What is the Amazon Monitoring Service? I am confused. I have it as a report in my interface but that’s it. Service is unavailable it says when I try to generate a report, and it is nowhere to be selected.
Does anyone out there have something like this?
Monthly Archives: March 2007
AWS Monitoring Service
Money comes around day
Here in Germany there seems to be a little money day today. First of all, congratulations to the friends from Sevenload for having closed with Burda Digital Ventures. A great partner for Sevenload, and with mother Burda, one that truly works had to understand where the world is going! And as Nico already put it, this means that Heiko might come by Cologne a bit more often. 
Here is the official blog post.
It seems that the big media companies really want to make sure that they have their own stakes in the growing video market on the internet. It will be really interesting to see how all of this turn out. The biggest an most interesting thing with all of this is really cost, and I can only suggest reading the last posts from Cringely. The thing is that each new viewer ads costs, and if you go with a P2P system, there is a lag involved, it only works with highly popular files and the cost is really with the ISP which they will surely not like. Check out this post by Cringely to see another option: Neokast. Read the blog
Next up is eConozco joins OpenBC. With the acquisition of the leading spanish social network (ok, Orkut seems to be really big in Brazil with like 20 million members, … no spain, but ok… never mind) they want to push further into their internationalization.
The most interesting thing is actually Experteer. It all started with me watching the interview with Martin Weber on Gründerszene today. I can only agree with Lukasz that Holtzbrinck Ventures is one of the best, and/or most active, VCs in Germany at the moment. Truyl a great team. The interesting thing is that in the interview Martin Weber talks about Experteer (min 7:56), which they founded 6 months ago. It’s fully built on Ruby on Rails it seems (looking forward to seeing another scaling proof) and a little bit different take on the recruitment market. In Experteer you as a user pay to become member, and Headhunters and companies can pitch 60.000 EUR plus jobs to you. Interesting. Even more interesting, now Christian posts that BV Capital and Wellington Partners have invested!
Now I don’t personally know the team behind Experteer, but with the investor team now behind them, I am looking forward to seeing a good growth curve.
So we have Xing buying stuff, Sevenload getting big cash to extend video with Burda, and then the young Experteer getting money from the big guys. This round goes to Experteer I’d say. Looking forward to what happens next.
Google’s Click-Fraud Solution
I have been wondering how they do it for some time. The thing is that I can easily use a group of hacked PCs to randomly click ads through a normal IE. I am not really sure how Google would be able to find out which clicking PC is a bot and which is a real person.
There is one other solution though, which seems to gain credibility through this post on Webby Thoughts.
It makes me wonder whether Google has algorithms in place to notice when certain posts get traffic spikes and consider a higher percentage of those clicks as invalid clicks.
That is exactly the thing and the only thing how this can work. They will just monitor traffic over the entire network and they for one know that distribution of ads and distribution of content will remain relatively stable, so if something spikes in the distribution curve then they will presume it to be fraud and remove the spike. That seems what has happened in the above case.
This also means that if you suddenly have a short spike in your traffic this will probably not result in too much additional revenue, which will only come if the spike is not a spike but a real continuous growth in traffic.
Xing is a Success
How do I know?
Pretty simple.
Currently the site is down.
And it is getting on my nerves. 
Loic and Ola Floating
Loic posted his Dead Sea Podcast. It’s an interview, or rather a chat, with Ola Ahlvarsson from Result.
Thanks for a few light minutes in the office.
Looking forward to seeing a few Result people again at Expand this week.
The Future of Radio: Slacker
Actually I should be saying last.fm, because it is really where all this is coming from. It’s an amazing start-up and the IT team at Ormigo is raving about it. I still do not get to use it because I don’t really like listening to random music at work. In comes Slacker. It’s an amazing start-up with some real talent behind it that kind of makes your last.fm mobile. They are building a portable device, and best of all a car stereo system. That system will use something similar to last.fm. You can say if you like or hate a song, and skip 6 songs per hour and have quasi personal radio through that.
The device will connect to the Slacker network through Satellite and and WiFi whenever a network is available and update the available songs on the internal hard disk. This means you always get fresh songs. Great stuff. I do want that in my car. I’d need two profiles but still
The next step then is that I will have a preferred list of some podcast like some special news, some comedy, and more, and that will be played first. Only then I get some random songs. That would and actually will, totally change your radio listening experience, and the cool thing is … you will be able to buy the song with the press of a button. Oh the world is interesting.
Deutschland sucht den Superstar
Deutschland sucht den Superstar, or DSDS in short, is the german equivalent to American Idol. After having been to a full show a few weeks ago, I now attended a final rehearsal. I am obviously biased, because my wife works at Grundy Light Entertainment, who run the show, but it is a cool thing to watch. Especially because seeing it in the studio is very different from TV, which I am not the only one to say. Having played drums and been to a recording studio with my bands twice, hearing the band play is great when listened to live.
The thing is that I am somebody interested in practically everything. This thirst for information and knowledge is actually what drives me in the direction I am in, culminating in the creation of Ormigo some time ago. The media landscape is an amazing thing, and seeing a little bit behind the curtains of one of the biggest shows in Germany, is really exciting. The amount of people working on this, and their dedication, are something that is truly educating. 
In the studio they even have a Spider Cam, which is great to watch as it zooms through the studio. Really congratulations for the entire team for running a great show.And to those that think I am a freak… this is entertainment people, and entertainment is there to entertain people and the show really does. People connect to those that are in the last rounds and that is not something that comes from nothing but is hard work. And trying to understand that, and letting yourself be entertained, is truly interesting.
This is really big, really expensive, and really profitable. Amazing. Especially for somebody having founded a company.
Yahoo! and Microsoft building a search company?
At least John thinks they should.
It seems that currently both still have a tough time, even though Panama seems encouraging. And there are a lot of players out there that make things more interesting, like the efforts of wunderloop.
So John suggests for them to join forces instead of trying to kill each other in the race to catch Google. They should form a new company, name Soverture , throw in their search monetization and syndication plays and recruit together. They can also build a killer AdSense product he believes. All in all a good idea but not thought far enough.
There are too many players out there already and for the portals, those with the best deal should win. What we need is an open market place where everyone can be plugged in. We need to be able to allow a publisher to handle ads themselves, but have a backfill from different other providers that fit best. The publisher then has to be able to decide how much share of their revenue they want to spend on optimization, taking somebody out there that does content match well, or adding somebody for demographic targeting or social targeting. We have to stop this being a walled garden, a blackbox from all sides where everybody believes they will only win if they will not tell anyone how it works. THAT will be interesting and I propose a similar corporate structure like VISA.
Hot Book: Founders at Work
I am actually not even done yet, but it already proves to be a wonderful book to read when founding or thinking of founding a company. Now Paul reviewed it and Guy did as well and and they both love it. I can only agree. Yes, it is not something that you read to learn how to attract VCs, or to get a 3 step guide to launch a successful start-up. When you are starting a company though a bell rings in hundreds of places. I remember one part where one of the founders (I think it was Joe Krauss from Excite, JotSpot). When you are starting a company you have days where you think that you will rule the world, and the next day you wake up and you think it will all fall to pieces, and nothing between those days has changed. Nothing. You still have the drive to pull this through because you really believe in it and you think it is the right thing to do. There are endless of other parts in there that are a great read so I can only suggest buying the book.
I won the alarm:clock euro quiz
Wohoo! alarm:clock euro had a quiz again recently in which they asked to name the VC firm founder who made his first fortune in modems and fax cards. As a hint they added that the firm is now on its third and largest fund. Having run around in the venture scene a bit in the last few months, I obviously knew that they ment Dr. Gottfried Neuhaus from Neuhaus Partners in Hamburg. Also knowing Valerie form alarm:clock I had to quickly write the answer over to them and hey, I was the first! You can now see my wonderful picture right here.
A good distraction coming in the office in the morning
