Open Source entrepreneur

With virtualization technology and services like EC2 (aws.amazon.com) the cost of building clusters is going down.

In the past 3 months we have put serious R&D work to find a solution for startups and SMB that need very reliable hosting.

The concept is to get the 5 nines (99.999) availability for any web application at an affordable price.

A 99.999% availability would cost about $250,000 for a dozen servers, a solid storage array dual load balancers, software and a lot of hard work.

To handle high load pick additional servers are needed but most of the time unused increasing again the operating cost.

This can't work for a small business or a startup.

So we will offer for a monthly fee to do all the setup and maintenance work using Amazon EC2 and S3 platforms.

We will take our customers' web applications load them in a database cluster and a web server cluster.

This product is perfect for SME or SMB that needs (5 nines) %99.999 availability or a young startup waiting to take off.

If your interested contact us.

Eliot Van Buskirk, did a nice review of the pre-beta version of NowHound.

NowHound is a project we've been working on for the past 2 months.
It's in PHP5 using xajax and the Ricoh javascript library to provide Live Cast search.

It's the one place where you can find all the live events. From ustream.tv to college football with cstv you will find npr, wcsn, world wide programs from JumpTV and much more to come.

NowHound offer a REST API to automate the process of adding live cast from your application.
It also supports the new MRSS (live event RSS feed) standard.

We are preparing for the public beta and will add more APIs and widgets soon.

links:
Wired

Nowhound

Got an email from Palm about dropping the Foleo and concentrating on their new operating system.

The iPhone technology is showing its effects also with Nokia demonstrating new touch screen capabilities for their next version of Symbian OS:
Nokia iPhone

The competition is reacting and the good news is that everything is moving the phone closer to a web terminal.

The number of web applications for the iPhone are increasing at a faster rate than any other Mobile OS.

They are web based allowing them to take full advantage of Web 2.0 technologies and networking capabilities.

With its 1 year advance Apple is setting up THE standard for cell phone web applications.

Next year we will mostlikely see Palm OS, Sybian, PocketPC and Opera releasing web browsers compatible with iPhone web applications.

Prediction never works, lets see....

I noticed that there is a new generation of Open Source software including ZenPhoto, Plogger, Lussumo Vanilla, Wordpress, Monket calendar, Photostack, Roundcube which follows a lot Defensive Design recipes.

Those applications take full advantage of Ajax to improve the user experience. Intuitive and simple seems to be the new rules in software development.

I am very impressed by what 37 signals do. Their influence is now everywhere in web based software. Directly or indirectly.

So thank you for taking software a step forward.

Zoli took me to the third Tech Crunch meetup.

It was very interesting. A lot of Web 2.0 companies where presenting and demoing their technology.
Among them were Sphere, Meebo, Healthline, Wink, Flock, Pandora, Zvents, Loomia, Goowy, RealTravel, TailRank, MeasureMap. Most of them revolve around the blog / bloggers sphere.

The Web 2.0 business model is scary. None of these companies have a clear plan for revenue. It seems like most of the Web 2.0 companies are think tanks or research-oriented technologies whose only goal is to be purchased by a big Web portal (google, yahoo, etc).

Sphere, Wink, Flock, Zvents, TailRank are all about blogs and similar user-contributed content.
I couldn't see any method other than advertising to generate revenue. When you only have 3 big players for the advertising market today -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- the only exit is a purchase.
The key for these companies seems to be user adoption. The more users they have and the bigger their community is the more likely they will be able to get some value out of it.

Pandora and Loomia are about podcasting and music, both very interesting and complementary technology.

Goowy is a MS Exchange killer using Macromedia Flash. It looks good, but with free open source players like Zimbra, Hula, Open Exchange, Kolab, RoundCube they have serious competition.

Meebo is an interesting technology for a web based instant messaging system, but it's not currently building a community of users, so I am not sure what their plans are.

RealTravel is a user-contributed travel guide -- very nice, with a clever way to build traffic with high quality user-contributed content. But I see it as a niche market.

Healthline was probably the best technology I've seen. Especially after listening to Adam Bosworth (Google VP of Engineering) talking about upcoming new types of searches (such as medical searches). It's an intelligent and tool-rich search for health-related information. It reminds me of a company I saw at the Santa Barbara Tech Coast Angel presentation.

MeasureMap is a web traffic report for Blogs. The user interface is very nice.

I've learned a lot by looking at these technologies. There are a lot of good ideas and user interface tricks among them, especially in terms of UI, as seen in MeasureMap.

It comforts me to see that we have a good business model with revenue as well as all the components necessary to be part of this Web 2.0 trend.

I would like to thank Michael for putting together such an event; it was great to be able to meet amazing entrepreneurs and smart VCs in such a casual atmosphere.