Addicted To 1’s and 0’s

Firefox 3 was released with much fan-fare last week, including a marketing campaign from Mozilla to set a new record for “most software downloads in 24 hours” in the Guinness Book of World Records. According to their “World Record FAQ,” they hoped to beat the number of downloads that version 2 of Firefox saw, which was 1.6 million. Well they’ve recently updated their “Download Day” site, indicating that in the 24-hour time period after publicly releasing the new version, the software was downloaded over 8 million times. Since then they’ve counted over 20 million downloads and that’s just from their official site (due to server lags, the release was quickly put up on private mirrors, so the real download number will never be known).

Want to celebrate your participation in this event? Why not (other than for the obvious reasons)? Mozilla now lets you print out your very own “personalized” Firefox 3 Download Day certificate by entering your name on their “Flaunt It” portion of the website. Click on the image posted above for an example of what it looks like (it will open in a new window). Now you can be the envy of your IT staff… this will surely show them you’re hip to the latest software releases and maybe they’ll show you how to install that cool screensaver you’ve been having trouble with!

Sooooo corny… but i couldn’t resist.

For the last year, I’ve been a subscriber to a new venture called www.startupschwag.com. For a nominal fee they send out a monthly mailing that is similar to any gift bag you’d get at your typical web related conference - tshirts, stickers, keychains, etc.. all from new companies trying to get their name out there to the masses in hopes of angel funding. Well, when the service was first offered I was one of the original people to sign-up, figuring in the least I’d get something “interesting” from time-to-time, however have up until now been rather disappointed. The shirts are hit-or-miss, the stickers have repeated themselves, and I’m pretty sure the first package had 10x more content than this last one. Included with each mailing is a sheet explaining the contents of your bag and a brief bio behind the company that provided each product.

This week however I opened the bag to find a nice little surprise. Along with the usual tshirt (for Pownce actually - making this one of the “good months”) was the sheet explaining the contents but also including a line that there was also a “little something extra for a few subscribers.” I guess I’m just that lucky because the extra piece of schwag that was found in the mailing bag was none-other than a brand-new iPod Shuffle.

If this was meant as a way to get me posting about your service, well……it worked.

If not - then I’m happy to see that the monthly fees for products you probably get for free has finally come back around and you were able to provide those of us who’ve shelled out enough of our money for a service (which adds up to a lot when you consider the # of months in service and compare it against the quality of merchandise that was sent in return) with something that is in fact, pretty f’in sweet schwag.

Kudos, and thanks for the ipod. I already have one, so am currently thinking of what kind of contest I could offer it up as the grand-prize that would creatively benefit a non-profit. So far I’m thinking along the lines of finding a charity that could use a light homepage refresh/logo redesign and offering up the ipod + other prizes in exchange for contest submissions…. any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

In the meantime, go check-out www.startupschwag.com (and thanks).

Hewlett-Packard just officially announced the release of HP Upline, an online storage service that serves as both a personal back-up source as well as a way to share files with friends. Not only that but it starts at only $4.99/month for unlimited data transfer & storage, making it ridiculously affordable compared to alternative large-scale backup methods. This announcement comes shortly after the successful launch of two similar services, Sugarsync and DropBox. The apparent need for a one-stop service provider that allows for data-backup, file-sharing, and cross-platform syncing has finally hit Enterprise level it seems. SugarSync service boasts the ability to synch not only your mac and pc, but also any mobile device that you may have as well. On top of that it would serve as a backup for your files should something happen to your equipment. The demand for the service was so high (their 45 day Free Trial may have something to do with it) that it actually crashed their service two days ago, resulting in a blog posting from their CEO Gibu Thomas explaining the situation and their progress towards fixing it. DropBox is currently still in a closed beta, but utilizes Amazon’s “cloud” based S3 service to do the same thing as what HP’s Upline is promoting - a virtualized synch/backup service that works on all platforms as well as can be used to share files with friends.

Speaking of Amazon, who so far has been the undeniable leader in Web Services, they too experienced a similar outage when their S3 service suddenly went down for a few hours a few weeks ago - leaving developers stranded as the entire purpose of using this service was to replace the need for any localized storage of data. The difference was that no one from Amazon has come forward to apologize or even acknowledge the error officially, the only mention was via a tech support representative after their forums were flooded with a battery of irate users reporting the error and asking why there wasn’t some sort of monitoring software/services in place (good question). Apparently Amazon either didn’t know about the outage, or simply didn’t send out some form of communication letting them know of the problem.

For a company to tout themselves as the replacement to purchasing/maintaining localized hardware to service enterprise level applications, this type of outage is simply unacceptable in my mind. Then the lack of response regarding the issue becomes an added slap in the face. Their complete lack of communication with the developers who relied on them was well documented across the web via the blogsphere but I sadly did not find it anywhere in the press. Why should it have been you might be asking? After all, it’s just some web-service. Their cloud services are currently being used to house large ammounts of critical data in applications that range from credit card processing portals to health-care based applications used in hospitals. Three hours of down-time with no explanation, warning, or even corporate outreach could have been catastrophic, even deadly. A great explanation of the incident can be found in a ZDNET article written by Michael Krisman where he even points out one worried developers plea, “But what do I tell my clients?” For a different perspective, I suggest you check-out what Bob Lozano had to say about the early-morning incident in his Appistry Blog (which also has a few other great articles on cloud/cluster based services if you’re interested in learning more about the service). S3 being down for any amount of time crippled a few companies who relied on it for data management…. and if you read the forums posts on Amazon’s site you can see the wide range of firms/industries who were helpless until the issue was resolved.

Since then there still hasn’t been any news from Amazon other than a small message explaining that the problem has been fixed. That doesn’t give me much confidence in the reliability of their other services, particularly their just recently announced launch of “Elastic IPs - Static IPs for Dynamic Cloud Computing,” This recent development would mean that you could not only use their virtualization/cloud services to store, manage, and transfer your database driven info but could also host the application that uses it through them as well. Throw in their Fulfillment Services and you have yourself a fully operational virtual company! An interesting thought was brought up on Brian “Krow” Aker’s blog (one of the smart ones who had a hand mysql + slashdot “back in the day”) comparing what I used to have running on a beat-up developement box in college and all these new offerings:

LAMP ->
Linux -> EC2
Mysql/Memcached -> S3/SimpleDB/Queue
Apache/Asterisk -> HTTP/Mechanical Turk
PHP/Perl/Python -> REST

Not to mention Google also has been aiming at getting in on a piece of the action. At last night’s Campfire One Google announced that they are now offering hosting for enterprise level web applications via a new tool called App Engine. Rumor is they also are partnering up with Salesforce (who have their own Appexchange service) in the upcoming week as well. Currently Google is giving away access/hosting for FREE to a limited 10,000 developers . I was lucky enough to snag an invitation, and although I have only had a few brief moments to tinker around with the site, it looks extremely promising at first glance. It currently only supports the Python language, however they are working on adding additional platforms soon-enough (i.e Ruby on Rails, or at least I hope seeing how it would be a perfect back-end for a cloud-based application of this magnitude).

According to their Google App Blog - the development environment provided is based off of how they themselves manage all the services/data, just rolled up into a more scalable (as in down-scale) commodity that they could then sell. This includes being powered by Bigtable and GFS - two services that have enabled Google’s search engines to run as fast as they do while parsing through petabytes of data to find you whatever it is you are searching for.

Soon the days of having to beg VC’s for startup capital to fund server farms will be replaced by virtualized data-flow…. I can tell you this much at least, all of these services give you the tools necessary to build whatever application you think might be the “Golden Ticket” - And It’d be a lot easier to get that $400 Million in funding by letting your potential investors actually use the product you want them to buy into. You then are selling them on the experience itself, leaving you free from having to dress in a suit to show off some slides of just how the experience “might look like.” And we all know that death by powerpoint is never a fun experience……

Introducing Alltop.com, the latest venture from Nononina (the same company behind Truemors.com - an increasingly popular source for the latest internet rumors). Alltop.com, which is still in beta form, is an ever-growing collection of RSS feeds broken down into various categories, including everything from “Moms” to “Sports.” They essentially have attempted to categorize the web in what you could consider a one-stop-shop for whatever type of late-breaking-news you might be seeking. The sites featured in each category seem to change as better suited feeds come to light, however the most interesting part of this collection of data is just the sheer number of sources that they pull from. As I said, each set of feeds is based on a particular category, even including an “Ego” (where you’d find Scoble & Mark Cuban’s blog) and “Celebrities” (TMZ, Dlisted, and all other Britney-obsessed tabloids) category thrown in there for those who secretly fiend for celebrity gossip. The idea originally stemming from another multi-source RSS portal, Popurls, and piggy-backed on the success of Truemors, this new venture has already been widely talked about in both press and (obviously), the internet. Nononina is run by infamous mac-evangelist/idea-generator Guy Kawasaki, Will Mayall, and Kathryn Henkens. This trio also were the founders of Fog City Software, producers of the long forgotten (unless you were a mac/apple geek like me) Claris Emailer.

From personal observations, I’ve noticed that only a select crowd use their own custom RSS News Aggregator (a la Google Reader), or even social bookmarking services like del.icio.us. That positions this site as a convenient alternative to having to rely on iGoogle or a “customized” Yahoo! homepage. With those the user would have to already know which feeds he or she was interested in vieweing, whereas here the average internet user would be able to explore not only the sites they typically frequent, but would also be given the opportunity to discover a whole new realm of similar content. With that in mind, I applaud the trio for creating this news-portal, the only catch is whether or not they will be able to create enough “buzz” about the site to draw that targeted user demographic away from their most likely “widgetized” homepage. Hopefully posts like this will help the cause. I look forward to seeing how it evolves over the next year. Good luck guys!

For more information on Alltop, check-out this great post on the evolution blog featuring an interview with Mr. Kawasaki himself, or just go read what they have to say about themselves via their about page - alltop.com/about/

It must be nice to be the editor of Wired Magazine, because to promote his latest book entitled “Free,” Chris Anderson is going to showcase a chunk of it in next month’s issue of the magazine and as a clever promotion you can register to get a FREE copy. It’s only for the first 10,000 people who sign up, so hurry before it’s too late.
To sign up for your free copy of Wired Magazine featuring Chris Anderson’s new book, just follow the link here: Get “Free” for Free.

A nice way of promoting the very material that he’s trying to sell, the business of “free.” From what I’ve read so far, it’s all about the marketing technique of providing the user with a free service or product. In return you end up with a company evangelist who will, “potentially,” purchase your products. Not only that, but because they were hooked when it was free, their more likely to relate the brand to a positive experience, which would better enable them to share it with friends/co-workers/family members….. I think you can see where I’m going with this one.

Anyhow, sign up if you’re interested… I just thought that I’d pass the info along.
Once again, here’s the link: Get “Free” for Free.
Enjoy!