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Web Services and Smart Data.

August 2006

Google has announced the beta of Google Apps for Your Domain, which combines Google's Gmail with its IM, calendar and web page editing services into one suite. It's no Office killer, heck, it's not even an Office Live killer yet, but it is a big step in that direction. Our sister publication, InformationWeek takes a look at the Google strategy, which includes embracing and extending Microsoft Office documents rather than trying to replace them outright. Google is borrowing other strategies from Microsoft, such as getting its software preloaded onto your next Dell. Of course Microsoft has a head start with its own hybrid suite of local and web-based tools, and I’m sure it will be quick to embrace any G-office features that are a hit with users.
Also of note this week: Thomas Claiborne considers How Google Might Fail, and Charles Babcock looks at Google's Brew of Open-Source And Custom Code.

Posted by John Dorsey at 05:21 PM  Permalink |

Amazon's Web Services team sent out an email invite for the Elastic Compute Cloud Beta on Thursday at 3:00 a.m. PDT, and within the first few hours, the initial beta list was already filled.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is Amazon's latest web service, which provides on-demand, resizable computing. The press release described the specs: "the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth." Pricing is $0.10/instance-hour, $0.20/GB for data transfers, and $0.15/GB per month for storage (on Amazon's S3).

Judging by the beta popularity, this price/performance ratio seems to have hit the sweet spot. It will be interesting to see how the other major players in the on-demand market such as IBM, Sun, and HP, react to Amazon's new offering.

Posted by John Dorsey at 02:27 PM  Permalink |

Contributors Rizwan Mallal and Mamoon Yunus recently ran some perf tests on Amazon's Simple Storage Service and gave it high marks for robustness and response times. It seems that S3 is a bargain to boot--the cost for two weeks of extensive testing was just half a buck. Also, check out Eric Bergman-Terrell's article, Synchronizing files with .NET 2.0, S3, and FTP. Eric pairs up S3 with the FtpWebRequest class in .NET to create a utility for syncing files across multiple machines.

Posted by John Dorsey at 07:16 PM  Permalink |

DDJ hosted a netseminar today titled Making Mashups Mobile. Guest speakers Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services Evangelist, Lester Memmott, a software architect in Intel's Software and Solutions Group, and Mike Fisher, co-founder of ElephantDrive discussed a mashup that uses Intel's Mobile Platform SDK and Amazon S3 APIs. They also looked into the code ElephantDrive used in its Web 2.0 online backup and storage implementation and discussed developing more robust mashups that deliver business value.
Watch the netseminar archive online or download a pdf version of the slides.

Posted by John Dorsey at 03:01 PM  Permalink |