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Startup Quander aims to help brands “deliver a memorable, measurable, multi-sensory brand experience”. It uses interactive technology to enhance the customer experience, while capturing the data that brands can use to gain insight into their customers. ZDNet spoke to Quander’s chief executive Gavin Williams about how the company is using graph database technology from Neo4j.
ZDNet: What was the first moment when things started to take off for Quander?
Willliams: “The irony was that it was one of the experiences that was being taken out.”
Photo:Quander
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Williams: We started to realise that this innovative advertising that we had been creating was really a platform. The advertisers wanted to know not just how many people had come to their events and had shared information and that kind of stuff, they also wanted to get a deeper understanding of how consumers interacted with the brand.
We had a lot of events that we were helping with and at every single event we would have the Quander platform working behind the scenes.
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Using experiential marketing at events, companies would have our marketing systems working behind the scenes so that all the data they picked up was captured, so that the customer would understand all the people who had been taking part in all of the activities. And they would have not just the current information but the information gained over, say, the previous two or three years. Then they could understand what they could take from the experiences they had taken part in, how long they had been engaged for and that was helping us understand how people were interacting in a physical space.
Talk me through how you are using the Neo4j software.
At the moment we are using it to try and understand the data. That’s always the first step. We are taking that data from our existing DBMS – which is Postgres – and we’ve imported it all into Neo4j. And we’re talking about 1.5 million to 2 million rows of data.
The thing about Neo4j when we started was that it kind of felt like it didn’t scale. And that was a big thing for us because we were so used to having a managed database – from AWS, for example – which upgrades everything and you don’t have to worry about it.
Whereas now we were getting into the realms of, “We don’t know if it will do what we want it to, but we do want to use this product”. But the starter version allowed us to play with the enterprise features of Neo4j without having to pay for a big overhead upfront.
It’s got to the point now where we are thinking of using Neo4j as our only database platform because it’s just phenomenal. It’s crazy.
What turned you onto it?
Funny story. So, you could see the difference between a regular database and a graph database – one was rows of data, the other was a graph database which is all about understanding a world of things.
So, we moved over to GraphQL and with our APIs we started to ingest that data and we couldn’t find a good database to actually restore and retrieve data and write and read queries and reach data out the back of it.
PostGres is really good at storing transactional data; it has the SQL SMB that allows you to store NoSQL data inside a database. We get the performance of PostGres with functionality that we might get from an SQL database.
We looked at MongoDB quite closely but the trouble with it was that it didn’t do relationships very well. If you were storing documents and stuff – embedded documents – it’s great for that, but for relationships it’s not very good.
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