Got this note from Amazon Today –

This is a note to inform you about some changes we’re making to our pricing, effective June 1, 2007.

With Amazon S3 recently celebrating its one year birthday, we took an in-depth look at how developers were using the service, and explored whether there were opportunities to further lower costs for our customers. The primary area our customers had asked us to investigate was whether we could charge less for bandwidth.

There are two primary costs associated with uploading and downloading files: the cost of the bandwidth itself, and the fixed cost of processing a request. Consistent with our cost-following pricing philosophy, we determined that the best solution for our customers, overall, is to equitably charge for the resources being used – and therefore disaggregate request costs from bandwidth costs.

Making this change will allow us to offer lower bandwidth rates for all of our customers. In addition, we’re implementing volume pricing for bandwidth, so that as our customers’ businesses grow and help us achieve further economies of scale, they benefit by receiving even lower bandwidth rates. Finally, this means that we will be introducing a small request-based charge for each time a request is made to the service. Below are the details of the new pricing plan (also available on the Amazon S3 detail page):

Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
€0.15 ($0.20) / GB – uploaded
€0.15 ($0.20) / GB – downloaded

New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
€0.07 ($0.10) per GB – all data uploaded

€0.13 ($0.18) per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded
€0.12 ($0.16) per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded
€0.10 ($0.13) per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge

New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
€0.00 ($0.01) per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
€0.00 ($0.01) per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Storage will continue to be charged at €0.11 ($0.15) / GB-month used.

The end result is an overall price reduction for the vast majority of our customers. If this new pricing had been applied to customers’ March 2007 usage, 75% of Amazon S3 customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.

We don’t anticipate making further structural changes to Amazon S3 pricing in the future, but we will continue to look for ways to drive down costs and pass the savings on to you.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

P.S. Please note that the reduced bandwidth rates shown above will also take effect for Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS. The bandwidth tier in which you will be charged each month will be calculated based on your use of each of these services separately, and could therefore vary across services.

PutPlace got a great write up from Karlin Lilington in the Irish Times today.

Better ship that beta!

Hey Darren, mysay.com has a better version. Unfortunately you can’t link to snippets, bah!

I did a piece on George Hook’s Radio show (podcast) today on Barcamp that turned into a full blown pitch for PutPlace.com. It turns out George needs to organise his digital life just like everyone else and wants to beta test the software on air when it goes into beta next month.

I didn’t completely screw up thanks to some excellent pointers from Sarah before hand. Still, a bit freaky sitting before the man so to speak.

Well Barcamp Dublin seemed to go well to my eye, the only fly in the ointment being practically non-existent WIFI. We had about 90 attendees in total and 20 or so speakers. Based on Barcamp Dublin and previous Barcamps you seem to get around two thirds of the registered numbers turning up.

Things that came up in this Barcamp:

• Make sure the geography of the building is clear to all attendees, loads of people asked me where the main auditorium was, even though I thought it was obvious.
• Name and label the talking areas and put plenty of signs up for people
• Make sure the speakers have plenty of water available
• I brought a big bag of random stationary to the event (postits, markers, sticky tape, spraymount (invaluable!), pens, elastic bands) etc. that proved useful
• Make sure the speakers clearly label their talk, No acronyms or contractions. I think it would be sensible for speakers to add their mobile numbers so they can be notified of schedule changes in the future
• Having tea and coffee available all day would be something I would aim for at the next Barcamp
• Both Barcamp Cork and Barcamp Dublin had the main networking and congregation area backing on to one of the talking areas. Ideally this should be seperated from the talking area so the networking can occur in parallel with talks
• Good WIFI is hard to achieve but Evert Bopp has offered to help here.
• Sean Foley of Microsoft (Clare Dillon‘s boss) has offered to help with videoing future Barcamps.
• You need at least two full timers on the day, one to man the entrance desk (Elly Parker did trojan work in this area) and the other to generally police the event, making sure the schedule board gets filled properly, speakers are ready on time and people can find their way around.

I would like to make one proposal rather than having a seperate blog for each Barcamp (we had BarcampDublin and I see Barcamp Galway is live) why not create one Barcamp blog (barcamp.ie?) that all Barcamps can use. Then there is only feed to subscribe to and each Barcamp can leverage the expertise and community of the others?

Finally, Big shout out to Elly, Eoghan and Paul for helping put it all together.

… To have a meeting with Enterprise Ireland, where they don’t mention in hushed tones, that its tax payers money, after all.

• Why can’t I buy a childs ticket on DART  automated ticket machines? If I was dishonest I wouldn’t pay at all on a Sunday as the gates are open and their is nobody at the ticket office. As it is, my honesty means I have to pay an extra tax if my children are to travel with a ticket.
• Why in 2007 can’t I register and pay for membership of the Irish Software Association online!
• Why does the Irish Software Association have the dumbest website URL in the world (www.software.ie!)
• Why will the poxy, shitty, fucked up, dire, “somebody put the poor thing out of its misery”,  visual editor in WordPress not leave my hand coded HTML alone.
• Why does Dell insist on shipping VISTA ready PCs with 512MB of  memory when Vista scarfs up a whooping 600MB of physical memory (Vista Home Basic mind you) just to give you an explorer window?
• Why in 2007 does Microsoft Word still bale out when writing something as simple as a one page letter?

Arrrghh, kill ’em all and let god sort them out!

Morgan Kelly (Prof of Economics UCD) and Pat McArdle (Chief Economist, Ulster Bank) debate the likelihood of a property crash (Kelly) or a soft landing in todays Sunday Business Post. I’m no economist, but Morgan’s side of the debate seemed more compelling and was more concerned with presenting real data to support his position. For instance the average rent on a 1m euro property is about 2000 euros a month, while the mortgage repayments now stand at around  4000 a month for the interest alone. Those economics demand high capital growth.

Pat on the other hand seems preoccupied with debunking common “myths” regarding the likelihood of an Irish property crash. As he admits himself, ( and I was thinking) , you would say that, wouldn’t you.

The full paper behind Morgan’s thinking is on his website.

Is there any hot meal that cannot be improved by putting a fried egg on top of it?

Download it at the google site.