The Snail in the Cloud
May 21, 2009
I’ve used this photo before, because I find the Post Office boxes rather lovely, in a vintage sort of way. Little did I suspect at the time that the photo might become relevant to cloud computing.
But (as I read at GigaOM), Amazon Web Services is now going postal, since snail mail is sometimes faster than the internet. “Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, explains… that it would take up to 13 days to sling a terabyte of data across a 10 Mbps network… So Amazon is offering customers the chance to store their data on an external device, ship it via post, and Amazon will load it.”
Kindle the Second
February 11, 2009
Amazon’s Kindle 2 will be released on Feb 24. I’d like a Kindle, but not at $350+. That’s similar to my reaction to the first Kindle, but it’s moved up from “It’s clunky, but I’d kind of like one” to “I’d really like one.”
The Boston Globe emphasized the Stephen King connection: he’s written a novella for, and featuring, the Kindle. It also covered the reservations expressed by Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. The Wall Street Journal reported other objections from the same source.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, Niniane posted a valentine to the Kindle 2. And at GigaOm, Kevin surmised that Amazon’s ebook business will be dating hardware other than the Kindle, based on the announcement that the new “Whispersync” technology will sync with “a range of mobile devices in the future.”
Back here, I’m wondering how what sort of price a gently used Kindle 1 will go for as Kindle fans upgrade. I’m also wondering when the Kindle 3 will arrive, what features it will have, and what the price of gently used Kindle 2s will be at that time.
Textbooks on Kindle
July 18, 2008
One of the barriers to adoption of the Amazon Kindle is its price. One of the things that makes it seem expensive is surely the price of books. For example, I usually buy paperbacks at $10 or less, so >$300 seems huge. But the Kindle might be particularly attractive to people who spend a lot on books.
College students certainly spend a lot of books. Textbooks for a single semester often cost more than a Kindle. Hence I think that Mike Arrington and others are right on the money when they identify college students as natural Kindle users.
The trouble is, college students don’t have much choice when it comes to textbooks. The professor usually chooses the textbook for the course from what the publishing firms offer. The incentives to the prof and the firms don’t always align with the best interests of the students.
A few days ago, many of us posted about Google App Engine. Most of us made some sort of comparison between GAE and AWS (Amazon Web Services.) I remarked that I didn’t understand why GAE seemed to arouse much more concern about lockin than did AWS.
Dion Hinchcliffe compares the two “Plafform as a Service” offerings, concluding that:
The decision for many startups will be an easy one; the benefits of using these platforms for their new products are compelling across the board despite minor concerns about platform lock-in even though the models used by both companies are actually surprisingly lock-in free.
So maybe the perception that GAE poses significantly greater lockin risk than does AWS is a perception about the difference between Google and Amazon, rather than a reflection of technical differences between the two platform as a service offerings. It’s a feeling that one should be wary about being locked in by the “don’t be evil” company.
A Surf Around the Cloud
February 19, 2008
Web application developers seem to be moving toward keeping their applications in the clouds. By what is a cloud? Alex Iskold at Read/Write Web:
The idea behind cloud computing is simple – scale your application by deploying it on a large grid of commodity hardware boxes. Each box has exactly the same system installed and behaves like all other boxes. The load balancer forwards a request to any one box and it is processed in a stateless manner; meaning the request is followed by an immediate response and no state is held by the system.
Alex contrasts cloud computing with the LAMP stack on which web applications “traditionally” run. He concludes that we are at the start of “a fundamental shift in our ability to compute.”
Fred Wilson agrees, but with an interesting qualification.
I think Alex is directionally correct. We are going to see more and more companies build and host their web apps on someone else’s infrastructure. It’s not going to happen overnight because I’ve never met a more control oriented group than software engineers.
Rackspace just announced its own cloud-like service, to add to its more traditional hosting services. Erick at TechCrunch remarks that Mosso bills itself as a Web app hosting service, and contrasts Mosso with Amazon Web Services.
Mosso isn’t as purely cloudy as AWS. As such, it may be a good first step toward a walk in the clouds for those control oriented software engineers.
BigCo Banter
February 16, 2008
Just a few comments on goings-on at the web BigCos in the last week.
- Microsoft and Yahoo obviously top the bill. I still think that Microhoo will happen. As Mashable Adam put it, there simply does not appear to be another way for Yahoo to create as much value for shareholders as by simply accepting Microsoft’s bid. That most of the board is tellng Jerry Yang the same thing makes the deal more likely.
- Amazon’s S3 outage, as Om remarked, shows that a lot of work needs to be done before we can completely rely on the cloud. It’s more of a reflection on the cloud in general than on S3 in particular: Amazon knows uptime as well as pretty much anyone.
- Google has started testing video ads on some search pages. When I first read this (at NYT BITS) I thought it was a terrible move. But I can see the logic of Marissa Mayer’s explanation. “Now that Google’s main search results pages include more images, video links and other elements, it is more appropriate… to have corresponding advertising formats.”
Three Music Models
January 27, 2008
Three music business models are in the tech news. Mashable lashed out at two different models, albeit via two different writers.
Qtrax is a free and legal way of getting (via P2P) music, and it has the support of the major labels. The bad news is that it requires an ad-inflicting proprietary player, uses DRM, and is not iPod-compatible. Why are people going to want to clutter up their systems with yet another proprietary system that is filled with DRMed music that they can’t put on the most popular digital music player in the world?
So, if that’s not the way to go, let’s consider music dialtone. But the attempt to work a one-price-have-all system successfully has several fatal flaws that will most likely allow it never to draw a lucrative existence in the era of the digital download.
The Mashable curmudgeons have yet to comment on the news that Amazon just announced the international rollout of Amazon MP3. Engadget sees this as the biggest threat yet to Apple’s dominance of digital music.
I actually like music dialtone. I don’t see it as a problem that I lose access to the music if I stop paying the monthly bucks. I’ll (almost) always be able to buy, or otherwise acquire, the music that I really really want to listen to.
Good for Amazon, and for Sony
January 11, 2008
Yes, Sony. A few days ago, it seemed that in order to download DRM-free MP3s of music on the Sony BMG label, you had first to go to a store.
But Sony will start selling DRM-free music on AmazonMP3 at the end of the month. This is good news for those of us who see shopping as an expensive form of surfing, rather than as a reason to leave the house.
It’s also good news for Amazon. AmazonMP3, unlike iTunes, will offer DRM-free music from all four major record labels.
DRM at the Home Movies
January 4, 2008
This year will, I hope, see the death of DRM. For an example of why it deserves to die, let’s go to the (home) movies, and to Seth of the EFF. The central character is Davis Freeberg, but his blog has been so busy it’s been down recently.
The trouble all started when Freeberg bought a new monitor for his Vista computer. When he decided to watch streaming movies from Netflix, Netflix documentation warned him that the recommended means of fixing a problem with DRM-restricted Netflix programming “may remove licenses to other content using Microsoft DRM” — including, in particular, restricted programming he had already purchased through Amazon Unbox…
Freeberg’s conundrum is likely the product of… (mis)features that have been added to Microsoft’s Vista operating system… Unfortunately, these kinds of (mis)features generally (1) don’t stop pirates and (2) result in compatibility headaches for paying customers.
