This is your brain on: Venture Capital and Technology
Just ran across a couple of good follow-ups to my article on Scalr: One done by the awesome Amazon Web Services team, and the other done by the kick-ass team at TechCrunch. Glad to see the Scalr project getting some good coverage. Let’s rally around this and make it great!
In my article about Sharpcast and their recently released SugarSync product, one of my key criticisms was the fact that the service was priced too high. It appears that I was not alone. Sharpcast has cut their prices in half in response. From their Pricing page:
Looking for the Founders’ Circle (50% off) pricing information? As of April 1, 2008, the Founders’ Circle promotional pricing is our new ongoing, everyday low price, as reflected below. We have listened to your feedback and are excited to offer you the best value possible.
Sharpcast apparently rolled out the price cut quietly. I would not have known about it had I not read a review by Walt Mossberg (cross-referenced here) which stated the lower price point. I was sure that Walt had it wrong. But, he did not. The price for the service has dropped.
Good for them.
I think they should continue to listen to their "customers". Of course, it seems odd that they would not have known that they were too pricey the week before when they launched. Oh well. Better late than never.
The other thing that surprised me from Walt’s review was that the much-touted SugarSync Mobile client actually doesn’t sync modified documents:
The cellphone versions can only view photos and whatever documents the phones allow, but changes you make on the phones in documents other than photos aren’t synced back to the computers or to the Web site.
In addition, SugarSync can’t synchronize Microsoft Outlook files and it can’t, say, replicate a new calendar entry or contact change across your computers.
I get that it doesn’t handle contacts and calendar information. It just deals with files. But, customers certainly would be interested in having a single "sync" solution for their entire mobile device that works Over The Air. But my guess is that this would be too de-focusing for SugarSync at this time.
The folks over at the photo sharing site Zoto have decided to Open Source the code for their site. Kord Campbell, CEO of Zoto and currently Chief Evangelist at Splunk, makes the announcement at GeekCEO:
I’ll keep this simple. I’m uploading the Zoto 3.0 source code to its new Google Code project tonight, and placing the BSD free software license on it. Version 2.0 of Zoto will follow in a couple of days (as soon as I find where we put it). We’ve also been working on a new site called Fotofluff, and its code is going up there as well.
This is a very cool development, and very cool of the Zoto folks to do. Hundreds of files filled with Python goodness representing a very well done photo sharing site. Nice.
However, while Kord claims that the code will be released under a BSD license, and the Google Code page specifically references the New BSD License, the About page on Google Code says:
The server and the rest of the Zoto code base is now free for non-commercial use. If you want to use Zoto’s software in a commercial, for-profit environment, you can contact Kord Campbell at kordless@gmail.com, to inquire about licensing options for commercial applications.
That’s not exactly a BSD license.
And, when you download the code using: "svn checkout http://zoto-server.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ zoto-server", there is no LICENSE file included in the distribution to clarify. Interestingly, someone even filed a bug/issue against the project about this.
The BSD License would certainly allow for the greatest re-use of the existing code and is a good choice to use, depending on what Kord’s goals are.
I look forward to the clarification of the license.
Tony Wright wrote a nice article over at FoundRead about his experience with the folks at Y Combinator in getting his most recent company, RescueTime, to market. Definitely worth a read.
I like the Y Combinator model that Paul Graham has put together. And, they’re getting lots of great companies built (on the cheap, as it should be).
I’ve written quite a few stories about Amazon Web Services, including their EC2 and S3 offerings. They are heading in the right direction toward utility computing in the cloud. I’m definitely a fan.
My most recent article highlighted how Amazon now allows you to use Static IP addresses with your hosted services - a clear step toward true, secure hosting in the cloud.
Of course, it’s still the wild west out there, and you do have to roll your own EC2 management and deployment services. Amazon gives you API’s to do this, but it’s still work and testing.
Enter Scalr:
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2.
It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI’s for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
Very cool. The project is very young yet, but they are going in the right direction (building easily scalable application tiers).
This project appears to be supported by Intridea.
Tags: Open Source, Scalr, Amazon, EC2, S3, Utility Computing, Scalability, Intridea, GPL, Brian Berliner, brianberliner
That was much faster than I had anticipated.
I wrote about the Apple iPhone SDK and how I thought it was going to revolutionize the mobile application market.
At that time, Apple released the first Beta of the iPhone SDK, which was very functional, but did not include a working Interface Builder application. That meant that you would have to roll your own User Interface elements using Cocoa Touch. No big deal for now, but it sure would be much nicer to have IB available.
And, now it is.
Kudos to Apple for moving quickly to get this out.
I am extremely impressed by Apple’s execution of their iPhone strategy and developer program. There will be a shitload of high-quality and reasonably priced applications for this device.
Thanks to Ars Technica for catching the announcement for me.
Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone SDK, SDK, Software Development Kit, Mobile, Platform,Programming, Interface Builder, IB, Brian Berliner, brianberliner
My good friend and advisor, Dave Patterson, has been selected to lead the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at UC Berkeley.
Patterson has been an advisor for three of the startup companies that I have founded. He’s a great guy and has a brilliant mind. He has a knack for doing research with immensely practical applications. He gets ahead of problems in Computer Science, and addresses them with the end result in mind. I just can’t say enough nice things about him. Brilliant.
The UPCRC is a joint venture between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by Intel and Microsoft. These two universities will spend the next 5 years trying to figure out how we build computing systems that can fully utilize the coming wave of multicore and manycore systems.
This is absolutely critical stuff.
Take a look at some of the coverage:
This is a very interesting project to me, and I will be writing more about it later. Why? Well:
You will absolutely hear more from me about this.
Tags: UPCRC, David Patterson, University of Illinois, UIUC, UC Berkeley, Intel, Microsoft, HPC,Parallel, Multicore, Manycore, Brian Berliner, brianberliner
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked about the file synchronization market. Products and companies like FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, and Sharpcast.
In a timely moment, BeInSync has been acquired by Phoenix Technologies for $25M. TechCrunch covers it well.
BeInSync looks to be most similar to Sharpcast’s SugarSync product in terms of functionality. Sharpcast has support for Mobile devices, while BeInSync does not. BeInSync may only work on Windows (no Mac) in fact. BeInSync charges $39.95 for 50GB of storage per year, while SugarSync charges $199.99 for 60GB of storage per year. BeInSync certainly has the more attractive price!
I must admit that I don’t fully get why Phoenix Technologies was interested, except that Woody Hobbs, current President/CEO and previous President/CEO of IntelliSync, clearly knows what he’s looking for.
And, the $25M price tag can’t be sitting well with the Sharpcast folks, since they’ve already taken down $16.5M in VC money. Sharpcast would need a significantly higher exit for an acquisition to make financial sense.
I’ve written a couple of articles about the Amazon EC2 service. It’s the Elastic Compute Cloud that lets you build very scalable (and, reliable) web sites "in the cloud", using Web Services created and operated by Amazon.
It’s amazingly good.
And, just got significantly better.
Amazon just announced two significant improvements to the service:
Elastic IP Addresses:
Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.
Availability Zones:
Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.
These two capabilities answer the primary complaints that I have heard about the EC2 service, and I suspect will allow for significant customer adoption in the next 18 months. Static IP Addresses, combined with serving up the proper certificates, should allow for fully secure computing under Amazon EC2.
The guys at RightScale have described Setting up a fault-tolerant site using Amazon’s Availability Zones.
Amazon also announced User Selectable Kernels:
Amazon EC2 now allows developers to use kernels other than the default Amazon EC2 kernels with their instances.
Including:
This release makes the following new AMIs and AKIs (Kernel IDs) available:
AMI: Fedora Core 6 - 32 bit - a stock FC6 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AMI: Fedora 8 - 32 bit - a stock F8 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AMI: Fedora 8 - 64 bit - a stock F8 release with matching kernel and RAM disk
AKI: 2.6.18 Kernel - 32 bit - a stock 2.6.18 kernel (can be used with 32 bit AMIs)
AKI: 2.6.18 Kernel - 64 bit - a stock 2.6.18 kernel (can be used with 64 bit AMIs)
Tags: Amazon, EC2, Cloud Computing, Web Services, Static IP, Failover, Redundancy, Brian Berliner, brianberliner
Sharpcast, founded in 2004 and funded in 2006, has just announced the launch of their SugarSync product (formerly known as Project Hummingbird).
Similar to the products I talked about last week in the article, "FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, Oh My…", SugarSync is a tool that keeps your files synchronized across multiple computers (PC & Mac today, maybe Linux as well someday), including mobile devices.
One of the things that sets Sharpcast apart from the others is the support for many mobile platforms. They support Brew, J2ME, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian (coming soon). I don’t really think that the mobile aspect of this is where the market is right now, but I could be wrong. And, Sharpcast certainly has enough VC money to address the perceived needs of the mobile users. In any case, Sharpcast certainly has a big enough market with just the Universal Sync service.
Sharpcast charges $9.99/month or $99.99/year for their basic plan, which includes 30GB of storage in the cloud. I have 40GB of music, 30GB of photos, and 50GB of documents, so for me to use the service for just that (not counting my 450GB of camcorder video), I would need the Business Plan, which runs $499.99 yearly and covers 250GB of storage in the cloud.
Yikes! That’s pricey.
For data protection, I think I’ll just buy another Time Machine drive.
A Note About Sharpcast Photos:
Sharpcast has had a product in the market for a couple years now known as Sharpcast Photos. Focused on synchronizing just your photos between your computers and mobile devices. A subset of what SugarSync provides, to be sure. However, it does not appear that Sharpcast Photos has gained many subscribers. The site https://www.sharpcastphotos.com/ doesn’t even register traffic on Quantcast or Compete.com. Does anyone have any paid subscriber data for Sharpcast Photos?
When Sharpcast Photos was first released, my feeling was that they had priced themselves out of the market. The cost is $5.99/month or $64.99/year, which is a bit steep for just photo protection - especially since the sharing part was limited to their photo sharing service. Perhaps the limited subscriber base backs that up. Anyone?
Tags: Sharpcast, Photos, Sharpcast Photos, SugarSync, Dropbox, FolderShare, Syncplicity,Synchronization, Sync, Brian Berliner, brianberliner
