Tag Archives: snowflake

Nature foiled an attempt to make the world’s biggest snowflake

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In London, where I live, you forget about white Christmas. The best I can hope for is a storm of pathetic flakes. So this year I’m on a mission to make my own snow. It’s not just snow. To maximize the effect of the festival, we want to create the world’s largest snowflake.

It’s going to be a challenge. Guinness World Records Diameter 38cm, thickness 20cm. This incredible phenomenon was recorded in Montana in January 1887, when rancher Matt Coleman reported seeing snowflakes “larger than milk bread” during a violent storm. To be sure, some experts are skeptical. “If this was falling from the sky, they would probably need to wear crash helmets,” said Douglas Mair, a glaciologist at the University of Liverpool in the UK. Nevertheless, Guinness World Records claims that modern sources corroborate the record.

But wait a minute! There is a postscript. The largest snowflake was 10 millimeters. “A snowflake is a single ice crystal,” says Ken Libbrecht, who took the record-breaking photo in Ontario, Canada, in December 2003. The textbook image of a Christmas snowflake is actually a complete snowflake, but a snowflake is made up of several crystals joined together. So you might be able to break the record by creating the world’s largest snowflake instead. How difficult would it be? “You could grow ice crystals from water vapor,” says Libbrecht, whose lab at the California Institute of Technology makes “designer” snowflakes. “But if you want to look like a snowflake, and you want to actually make a symmetrical snowflake, that’s a tall order.” Obviously, I need help.

Source: www.newscientist.com

Snowflake makes a big move into data clean rooms with acquisition of Samooha

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snowflake is buying Samuhaa startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration suite; company announced This morning it was added to the list of big tech acquisitions for the holiday season.

The transaction, which is expected to close by the end of this month and is subject to customary closing conditions, will enable Snowflake to securely share, collaborate on, and gain insights from their own and partners’ data, a well-established data clean technology. Acquire the “Room” platform. Regardless of the underlying data stack.

Samooha, in turn, will receive an undisclosed amount of cash and/or stock, along with support for Snowflake’s extensive technology and engineering infrastructure. All 19 Samooha employees, including CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan and co-founder Abhishek Bhowmik, will be joining Snowflake in some capacity.

“This acquisition further strengthens our mission to leverage the world’s data by accelerating the built-in capabilities of the Snowflake platform for our customers,” Carl Perry, director of product management at Snowflake, said in an email. told TechCrunch. “Samooha customers will benefit from Snowflake’s many built-in platform features and the powerful network of the Snowflake Data Cloud. Meanwhile, Snowflake customers will be able to use the data clean room where their data already resides within Snowflake. It’s now faster and easier to build, connect, and use directly with .

Los Altos-based Samuha, co-founded by Sivaramakrishnan and Bhowmik in 2022, competes in the increasingly crowded data cleanroom space. AWS has a data clean room product, and so do startups like Herb. However, Samooha differentiates itself by relying heavily on his Snowflake ecosystem. Naturally, Snowflake was an early investor.

Samooha, a Snowflake native app, provides a no-code UI that customers can use to access and build clean room apps.The company went The company specifically targets industries considered to be potentially underserved, including healthcare, financial services, advertising, retail, and entertainment, and its customer base includes several Fortune 500 brands. He claimed that

Buoyed by its customer acquisition momentum, Samooha raised $12.5 million from investors including Altimeter Capital prior to the acquisition. The startup was valued at about $40 million post-money.

“SaMooha’s founding hypothesis was that the latest frontiers in data and AI would be built on a foundation of secure data sharing and collaboration,” Sivaramakrishnan said in an emailed statement. “Samooha joining Snowflake strengthens Snowflake’s ability to enable enterprises to collaborate in a seamless manner, with data governance, privacy, and security at its core. Companies and businesses such as media platforms can now build a powerful edge of value exchange and connectivity across their ecosystems of partners and customers.”

Investing in data clean room technology could be a beneficial decision for Snowflake. Continue to exceed Investor expectations, as a side note, in the long term. according to According to Gartner, 80% of advertisers spending more than $1 billion annually on media will use data clean rooms by the end of the year for applications such as analytics, measuring campaign results, and facilitating data integration. Probably.another poll published In early 2023, 29% of U.S. marketers suggested they would place more emphasis on data clean rooms this year compared to 2022, but given Snowflake’s interest, this prediction is certainly not impossible. there is no.

Source: techcrunch.com