Software views

Evan Williams made a round up of the podcasting segment. Podcasting site Roundup

Om Malik explains the Microsoft method of product development with a comparsion to Macy's.
http://gigaom.com/2005/11/04/what-do-macy-and-microsoft-live-have-in-common/

In the fashion world, haute couture designers like Tom Ford and Dolce & Gabana create eye-popping outfits, that impress the fashionistas worldwide, and generate gushing headlines around the planet. A few hundred of them are sold at prices high enough to pay off the debt of some struggling nation. However, a few months later, pale imitations of that daring vision start to show up in mainstream stores like Macy’s, and thousands of consumers buy them. That’s when the real money is made.

Simple storage


Simple messaging

These types of services are great for decreasing development time and makes things easier to manage for larger scaled sites. The problem is reliability and backup.

Amazon may have 99.99 % on their network, sadly when running a site with millions of users you notice when a certain geographic area or network can not access your web site. This happened due to every network does not have many routes and many providers. Saying this amazon could easily become inaccessible by the server causing down time. Add that on to regular downtime caused by random events and your site is starting to look unreliable.

Worse case I seen for Internet failure is providers in the financial district after Sept 11 Terror attacks. With the power out and the servers hot every thing cooked at a nice 120 F.

Of course everyone promises that they are going to be 99.99 % there, what happens if you are that 0.01 % and all your data is lost ? Once again with large sites this WILL happen at one point or another. Therefor you have to have backups.

Worse case I have seen for backups is having a data center destroyed. I had the customer setup with three backup systems in place. Two where on site and the third was remote site. Only the remote backup server was active, in a 24 hour period the customer went from four copies of their data to one.

On the flip side, these services do make things faster to develop and if you do have a backup of what is on amazon you are all set tell you need to move in house. For many sites this will never be needed.

Amazon has released a beta of their Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2) for you to outsource computing power. This service appears to be another form of virtual private servers. The main benefit is that if you use this service in joint with previously mentioned ones your site could be as reliable as amazons assuming they assigned the same priority to this system as their own.

EC2

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is an interesting spin on managing small projects. It allows people to enter tasks which are easily done by people and not quite worth it to automate. Small tasks like this are often difficult to get done if the infrastructure is not there. This is why sites like Elance where created as well.

This model of business appears to have its roots in the temporary agency. Where workers signup and people with tasks post their jobs to be done.

Some call centers handle things like this as well, they have a certain amount of computer stations and the workers are all given the same training. It is up to them to choose which desk to sit at and login. Once they are logged in the computer starts feeding tasks from the queue.

With Amazons Turk system is it looks more like an api the all ready had internally and someone said, hey for a little bit of money we can make this public and it may or may not work out. As for working out it appears to only created press and blog attention, the cost to pay for this awareness is most likely more then it cost to make this system. In that sense it is a success and does not really need to go any where else.


Before thinking of making a business on the temporary agency system, make sure you have a source of people with projects of value and people who can do the tasks.

Today million of people run small businesses and want to develop income on the side. Both google and ebay first created a great site with good traffic. Then with their traffic they empowered businesses to earn money rather then attempt to hoard it. The result is they receive more traffic then otherwise.

By prompting people to create web sites and providing a way for income people and businesses of all sizes exist. Google and ebay have inspired people to create new products and services. By inspiring others to startup new businesses both these companies have added plenty to their bottom lines.

Is your next business idea going to inspire others ?

Link: Charles Verge in Business Comments: (0) Trackbacks: (0)

A few times a year someone asks me to break copyright laws. From there I do my best to suggest getting the proper agreements to prevent having to make a court appearance.
Most of these requests come from people who see a site and really want a feature added to the site which in its self would be a money maker. The money is in the data mining of the data on the other persons company or site. Expect often if someone does not want their data to be copied a screen scrape is needed. This is where it gets tricky.

Here is a few links to copyright Myths and related info.

An article by Brad Templeton 10 Copyright myths

An article by Eric Sink Copyrights, Trademarks and patents

For Canadians, there is copyrightwatch.ca. This blog is supported by a team of academics, public interest advocates, and creators concerned that copyright serve the interests of ordinary Canadians. CopyrightWatch.ca

For real life example - Westjet vs Air Canada
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/business/article.jsp?content=20040920_88645_88645
It ended up costing them 15 million...
http://www.cbc.ca/calgary/story/ca-westjet-settlement-20060529.html

While going threw technorati.com blog's search I stumbled on to techeast.ca

A good site on east coast tech news.

Chalk gaming, based in Halifax has a blog a http://chalkgaming.com/chalk-blog.php it is wrote by Scott Neil, President of Chalk.

The rental listings market is all bits and pieces. There are many small web site and large ones which have rental listings.

There are Rental specific,
GoRent.ca
viewit.ca
rentboard.ca
rentalmonster.ca
rentalshalifax.com

The herald, hfx4sale.com and craigslist all have rental sections.

On top of all that, most rental companies with more then a few units all have their own listings sites.

The Halifax local paper has Wheels Press and Jobs Press both appear to of done well. The news paper has command of the local market and has done well of creating a web site to carry its print ads online. The web sites do not need to be pretty or have lots of functionality.

The paid alternatives are Canada Auto Trader and the free alternatives are hfx4sale.com, hfx.forsale and halifax.craigslist.com.

Canada Auto has a local office and its web site looks much better then wheels press.

Today, wheels press has 564 listings and autotrader for Nova Scotia has 301. As competitors I bet they have close to the same users and traffic. Trying to work your way into general online classifieds for cars would appear to be difficult for the province of Nova Scotia. The only way I see getting a good market would to create more of niche.

AOL has made some fireworks with their release of search engine data. What they wanted to do with this data was provide something researchers could work with. The data its self only confirms what I have seen for many years in web logs. That is searches that are done are not very complex, which is why the power options like - / + really are not useful. Why build something no one is going to use ?

Other things that the data made me realize is there is lots of opportunity for keywords to be associated to a certain web site or brand.

thechronicleherald.ca The Herald has a fairly standard local news site. The paper has a viewer ship of just under 300 000 daily and the web site 170,000 unique visitors monthly.

The paper its self does fairly we, expect as an all ready established business I do not see it adapting to the modern trends on the Internet fast enough.

This in my eyes means that eventually someone will grab the market share for the local news online from the Herald at one point or another. Of course there is some of these sites already in development.

YouTube.com has made a splash in the Internet world taking what all ready existed and fine tuning it for the masses. Sense Napster has made the waves before in copyright issues chances are that YouTube.com can avoid being killed by lawsuits. Reality is that Tv is turnning into a video segement rather then a clear Tv only.

They have the big names helping them out http://www.sequoiacap.com/scpartner.asp?pid=4406 Roelof Botha, Past CEO of paypal.

The founders are Chad Hurley, 29, and Steve Chen, 27 which from reading this article they used a illertivate model where they started small to see if it would work then listened to people.

Though their domain was created in feb 2005 and funding by nov 2005, 7 to 8 months to venture capital funding.

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=14376&hed=YouTube+Scores+%243.5+Million

blockbuster store / day in nov 2005 , 8 terabytes. So if they had thousands of stores that would be one hell of data.