

Meteor Acquires YC Alum FathomDB for Its Development Platform - arbesfeld
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/meteor-acquires-yc-alum-fathomdb-for-its-web-development-platform/

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simonw
"... there are now plenty of companies that have raised more than $7 million
each that run almost completely using the Meteor framework ..." \- anyone know
who some of those companies are? I'd love to see some large-scale examples of
Meteor running in the wild.

~~~
primigenus
Off the top of my head, Lookback.io
([https://lookback.io](https://lookback.io)) raised $2.2M and Workpop raised
$7.9M
([http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/workpop/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/workpop/)).

Lots more: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-startups-using-
Meteor](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-startups-using-Meteor)

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tsmash
Wait, MeteorJS was funded? I'm starting to think investors are strangely out
of touch with the projects they throw money at. Famo.us is the one that stands
out the most to me; I have no idea how they got funding or were able to pay
employees. Now Famo.us is open source, like it should have always started as,
with nowhere to go for investors. Meteor seems like a similar thing, a web
framework of sorts with no concrete way to monetize, also in a very weird
niche space (Famo.us for people who think they can get away with not making
native apps, Meteor for people who think they can get away with undocumented
voodoo in their web development). Now Meteor somehow has enough money to
purchase a database company? It seems like the only exit they could have is
sell their souls to enterprise. Look at Django, which is a complete, robust,
mature framework compared to Meteor's collection of magic. Django is a non-
profit entity, which makes sense for this type of software. We've all built a
web framework or animation library in our spare time, since when did investors
start dishing out cash thinking these things were monetizeable?

To me this just smells of bubble, of too much money for too small projects /
markets. Of course Meteor could start expanding to new products and do
something unrelated to an MVC framework, but there's no mention of that right
now.

~~~
primigenus
> Of course Meteor could start expanding to new products and do something
> unrelated to an MVC framework, but there's no mention of that right now.

Visit [http://meteor.com/about](http://meteor.com/about) and you will find
this:

> [...] a new platform for cloud applications that will become as ubiquitous
> as previous platforms such as Unix, HTTP, and the relational database.

Meteor is not "an MVC framework", it is a platform for creating applications.
The investment seems to reflect the ambition described on this page and after
having watched them execute over the past two years, I'm glad they're funded,
because it clearly enabled them to continue working on this without running
out of steam and having to go back to their old jobs.

They have also been quite open about their future plans for making money, such
as in the post announcing their funding back in 2012:
[https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors-
new-112-milli...](https://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors-
new-112-million-development-budget)

> Eventually, we plan to make a commercial product too, called Galaxy. Galaxy
> will be a product that the operations department at a large company might
> buy. It'll be an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant hosting environment for
> Meteor apps.

~~~
aikah
The success of this future plateform obviously depends on the success of their
core product.

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taternuts
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like every meteor site I see just feels a
little ....off, for some reason, or just not as polished. Like the
[http://lookback.io](http://lookback.io) site, the location of the navigation
items at the top shifts slightly between pages, and completely when jumping
from 'explore' to anything else. I've messed around with meteor and really
like it, but I'm still waiting to see a "Made with Meteor" site that blows me
away.

~~~
huckyaus
The change in navigation position you're seeing when navigating between pages
other than Explore is caused by the browser displaying a scroll bar. The nav
bar on the Explore page (for whatever reason) has an entirely different style
applied.

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hawkice
This article is surprisingly light on details, and their websites seem to have
few others. Does this mean that Meteor will support SQL databases for the 1.0
release?

~~~
aioprisan
I hope that to be the case as well. The way the data model works is pushing
data updates back to the client through the mongodb cursor and this db
solution should be able to provide that data update functionality

~~~
brentjanderson
Experiments with Redis and other databases have been done, so SQL support will
almost certainly arrive at some point.

