Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Over the last few days and even weeks a few things clogged up my bookmarks folder entitled “To Blog” which I haven’t done up till now. It’s about time that I finally get them out of here, be it as a summary of sorts.

Ingmar pointed me to Zattoo, which is giving you TV on your computer and it seems to be working really well and they already have 46 channels in Germany as well as many in several other countries. I am still waiting for TV/Computer/Streaming/… to be fully integrated. I think Podcasting will fully take off once we have nocat of 3G enabled car radios with clients, and Videocasting will take off once my TV can effortlessly let me subscribe to Diggnation, News, Whatever. Zattoo might help to keep live shows available.

Dropbox is something I am starting to really love as a startup. They are using Amazon’s S3 as a storage solution and have built a nice little tool for windows and os x that will automatically sync everything you put into a special folder with your cloud based storage. Due to the fact that you can install your app on two computers you can sync several gigs of storage between two computers, and the fun thing is that you can share a special folder with another person all together. So if I put something in my “Shared with Henning” folder (could have chosen a wiser name, but this makes it easy to understand ;)) it is moved into the cloud, and when Henning turns on his computer, it will appear in his folder and everything is dandy. I really love the system they build. The opportunities are endless and that I love Amazon’s system is clear. This is a very clever way to use the service and the syncing part with revisions is great!

Friendfeed is something that is making the rounds at the moment and the Twitterati are signing up in big numbers. As I had discussions with Dirk about Noserub for ages, it all felt very familiar. The thing is that it is build by ex-Googlers and there are some things weird about it. I for one do not really feel like adding friends on the system but just people of whom I want to have access to all their feeds. As the feeds are managed by each individual user, I am always up to date on what these “friends” wright about. Then Friendfeed added search and I started adding “Friends” like crazy, choosing people that I respect and like. I have the slight feeling that it might become a form of search engine for me in the future. Using Friendfeed to follow your friends is a totally nutcase idea anyway. There are a gazillion filters missing and Friendfeed is actually not focussed enough to allow it from a mindset of the users I think.

Then there was this story on Techcrunch about MyBlogLog launching a Bluetooth type network. I am still wondering if this is a joke. The thing is that this makes MyBlogLog even more scary as a data gathering system, but mot of all I am wondering if people are nuts again. Bluetooth is not there to create a social network, something some people seem to be thinking at the moment. Aka-Aki in Germany seems to be one of those. The thing is that the amount of people you need in the network is way too high, leaving bluetooth on is a major security hazard waiting to happen, and once you are in my bluetooth range i can probably see you! People, get real! It’s a fun toy, but this is not and should not happen.

Then we had the launch of the Google App Engine. I got an account for our hosted system for Ormigo and we might be playing with it some time. Feld has a few good links about it and Tim O’Reilly is thinking whether Google App Engine is nothing more than a lock-in play. I do love the general idea of the App Engine, in that you do not have to worry about anything other than writing your code. But you do have to write it within the Google App Engine and write it in Python. So it is a kind of lock-in. But then comes Andy Baio writing about Chris Anderson launching AddDrop. AddDrop is a container for apps written with Google’s AppEngine SDK to be run directly on Amazon’s EC2. Now how cool is that!

And this brings us back to one of my favorite topics, Amazon, who announced a persistent storage feature for EC2. Before I blabber along on how cool that is, just read this from RightScale’s Thorsten vok Eiken.

That concludes my little summary for today. Have a great weekend.

How I love Amazon AWS. In October there were already hints about Static IPs and now they are here. Check out the Amazon Web Services Blog post about all of the new stuff.

First of all, we now have what they call Elastic IP Addresses and the system is very cool. You get up to 5 IPs to start with. You get one via an API call to AllocateAddress, which allocates you one fixed IP that then belongs to you. Without you using it you pay 1 cent per hour. But you can then do an AssociateAddress and it is attached to a Server and becomes free, meaning you no longer pay for its usage. You can then DisassociateAddress and ReleaseAddress if you do not plan to use it at all.

Then couple that with Availability Zones, which are zones in their Network Infrastructure that are insulated from each other so that if one zone goes down, another does not (in theory, there might always be odd cases, chance if you want ;)).

This really means you can do more for a high availability solution with Amazon AWS and if they now start a NOC in Germany, I will possibly never do my own Server again. But they are not here yet so we are just using it for parts of our system, and I am taking a look at Globalways.

But again, congratulations to the entire Team behind Amazon EC2 for pulling this one of. Thank you. No more DynDNS for our Ad Server

Amazon has a press release out with some interesting numbers for 2007, for those interested in them. It’s already been going around the web, but here are some I really like and a few further links at the end. (Data seems to include .com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .co.jp, .ca)

1. Busiest Day December 10th: 5.4 million items ordered, 62,5 per second!
2. On peek day their fulfillment network shipped 3.9 million units!
3. COMMENT: Kind of means that the average person buys something like 2 items per order right? Roughly. Interesting.
4. They shipped something to Borrow, Alaska

Following are some amazon.com numbers (with hotsellers being nov 15th until dec 19th):

1. When in stock, Wiis sold at 17/sec … but they are rarely in stock I think
2. In video games top seller was the Wii!
3. In DVDs Harry Potter and “Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series” among others
4. In consumer electronics Garmin GPS, Canon Powershop and Samsung LCDs
5. In PCs MacBook, Nokia Internet Tablet! (two shares I hold and items I have ;))

Gizmodo has a further list with mosted wished for and the like. Very nice.

Lots of great news from the Amazon AWS team. First of all there is now an SLA for their service. This in itself is very cool indeed, not because I don’t trust their uptime and their will to be up and running, but it just ads a little bit of accountability to the mix. 99.9% uptime is roughly an hour of downtime per year by the way. Not bad.

The one that excited me even more, and I am happy to quiz one of their evangelists when he comes over to cologne next month, is from an eWeek article:

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, told the audience that the offering was currently working on static IP technology.

Wow! Kick ass. I just really need one, and a way to manage which server gets that IP. Sure I could use some dyndns like service, or even Neustar Ultra Services or something but having one unique IP that is up and that can be bound to a load balancer would be great. Add WeoCeo and I am set.

A kid sure occupies you. A friend likened it to watching fire recently. Really not too interesting but you just have to keep watching. I obviously didn’t stop reading though so it is time for clearing the backlog again, dumping my brain into this blog once again, trying to get back on top of things.

• The wonderful people at MOO have launched their MOO Stickers.  I already love their business cards, and this ads to the mix. Looking forward to seeing the company grow into other markets.
• The guys at Townster posted about Vibe on their Blog. Great little video!
• AOL/Time Warner bought TACODA in another deal which moves a network for ads further towards the big players, giving behavioural targeting a further push into the main stream.
• Seth Goldstein launched SocialMedia, which builds Facebook aps, already having over 12 Million Users in total!!! They are looking for a designer by the way. If you know anyone, send me an eMail or leave a comment.
• As for ad networks, check out this article on media week entitled: Marketers Turn to Web Ad Nets. Also a real relevant point for all the people out there running performance based advertising solutions.
• Don Dodge wrote about the Microsoft analyst meeting with some interesting bits. They are serious about advertising, having bought AQuantive and AdECN, having deals with Facebook and Digg. The other big pushes from Redmond are software as a service and consumer services. Big changes going on at Microsoft.
• Clickriver is online, allowing your to advertise your services on Amazon.
• Amazon has started to allow payable AMIs on their Amazon EC2 service. I have the feeling that WeoCEO might be one of them soon.
• Valleywag posted the Facebook Ratecard.
• The NU2M portfolio seems to be transferred to Media Ventures by the looks of it. Watch out for some posters near you in Germany
• Desktop Tower Defense is coming to the desktop as a mutiplayer game. God the time we will loose!
• F5 Networks bought Acopia. A good move if you ask me. They move from traffic management to a more integrated system of managing your entire server system.
• Google is tracking deeper data with AdSense, allowing them to target users specifically based on their habits. With their reach, it’s an amazing behavioural targeting system.
• Plentyoffish.com is sticking with no employees for a while with big changes in the online dating market happening it seems.
• Feld posts about the Social Graph. One of our employees is working on something to allow social graph portability and Brad, ex LiveJournal / Six Apart, now Google, seems to be going in that direction too. This will seriously be a major shift and let’s see if it happens or rather when.