4 posts from 2006
- January
- February
- March
- April
- May
- June
- July
- August
- September
- October
- November
- December
NEW YORK -- I have been quite intrigued by Amazon’s by-the-hour, on-the-fly, compute cloud. It lets you set up a basic virtual linux machine of your own and turn it on and off, as you need it. This can be paired with Amazon's on demand storage facility. You could scale from one machine to twenty in a few minutes to meet peak demand. In future, I see being able to scale to hundreds or even thousands of machines as needs dictate, say to meet increase in demand due to high stock market activity, a special event, or to perfectly match demand as it grows and declines through the day. Despite the hype about low cost, this computing capacity appears to cost about three times as much as fully loaded equivalent capacity owned and collocated by yourself at a conventional facility. But it could make excellent sense: (1) if you want contingency usage, or (2) you want to scale throughout the day but average usage amounts to less than a third throughout the day, or (3) demand is unpredictable, or (4) you want to grow quickly but do not know if or when that will happen. For at least some of these reasons, it might be a good choice for at least part of a new venture's infrastructure.
See Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (E3), Amazon Storage (S3), Amazon Web Services
vs. C I Host, Silicon Mechanics rackmount servers
On the other hand, using Amazon's cloud, does lock one into a proprietory system. Amazon can raise prices as they please, or despite best intentions, may not have desperately needed capacity available when needed. Systems designed to operate in the Amazon clouds can not be quickly moved to a new host as easily as other systems designed to operate in a generic ISP environment. Although the rational for Amazon closing their new service to new users is that "it's in beta and it's full", it does offer a caution to those considering banking their future on the service.
I
The cogmap.com presenter was a real salesman. Some people felt like they were just about to be pitched a magazine subscription. But instead it was a wiki for org charts.
In late April 2006, I visited China for a week, mostly Shanghai, to test out a new idea for a business venture. I was especially impressed with Shanghai. I found the energy and optimism in this incredibly modern city inspiring. My experiments in Shanghai should lead to a new business being launched there in early 2007.
Interestingly, I found some video online showing a mobile phone based translation service in action. Youtube was being used as the advertising vehicle. I am not sure how well this service would really work in the real world based on what I see in the video, especially the one in the restaurant.
Video 2.0 Meetup
Columbia Business School, New York City
November 30, 2006
The Pond5 service provides high quality 5 to 60 second .mov (Quicktime) format video clips under a royalty free (unlimited usage) license. A typical price is $35, going up to $200, which is very low for this market. Right now there are more than 5,000 clips online.
