In the world of cloud computing every action has a cost. Every HTTP request fires off a chain of actions, each uniquely measured on a variety of billable meters. Gone are the days of idle or unused resources on our local servers. Cloud computing charges by the sip (when sips are available) aligning business goals of resource efficiency and its cost. The cloud computing world shares many similarities with the plug-in and go world of electricity, including the need to run green for the sake of resources and cost savings. What can the world of green energy teach us about the future of cloud computing? How can we measure computing resources in the cloud for efficiency, replacement costs, and cost savings?
Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Lately I have been thinking about the ways on-demand servers, storage, and CDNs are changing the way we develop web applications and make business decisions. In this post I will provide an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies. I will walk through a managed infrastructure stack and examine a few major business targets.
Micro-blogging service Twitter will celebrate its third birthday in March and may have a revenue model to support the company over the long-term. Last month Twitter CEO Evan Williams told Kevin Maney of Porfolio.com the company will kick off new revenue streams by March 2009 to avoid raising another round of venture capital funding. Twitter's deeply engaged community would love to see a sustainable business develop around the site, its services, and the community. In this post I will take a deeper look at Twitter and its revenue potential as publicly hinted by its founders.
Today's publishers need to think beyond the fixed location of their website and fully integrate with the large hubs of user activity on the desktop, mobile phone, social networks, blogs, and web pages at large. Syndication and widgets power new opportunities to carry content beyond the walls of a single site and into some of the largest brands in the world yet some publishers still haven't gotten the message. I recorded a 1-hour video presentation earlier this week to better explain the syndication and widget landscape to web publishers.
Apple's relative secrecy regarding the iPhone platform and distribution policies have caused market uncertainties in need of some further clarity. In this post I will examine the iPhone OS 2.0 platform and the iPhone App Store from the point of view of Apple and other hosted storefront providers.
The Internet is coming to your TV, reclaiming your split attention span from the other gadgets around the house. Intel announced its latest effort to power your living room yesterday with new media processors, reference designs, and software stacks that may eventually find their way into the cable boxes, Blu-ray players, and home media centers of 2010. Intel partnered with Yahoo! to deliver Internet-connected widgets, advertising, and content to potential partners with a software stack branded The Widget Channel. What new opportunities are available inside the Widget Channel platform? When is the right time to implement?
Google released a new version of its Google Analytics tracking code last month. In this post you will learn about the new features available to webmasters and how to move away from the deprecated libraries.
Facebook is proactively deleting Pages and other content from its site in an attempt to limit fake listings created by unauthorized entities. The new enforcement procedures started on Thursday night with many Facebook users receiving notifications of their deleted pages and an apparent violation of the Facebook Pages Terms of Service.
Tonight I am unveiling a new site tracking the startup ecosystem. It's a directory and analytics tool I've personally wanted for a long time, and I know others will enjoy. Introducing Startup Search. Startup Search tracks Web startups, their products, key employees, investment firms, and investment partners. Startup Search also tracks the success of each product since it was first introduced to the world, using publicly available metrics pulled into a single page. It's a research tool, a discovery engine, and a fact-filled directory of our little Web startup world. I'll walk through a few features. Directory data Startup Search…
Kevin Ham built a $300 million web company in Vancouver you've probably never heard of. You are likely familiar with his work as you drop vowels from the domain names of your favorite web startups such as Flickr or Tumblr, or try selecting a name for your new company or product. Kevin Ham built a domain name empire named Agoga, cutting exclusive deals with local registrars and national governments, attracting over 30 million unique visitors a month according to an article by Paul Sloan in the June issue Business 2.0 magazine. Think of a name, any name, and it's probably…
Today marked the end of Apple Computer after 30 years. The company has come a long way from kit computers assembled in a garage, capitalizing on at least one eureka moment a decade that causes people to rethink the intersection of cutting edge hardware and software. The release of the Mac in 1984 combined the best available hardware with commercial software utilizing the best ideas developed at Apple and research labs such as Xerox PARC. The release of the iMac in 1998 changed consumer views on personal computing, adding a colorful and quiet device to our desktops, placing an…
I've been sucked in to the Business Plan Archive created by the University of Maryland and George Mason. They've archived business plans, investor pitches, term sheets, screenshots, mockups, and even old business cards. Here's a sample company description from an online job site: The company will introduce a new network of online recruiting sites that will utilize the latest advances in internet technology to provide online interaction between employers and job seekers. Seeking a $26 million Series A in mid-1998. Another company I found was after $10 million for a sports site and ended up with $500,000 in convertible notes….
I like small, focused events especially in the early days of an industry. Om and I organized the Widgets Live! conference to bring together the major players creating widgets, gadgets, and modules and the major endpoints of deployment. Many decisions were made along the way, and I'll share just a few in this post. When? We knew lots of people from around the web industry would be in San Francisco for O'Reilly Media's Web 2.0 conference November 7-9. Scheduling the widgets conference adjacent to the Web 2.0 conference creates a convenient opportunity for a few people to extend their visit…
I've been busy over the past few weeks organizing the Widgets Live! conference. I've talked to lots of people interested in various aspects of the conference industry, so I'll summarize a few logistics in this post. Venue costs Event venues typically charge a room rental fee combined with a minimum catering expense. All prices quoted are usually a "list price" and negotiable depending on factors such as the length of the conference, number of rooms booked at the hotel, your total catering spend, and your repeat business if you host multiple conferences a year. Many venues will waive the room…
The war of the data clouds will really start to heat up in 2007 as large Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft open huge data centers in the Pacific Northwest fueled by cheap power and bandwidth. Our digital lives continue to be fueled by the cloud, with new data services and software that replace or complement desktop tasks coming online every month. Software as a service is the new development push, and custom build outs next to a few large dams and fiber highways are a sign of what's next. Internet giants are building up their server…
Rebecca Buckman wrote about the seemingly impending breakup of Mobius Venture Capital on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal Markets section this morning. Buckman cites "people familiar with the matter" saying Managing Director Brad Feld may break off and form his own fund, bringing a few people from Mobius with him. Mobius raised a $630 million fund in 1999 and a $1.25 billion fund in 2000. The firm does not plan to raise another fund and the article cites investors saying the funds are "well underwater" Mobius invested in blog and feed syndication firms FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati. The…
Forbes provides a summary of PubSub's business history, from the company's founding through it's recent collapse. "$4 million is down the drain, and PubSub can't even afford to file for bankruptcy. No one has filed suit–yet." PubSub is still online, so someone must be paying the continued hosting costs….
Harvard business school professor Robert D. Austin is writing a book on reliable innovation and shared some of his findings in a HBS Working Knowledge interview last week. He takes a look at how some big accidental discoveries such as anesthesia, cellophane, cholesterol lowering drugs, cornflakes, dynamite, the ice cream soda, Ivory soap, NutraSweet (and several other artificial sweeteners), nylon, penicillin, photography, rayon, PVC, smallpox vaccine, stainless steel, Teflon came about and what are key factors allowing accidents to happen and realizing value in what could be considered chaos. It takes a considerable capability to see the value in an…
A poster child of the dot-com boom, LinuxCare has rebranded itself "Levanta," raised another round of capital. BusinessWeek profiles the company though it's rise and fall and attempt to rise again and I found the details rather amusing. Levanta sounds a lot like erectile disfunction drug Levitra but it's possible the company may be able to get their finances up again. Renaming the company seems like an attempt to hide from its past, which BusinessWeek covers in detail. Some highlights from the company's history. Raised over $70 million in venture capital, including big names such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield &…
I just received a press release for a new startup launching today. The announcement is heavy with buzzwords, but doesn't actually tell me what the site is all about. Here's the actual first paragraph, with the name and industry removed. Web 2.0 changes the way we perceive information. [Company name] uses Web 2.0 in the [vertical name] (i.e. blogs, podcasts, ajax, tags, etc.) and is particularly attentive to RSS, which presents a formidable opportunity for this sector. The press release on the launch of this new company next explains what a typical RSS button on a website looks like, and…
A multi-billion dollar TV almost didn't happen. A television producer was eventually able to find one person who understood his vision to reinvent television and was persistent enough with his idea to help an old industry grasp a new concept. British producer Mark Burnett had an idea for a new reality TV show but needed support from network gatekeepers to make his vision a reality. In the late 90s Burnett went all over Hollywood pitching the show to whoever would listen, including the cable networks. No one was interested and the idea of reality television had not taken off….
FeedShow is an online RSS aggregator from France hoping to create a business around splitting advertising money with feed publishers. A publisher may opt-in to the advertising system and display up to two contextual advertisements alongside their feed. FeedShow receives a 50% split of the advertising revenues from publishers participating in the program. FeedShow created a new RSS namespace allowing feed publishers to define their ad provider, account number, and additional provider data such as an AdSense channel. While ads alongside e-mail created new businesses and accounts for a large percentage of private e-mail usage today, feed publishers seem…
Hitwise just published rankings and market share for top portals in search, mail, news, finance, and maps. While Google dominates in search, Yahoo! is the clear aggregate leader across these top categories with an almost 10% lead over the search leader. SearchE-mailNewsFinanceMapsTotal Market7.39.33.40.60.521.04 Google47.42.51.90.37.53.80 Yahoo!16.042.46.334.920.55.62 MSN11.522.913.44.33.07 Other8.56 While Google Maps is an often-cited example of the Web 2.0 world Mapquest has 7x the market share according to these numbers….
Mark Fletcher spoke about his experience starting ONElist and Bloglines at this month's SDForum Startup SIG in Palo Alto. Mark has given a similar presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and at Startup School, but if you are not in California you might have missed his advice for starting your own company while moonlighting and being super-cheap. Mark's last corporate job was with set-top box maker Diba which was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems in July 1997. He started working on a new company, ONElist, on the side, funded by a $5,000 bonus check for its first six…
