iPhone and Blogosphere: The day after the launch
June 29th, 2007Social sites reveal class divide
June 28th, 2007BBC is reporting that:
Fans of MySpace and Facebook are divided by much more than which music they like, suggests a study. A six-month research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to the social network sites.
The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.
By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.
Funny Toon: Lifeguard Outsourced to India
June 20th, 2007
Behavioral Targeting: The Online Advertising Market’s Future
June 19th, 2007Knowledge@Wharton reports about the current scheme of online advertising market and reports insights into the evolution:
“Behavioral targeting makes inventory available for sale based on the value of a web site’s audience, generally outstripping the value of the content on a page. Behavioral advertising enables marketers to reach beyond keywords and impressions to the audience segments behind them.”
Microsoft’s desperate acquisition of aQuantive: What they could have done instead
May 22nd, 2007Are 70,000+ Microsoft employees that useless? Or the 1,000+ Senior Management has no clue? Can’t believe that Microsoft would pay 85% premium and fork out $6bn dollars! They could have bought Salesforce.com for that money and saved $500 million to acquire several smart startups in search and online advertising space. Microsoft could have successfully negated Google’s further foray into the growing on-demand business and may have brought raw energy to Redmond.
However, by the time, Microsoft figures out the monetization model for Search and online ad market, Google would start making significant inroads into the on-demand business and productivity applications. Why don’t they focus on solving problems? Well, it’s the big company syndrome; I’m a manager-I don’t solve problems-I get vendors/acquire companies. What a pity.
Does any B-school offer a course on intra-preneurship? Take a leaf from Google or even HP has a lesson to offer from their recent release of the NeoView Business Intelligence product.
MYSQL on EC2: Data backup strategy using replication on S3
May 1st, 2007Few EC2 and S3 facts:
1. S3 (Amazon’s Storage in the Cloud Infrastructure) cannot be natively mounted on EC2 (Amazon’s Cloud Computing Infrastructure).
2. The maximum size of an “object” (atomic unit of a stored data element on S3) is 5GB
3. Multiple EC2 instances (a virtual machine having a horsepower of 1.7GHz, 160 GB ephemeral HDD and 1500 MB RAM) can be booted on demand
I run couple of EC2 instances in the cloud. The backup strategy (call it layman’s strategy or lame strategy!) so far has been a) Freeze the database b) Break the data files into 5GB chunks c) Move the chunks (or objects) onto S3 d) Unfreeze the database e) Repeat.
The above approach brings the database offline for at least 4-6 minutes for every cycle. So, here’s a new strategy I’m planning to test. The pseudo-algo is as follows:
1. Create an AMI which has a pre-configured mysql slave
2. Boot a new instance using the AMI created in #1 above, whenever a backup is desired
3. Read objects from S3 (if any) and coalesce them to rebuild data file
4. Create SSH Tunnel to the master
5. Start slave to catch up with replication
6. Stop Slave after some time
7. Break the fattened data file into chunks or objects (S3 limitation of 5 GB)
8. Move the objects to S3
9. Shutdown the instance
10. Go to 2
The new algo requires quite a bit of automation and there are some unanswered questions, which I’m sure could be figured out after the first trial. The following areas need to be automated:
1. SSH Tunneling between slave and master EC2 instances. The trick is to figure out the host name of the newly booted instance and then tunnel from it.
2. Client scripting for booting and executing the scripts on the slave. I think the best way to address this could be by running a cron job on the master server, which initiates and completes the backup process.
3. Prevention of data corruption. Moving large objects to/from S3 could have it’s own issues. Need to figure out whether the REST API call will guarantee data consistency.
Cloud Computing Panel at TiE: Amazon, where are my candies?
April 18th, 2007I was in the audience for a panel discussion on Cloud Computing hosted by TiE. The panel was moderated by Nimish Gupta of SAP and had people from Amazon WebServices, Google, Opus Capital, and SAP. The interesting thing to watch was how the panel agreed to disagree on the benefits/definition of Cloud Computing. Pavni Diwanji from Google mentioned that it’s the tools on Google Apps and the API which matters to the developers.
Dan Avida, a VC from Opus, seemed to have innate knowledge about EC2 and mentioned that there are interesting opportunities waiting to be tapped for EC2. It may be interesting to look into those areas.
According to Vishal Sikka, CTO of SAP:
Cloud computing is suitable for smaller applications but not for large applications like SAP.
Adam Selipsky who represented Amazon agreed with that statement and said the current shape of Amazon EC2 & S3 is the first cut and is still in limited private beta. He further mentioned that Amazon’s prime focus is on stability of the platform and they haven’t added any major feature on EC2 and S3 in last 12 months.
On a question about competition for EC2, he joked, “There are rumors that the company on my left (referring to Google, as Pavni Diwanji of Google Apps was seated there) is working on something.” He went serious and said that educating developers to jump onto EC2 is the hardest part and he would love to have some competition so that they could spend millions of dollars in educating the customers.
On being asked whether Amazon is just utilizing the over capacity available in their data centers, Adam responded, “Amazon has invested around $2b for Amazon WebServices including EC2 and S3 and are fully committed.”
I took my turn from the audience and mentioned that using S3 as a natively mounted filesytem is a limitation on EC2 and asked about the oft-requested feature to support large databases on EC2. Adam quipped that he does not want to commit on a date but they are working on it. Cool.
On a side note: Adam and his team (couple of his colleagues in the audience) were pitching people to sign-up with their beta program at the venue but did not bring any candies for existing customers like me. Too bad! After the meeting I even sold the idea of using EC2 to a gentleman who was still kicking tires. Where’s my referral fee? 🙂
Tags:ec2, s3
Why Web 2.0? Why now?
April 15th, 2007A friend-of-a-friend (“SJ”) and I were talking about Web 2.0 as part of his research for a major London based VC. He asked me, “Why Web 2.0? And Why now?” In large part for Silicon Valley geeks, Web 2.0 is nothing new and it’s an old topic. Guess what, rest of the world and the enterprise are waking up to Web 2.0 now.
Here’s a summary of what I explained to him:
1. Web 2.0 is an attempt to fulfill the promises made during the Web 1.0 days. Office on the web, online calendar, utility Computing for the masses, content sharing, collaboration, anywhere/anytime on-demand storage, one-click publishing, etc. are some of the examples, where we heard lot of chatter during the late 90s but we are seeing real applications only now.
2. Growth of user-created content. Simply put, blogs and wikis are allowing non-geek crowd to participate in the 2-way web. The surge of tools, commoditization of CMS, 1-click publishing and new methods of monetization are pushing the limits and expectations of both consumers and innovative startups.
3. Money is no longer just waiting on the sidelines (it has started talking lately). Web 1.0 bust is now digested and pooped from our intestines. At a recent New Tech Meetup in Palo Alto, I overheard couple of angel investors introducing themselves to the companies demoing over there.
4. Browser as a platform has matured. I gave him a very simple example, of rectangles with smooth/rounded edges rendered on web pages. During the 1.0 days it was quite a hack doing that using tables and images. In 2.0, it is done by a few lines of CSS. And then there is AJAX, which has made the browser a much more mature platform.
All of the 4 are the necessary ingredients in that order of decreasing priority, for making Web 2.0 happen. More than that and contrary to a popular notion, Web 2.0 is not just about the advancements of browser as a platform, or social networking at large, or raw bandwidth/storage for video at cheap prices, or just the sheer volume of user-created content, but it’s the ideas around simple applications which are now being done right (of course, technology has helped). It’s the simple applications which everybody wanted to reduce their drudgery while working with computing devices. That’s why it’s happening now and has a new version number.
Tags:Web 2.0 Expo Web 2.0 Writable Intranet Enterprise 2.0
Apple’s Next Gig: A Digital Camera?
April 11th, 2007Josh Kopelman points to Kodak’s Winds of Change video which got released onto YouTube. While I was watching this video, I was also watching Apple’s stock price. This got me thinking. What would be Apple’s next gig. An iCam? A Digital Camera from Apple is long due.
Interestingly enough, Apple had a digital camera up its sleeves, which went by the name QuickTake and was discontinued when Steve Jobs took the helm in 1997.
The digital camera vendors shipped 100m units in 2006 and the market is growing at 15% with total sales being pegged at $25 billion. With Apple’s brand name and possible integration with it’s suite of desktop authoring tools like iLife and Aperture, it can be easily speculated to capture 2% – 5% of market share, if and when it comes out. This would give $1 billion – $2 billion in additional sales. It would also boost the sales of Apple’s software products.
Compare this with iPhone; it is aiming at 1% of the total 1 billion unit sales of the $115 billion Mobile phone market, which would add another $2b – $5b in revenues in next few years.
Makes sense? Eh, I can speculate at least. Remember, iPod came out in a crowded MP3 Player market, which was considered “mature” 5 years ago.
Founders at Work
March 18th, 2007Samir Patel, an old buddy and a fellow entrepreneur just IMed me, that he has started a blog to share his ideas on entrepreneurship. His recent post points to Guy Kawasaki’s copy of the book, Founders at Work. Apparently, this book has broken a record of sorts of having the most stickies in it.
Keep Blogging, dude!