Scott Watermasysk

Cloud Storage Heating Up

2008-12-02T04:44:48Z

What happens with three very successful companies all start competing in the same web space? Consumers get cheap prices. Today Amazon announced a more open beta, lots of free beta access, and much cheaper prices on their cloud db service, SimpleDB . We've made the business decision to go with SimpleDB even simpler than it was before. You can now get started for free. For at least the next six months, you can consume up to 1 GB of storage, and you can use up to 25 machine hours each month. You...(read more)

eBay Bloggers Holiday Charity Challenge

2008-12-01T02:35:52Z

Before you read the rest of this post, quickly look around your office and do a quick count on the number of usable gadgets and gizmos you have not touched in more than three months? I will wait.... Wow, quite a few things huh? What to do with all of this stuff? An obvious and easy answer is eBay it. I am definitely not the blog meme type of person. However, I am sure I am not the only person in this position. I am hoping to leverage the power of the web to not only help myself, but also do some...(read more)

Cloud Options - Amazon, Google, & Microsoft

2008-11-26T04:53:20Z

I have been researching various cloud offerings on and off for the last couple of months. I have primarily focused on offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Here is an overview and some quick opinions of what each service offers. Amazon (AWS) While they did not invent the notion of cloud computing, they are certainly the thought leader here and have an impressive offering. Core Services S3 - Blob storage SimpleDB - structure data EC2 - OS in the cloud SQS - Queue in the cloud Overview &...(read more)

Saying Goodbye to the Non-Essential

2008-11-21T12:33:12Z

I expect we will be hearing many announcements like this from Google and many others in the coming weeks and months. In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives. But we've also always accepted that when you...(read more)

Live Search API "Silk Road"

2008-11-14T12:37:48Z

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of Live Search services "Silk Road" . Silk Road is Live Search's new set of search APIs (version 2.0 beta) and services for developers. With Silk Road, you can build applications without restrictions around presentation. Getting started is simple: decide what search content you want, choose from JSON, SOAP, or XML output, and then customize them according to your needs to build your own search application. All you need to get going is an AppID...(read more)

Apology-Based Computing

2008-11-13T15:42:27Z

I was watching Max Feingold's PDC talk, Designing Your Application to Scale and one particular quote really stuck out to me. "At global scale, getting the truth is really really expensive". What he is referring to by " truth " is knowing exact details such as exactly how many "widgets" you have in your inventory. While there are obviously times you do need to know this, most of the time it is not necessary and you can potentially gain a lot of scale, if you can design...(read more)

Video Cameras For Sale

2008-11-12T18:49:10Z

I am looking to sell to video cameras to make room for the new Flip Mino HD . If you are interested in either, ping me at scottwater@gmail.com . Flip Mino I love this camera . It is super easy to use, fits into your pocket, and works on PC/Mac with no software to install. An HD version was just released , so I am looking to sell this one so that I can justify the new purchase. :) Amazon Details . Asking $120. Note: This camera is also the one which filmed the Ohio Arm Challenge so it's may be...(read more)

FeedBurner – Not Dead Yet?

2008-11-11T13:15:59Z

Maybe FeedBurner isn’t dead after all. I received the following email this morning: We’re contacting you to let you know that we’ll be migrating your FeedBurner account [removed] to your Google Account [removed] on 11/13/2008 . Please rest assured, this change won’t disrupt your current feeds service. As part of this migration, all of your existing FeedBurner feeds will automatically redirect to Google feeds. You won’t lose any of your current subscribers in the process nor will this affect any email...(read more)

The New White

2008-11-07T14:21:24Z

Ahh, so many title choices, all of them would have haunted me in Google for many years. Anyway, I recently realized that four of my recent gadget purchases had one thing in common, they were all white. iPhone – I went with the white model based on the assumption there would be a lot less noticeable finger prints. Unfortunately, this does not help the screen when my toddler daughter places it in her mouth. Flip Mino – this one I would have rather had in black, but Amazon charged less for the...(read more)

Papercut – Easy Email Testing

2008-11-07T12:50:40Z

Email is an incredibly important aspect of many applications. While most programming languages make it trivially easy to send email, debugging/testing is often a tedious and boring task…until now. Ken Robertson (of the Telligent product team) has released a tool called Papercut which should make this process a lot more tolerable. Papercut is a simplified SMTP server designed to only receive messages (not to send them on) with a GUI on top of it allowing you to see the messages it receives. It doesn't...(read more)

SEO in Blogs is Overrated

2008-11-07T02:42:25Z

I have spent way too much time in my life discussing SEO in blogs. For blogs like Engadget , SEO is a big deal. However, for the other 99.99% of people you are way better served creating great content and interacting with the visitors you already (yes, I can see there is a bit of chicken and egg). What got me thinking about this was a post “ Advanced comment systems are bad for SEO: IntenseDebate, Sezwho and Disqus ”. The author is correct that rendering comments via JavaScript lessens the chance...(read more)

Follow the Chefs

2008-11-06T18:56:52Z

With all the news about a crappy economy, I found the video below by Jason Fried of 37Signals very interesting. In particular, at the 20:06 marker he quoted Kathy Sierra , When it comes to marketing, you can either outspend or out teach your competitors. In the video, Jason Fried, was using an example of how some famous chefs had taken the approach of “ out teach, out share, and out contribute ” their competitors as a way of getting ahead. In hindsight this is obvious, but it is still a really smart...(read more)

Yahoo! Search BOSS C# Implementation

2008-11-06T13:24:07Z

I saw some mentions about Yahoo’s Boss a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t have time until recently to try it out for myself. BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start- ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in...(read more)

BizSpark

2008-11-05T21:27:24Z

Photo By: scholewiak Microsoft's new BizSpark project is an effort to spur startups and entrepreneurs to use Microsoft technology when launching new companies. Microsoft is giving away software, services and support to startups earning less than $1 million to help them get off the ground and to the next level. The technology Microsoft is making available includes Visual Studio, Windows Server, SQL Server and Windows Azure. [ eWeek ] I still wouldn’t expect someone who is comfortable on LAMP to...(read more)

Improving Kindle

2008-10-26T16:16:33Z

I have had my Kindle since June. The hardware and user experience is really good, but there are some things Amazon could do to make the owner experience much better. Here are my suggestions for taking the Kindle from Good to Great. Total Price - $300+ for the privilege of buying eBooks? I do not see the masses making this commitment. I understand you cannot just give it way, but it would be a no brainer if the $100 - $200 of books where included. eBook Prices - As an Amazon Price customer, I can...(read more)