Joe Drumgoole – Dev Rel Guy
S3 is a cool virtual disk service provided by Amazon. Unfortunately its only accessible via an API so mere mortals don’t get a lookin. Thankfully Jeremy Zawodny has compiled a list of list of backup tools that will give you access to the service.
S3 is priced at 0.15 USD per GB per month and 0.20 USD per GB of bandwidth consumed.
Darren drew my attention to an essay by Paul Graham entitled “The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups“. Its a pretty good list but of course it could just as easily be entitled “The 18 mistakes that kill companies”. The only difference is that when big companies (DEC, Data General, Compaq, Symbolics, Thinking Machines, ICL) make these mistakes, death is long and lingering rather than short and sharp.
More sanctimonious rubbish from our moral guardians at the IEDR.
Dev would be proud.
One of the worlds most popular RAD environments is Excel. But Excel is a pain to share and god forbid you need a third party to enter data into your carefully crafted spreadsheets. Now imagine this problem compounded n times over when an organisation attempts to collate data via a shared spreadsheet. You get to play our favourite corporate games such as,
So we all love Excel, but we need better ways to control data entry and sharing.
So take your Excel spreadsheet and parse all the presentation material out it in order to generate a web page. Now use an AJAX interface to hide intermediate workbooks, behinds the scenes tables etc. etc. Now ink in the data entry fields so they become highlighted. You now have a AJAX/HTML application version of your spreadsheet.
Now you load this into a runtime framework (probably encompassing the Excel DLL ‘cos who wants to rewrite all that code) and you wrap it in a proper web login environment along with profile and preference information and you store all computation and changes in a database so every version of the spreadsheet is kept when each set of values is changed by each user.
Finally you allow the designer to upload new versions of the spreadsheet and store that in a history as well. Finally you offer a sharing capability so a user can invite other users to access and use spreadsheet, safe in the knowledge that a single master and all changes are held centrally.
Now you can offer it as a hosted service, charging each user a few cents for each spreadsheet they access or charging the owner a most substantial fee on a monthly basis for hosting their application.
How hard can that be?
I’ve been adding people to my del.icio.us network without really know why or understanding it for the past while. So today I actually clicked on the link and finally copped on.
Its an RSS feed of all the links these people post, doh!
Anyway I’ve added it to bloglines, so thanks Conor (argolon), James (eirepreneur), Justin (jm), John (johnkeyes), Damien (mulley) and Walter (walterh).
Keep ’em coming…
SiliconRepublic.com reports that Cape Clear has flogged its ESB technology to Ohio state. No dollar values and that usually implies a less than 1m price tag.
When its over 1m the tag line is “multi-million dollar deal”. Still business is business, props to the Cape.
The new Live Writer beta fixes the categories problem where a long list of categories was not visible once in exceeded the height of the screen.
Live Writer continues to impress me.
I uploaded a few snaps from Barcamp Ireland to Flickr.
Conor O’Neill (Argolon) introduced proceedings and Simon McGarr kicked off with a talk on “Whats wrong with data retention?”.
Keep the data – Don’t tell anyone I told you. This was illegal. What data? phone records, location data, who called who.
Who knew we’d all be carrying a government tracking device everywhere we went and pay 100 euro for the privilege.
The same goes for all your internet records. All your email tos and froms.
This data is being retained “in case you commit a crime”.
If we are successful in overturning this law at the Eurpean Court of Justice, then we will overturn a law affecting hundreds of millions of people.
Key defence – We must catch terrorists and paedophiles.
Hard to prove that this data contributes to those tasks. Was there ever a case, where data retention issues prevented a crime being solved? The Irish government’s answer? No.
Use data preservation rather than retention. Take action based on specific events, rather than retaining everything. The operators already keep data for 6 months anyway for billing purposes.
Put the DRI button on your website and get a free laptop skin.
There are no safeguards in place to protect the data from illegal access.
Runs a blog on Second Life.
Soon be a million players on Second Life. 50% will have logged in in the last 30 days. The players online spent 350,000 dollars in the last 24 days.
Exchange rate 300 linden dollars to 1 USD. Second Life gets one dollar for each sell transaction. Made money even when not logged into Second Life. Made 300 dollars without logging in.
Economic forces,
Land : There are 64000 sq. meters of land.
An She Chung (spelling?) – biggest developer in Second Life. Came up with the idea of themed communities. Gay, gothic, japanese etc. etc. Made $125,000 USD in first year of trading.
Builds them and sells them. The plots cost 15000 Linden dollars.
There is a compelling desire to give your avatar a home. Spending money drives the need to make money.
Services – sex obviously comes up. Linden don’t have a policy. Anything goes (within the bounds of the law). Prostitution is big business.
Second Life pays my rent.
Everything in Second Life was built by the players. Linden provides the land and the water.
Events – Throw a ball for 500 linden each. They are themed. Weddings cost around 30000 linden. You can have as many wifes as you want, but of course there is no way of guaranteeing your wife is a women.
Casinos – Russian roulette.
Shopping – stuff to make you look better. Body parts, cosmetic surgery, good clothes great hair.
Objects get built by users. They can be incredibly complex and both small (shoes) and large (houses). Houses sell for around 5000 linden.
There is a search engine to find stuff. You pay linden dollars to get rankings.
Women’s clothing is a big market. Men’s market is growing.
There was no way to do elaborate avatar interactions (e.g. hugging, kissing etc.) Craig Altman came up with a “hug pack”. With this you can do physical interaction. Made 90000 linden in the first year of trading.
Real World Businesses – American apparel have opened a store selling models of their real world clothes.
Starwood Hotels is building hotels in Second Life. They are prototyping their hotels in order to determine what they put in their real world hotels.
There are VCs in Second Life. But there are no contracts, so legal enforcement is a problem. ROI is likely to be small. There is no regulation. The income you earn is taxable.
There are charities.
External Businesses – Ebay, Escort Services, Linden Lifestyles. Marketing and advertising. There is a company called Rivers Run Red which has brought the BBC into Second Life.
You can spend a lot of (real) time on supporting customers.
My store is running while I’m not logged in, making me money.
Strategy and guerilla marketing. How to enhance your presence on the web. Blogging hasn’t been a rampant success for their clients. Your corporate competitors are bigger and have more money.
Use Ryder cup as a case study. What kind of impact can we make in 4 months. Campaign investment by big boys was over €10m (AIB, Rolex, O2, Failte…)
Create something useful, find a niche, create relevant content, target the long tail.
Couldn’t win the term ryder cup. But the more obscure searches push up your postings.
Became the No 1 independent blog on the Ryder cup (Ryder Diary). Lots of old media hits. Traditional media is looking for stuff to write about.
Didn’t appreciate the importance of inbound links. Didn’t commercialise the UI (bookmarks, Google ads).
Copacetic 