Coty's Weblog

MC Marc F?

Among other more significant bits of inside info regarding Red Hat and JBoss in his JBoss revenue for Red Hat is significant post, Jeff Haynie also reports that JBoss founder, Marc Fleury, will be DJing at a local club tomorrow night. Jeff mentioned this over dinner the night before last, too. I wonder whether this might be a first. I mean how often does a DJ have a net worth greater than his entire audience? (Of course, I’m just speculating on the composition of the audience. Maybe Chris Klaus will be in the house [I couldn’t resist the rhyme.], and I’ll be mistaken.)

Anyway, on a more serious note, it occurred to me how screwing up an acquisition can really burn you twice. First, you don’t get the value that you expected. Second, you eliminate a competitor from the market. Sure, that reduces competition for you, but it does for your competitors, as well. And when you screw up the acquisition, then the benefit arguably nets to your remaining competitors.

SoCon07

Responding to Haynie’s recent tag reminded me that I’ve neglected to promote an event that he has been working on and that I’m planning to attend: SoCon07.

SoCon07 is an unconference focused on social media, social networks, Web 2.0, and all that relatively loosely defined but arguably quite interesting stuff. It will be taking place on February 10th starting at 8am and continuing until 3:30pm in the first floor auditorium of the brand new Social Science Building at Kennesaw State University. There are other related events the evening before and the evening of the event. See the official schedule for details.

If you are here or near here and interested, then go sign up. It is free and open.

Hope to see you there.

Atlanta Technology Dinners

Sanjay says he was lazy, so I don’t know what that makes me—even lazier, I suppose. I’ve meant to blog about our dinners for a while and haven’t. Sanjay just did, so I’m following suit.

You can read Sanjay’s post for a lot of the background and details from recent dinners. What really prompted me to start this up was noticing how often I was saying things like, “Do you know X, because he is doing Y, too?” Now, it is not as if I’m all that connected or anything, but I was disappointed that all the smart, interesting people I knew who were starting companies, thinking about starting companies, growing recently started companies, etc., didn’t seem to know much about one another. I thought getting together for dinner might help. So, I mentioned it to Sanjay over lunch one day. That was key, because I’m pretty good with ideas, but as Sanjay describes himself in his post, he’s a “Doer”—“Instigator” might be an even better word. So, Sanjay kept reminding me about it until we actually got a dinner together in August.

Now we’ve got two dinners under our belts. I think we’re going to shoot for another in early December. In the long run, I want to make these self-sustaining. I’d really like to have them happening frequently without me or Sanjay or any particular organizer—just people with similar interests getting together share ideas, experiences, etc. Ideally, we’ll get something organic going that just keeps on rolling and enriching the community here in Atlanta.

So, like Sanjay, I’ll encourage anyone who knows me and is interested to reach out. And, like Sanjay, I’d like to thank everyone who has attended to two dinners to date for their participation. I’ve gotten a lot out of them, and I hope you have, too.

So, if you've got $48...

you can now get nearly immediate access to 20 machines for 24 hours, each with something a like a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. This is made possible by Amazon's new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The $48 figure is relatively arbitrary. I picked it because you apparently need to get some sort of authorization to fire up more than 20 simultaneous instances. Amazon is charging $0.10 per instance hour. So, 20 instances x $0.10 instance/hour x 24 hours is $48. I'm not accounting for bandwidth charges, but the point is that you can get some serious computing done for not much money—or effort.

A few weeks ago at a dinner that I should have blogged but didn't, Jeff Haynie was talking about how surprised he was at how cheap dedicated hosting was. Jeff was quoting some GoDaddy prices, and they were pretty compelling. This EC2 thing, though, takes it to another level—particularly because of its elasticity. Let's say you want to do some web crawling, for example. All of a sudden, you can have 100 machines go to work for 10 hours for about $100 (plus bandwidth charges). That is pretty cool.

I haven't been able to play with EC2 directly, yet. The beta program was filled by the time I got there. Jesse Andrews did get in in time and has both written an article on Exploring Amazon EC2 and fired up a Rails app on an EC2 instance.

Microsoft and Vocalocity in the news

spkydog beat me to it, but I thought I'd also point to Microsoft's announcement today that Speech Server 2007 will support VoiceXML.

This is exciting news for the VoiceXML community. It is particularly exciting for Vocalocity, as we licensed some of our technology and worked with Microsoft to develop their standards-compliant implementation of VoiceXML for Speech Server 2007.

More information and comments from both Microsoft and our CEO, Mike Dickerson, on the agreement can be found in our press release:

Vocalocity Announces Strategic Licensing Agreement with Microsoft

And so it begins...

TY: Robot demonstrates self awareness, ability to find Sarah Connor

Seriously, though, I think there is a long way to go, yet.

Google Maps on your cell phone

A little late posting this, but in case you missed it, Google has released Local for mobile^{beta(of course)}.

Looks pretty nice. The Treo isn't supported, yet, but you can install via the Other/Generic/Advanced MIDP2 path. You'll need the WebSphere Everyplace JVM first. I've gotten it loaded on my Treo 600, and it works—sort of. I've been able to get maps of a location, but it locks up every time I try to get directions.

So, KMaps is still your best bet for Google Maps on your Treo. It is more stable, and it is doing more interesting location-based stuff, too. I've heard rumors that Ivan may have more time to devote to it soon, too, so it should be a horse race.

Off to NYC for DIDW/FS

Umm, that's Digital Identity World/Financial Services. I'm heading up tonight. A lot of big players in financial services will be talking. Frankly, I'm more interested in what federated identity can do for smaller financial services companies, but I'll be interested in hearing what the big guys are doing.

I'll try to blog as I go, but I'm not promising anything.

Ning

So a while back there was some hubbub about 24 Hour Laundry. Marc Andreesen was behind it. What could it be?

Well, it turns out that it was/is Ning. A really boring description of it would be "a free hosting service for a certain style of PHP application". I think it is far more interesting than that, though. IMO, there are two really interesting things about Ning.

The first is the Ning Content Store. This is where Ning apps will store most data. I can't tell what it is underneath, but it presents the API of an unstructured store of Content Objects. These content objects have a few Ning-defined attributes: type, title, description, ID, public/private bit, and a few others. Type is an arbitrary string, but it is set for the lifetime of the object. ID is an opaque universal ID. Beyond these system attributes, developers are free to add whatever other attributes they would like to their content. What is most interesting about the content store, though, is that any public content objects are accessible to any Ning application—not just to the application that created them. Ning's various pet example apps are the best way to get a feel for the implications of this. There are separate apps for beagles and bulldogs and mutts, but Ningpets can show content from them all—and from any other similar apps created in the future.

The second is related to the first, and it is the inbuilt ability to view source and clone Ning apps. Both of these features require Ning developer status (which I'm in the queue for). I think they are the real genius of Ning, in that they bring what made web pages great to Ning apps. I mean, how did everyone start making web pages? Was it by reading all the specs and then starting from scratch? No, it was by copying a page they liked and modifying it. Ning seems to enable that for Ning apps. Moreover, a cloned Ning app will by default add content compatible with its fellow clones to the Ning content store.

I may write more later. I've been playing around a bit, but I'm really waiting on my developer status to dig in.

SiliconBeat has a good post in Andreessen's Ning unveiled. Marc even responds to some questions in the comments for the same.

Subways and the Singularity

Been reading and talking with Jeff about the Singularity a lot recently. Steve Dekorte's On The Singularity post helped give me back some perspective:

After having seen several singularity talks, what stands out to me most is the selectiveness in what they choose to plot. For example, if we plotted speed for commuter travel, we'd see that this exponent rule doesn't hold.

...

Hyperbolic tangents look a lot like exponentials, until you pass the inflection point.

I'll save you the clicks. Here are the graphs: