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Speaking at 'The Startup Project' Wednesday
I should have posted this awhile ago. I suck. I’m sorry.
Anyway, I’m speaking at The Startup Project, an Amazon and Kleiner-Perkins event tomorrow in the Silicon Valley. I’ll be talking a little bit about S3, EC2, and FPS, the three announced Amazon Web Services we’re most excited about.
There’ll be a Q&A, and I’m happy to stick around after and answer questions about AWS or anything else under the sun, too, if you have any.
See ya there! RSVPs are required, I believe.
(On a related note, I blew it this year and spoke at and attended too many events. In 2008, I’ll be going to far fewer conferences and will be very selective of the ones I speak at, so if you think I’d be a good fit with your event, ask earlier rather than later please)
Apple does the right thing – but no SDK? :(
Apple made a brilliant move today that’ll earn them lots of happy customers as well as lots of free press coverage. Everyone wins.
However, I’m with Scoble: Take my $1400 credit back, Apple, and instead release an SDK. SmugMug’s iPhone interface is totally awesome – about as good as it can possibly get in-browser. With an SDK, though, I promise – we’ll make the best mobile photo sharing app the world has ever seen. And guess what? It’ll help you sell even more phones.
So how about it?
Free idea for anyone who’s got a little time on their hands: Set up a site where those of us with rebates can “pledge” our $100 credits towards an SDK instead. Who knows? Maybe something will come of it with enough pledges.
LunchGeeks Tomorrow (Aug 30th)!
Wanna come geek out over the best Mexican food in Silicon Valley? LunchGeeks is on tomorrow. Sorry for the late notice – almost didn’t realize August was over until the Wall Street Journal mentioned us today.
Here’s the Upcoming event. Add yourself at Upcoming, on the LunchGeeks blog, or right here so I know if you’re coming.
I promise I’ll try to give more notice for September. 🙂
Finally! Flash supports H.264 video!
I fell asleep last night dreaming about all the neat things we can finally do with Flash because Adobe now supports H.264 video with AAC audio! Lots of great tech details here.
I think it’s safe to say that everyone building web apps said “wtf?!” when Flash 9 shipped without H.264 support, and we all said “WTF!?” when Microsoft shipped Silverlight without it, too. I mean, come on! We finally have an industry standard that’s efficient, used basically everywhere but on web pages, and neither the leader (Flash) nor the upstart (Silverlight) thought to include support, opting for expensive proprietary encoding formats instead? Talk about dumb.
Silverlight, especially, is a head-scratcher. Silverlight 1.0 is focused almost entirely on video, including HD, and clearly gunning for Flash. So why wouldn’t they go right for Flash’s big Achilles heel – no H.264 support?
Oh well – that opportunity is now lost, and I believe this basically nails Silverlight 1.0’s coffin shut. (The bad Mac installation process had nearly done this for us already) Sad, because I had high hopes for how beneficial strong competition would be for those of us building Rich Internet Apps.
Adobe deserves lots of kudos for actually listening to their customers and doing what we want. Honestly, I never thought this day would come. Finally, we can all encode video without expensive closed-source Windows-only encoders. You can’t imagine how limiting that is unless you’re in the trenches, but mark my words:
You’re going to see a massive boom in the online video space shortly. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Where's the Mac?
Have you been to a tech conference lately? They’re dominated, absolutely dominated, by MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Their employers are happy to buy them because they’re fast, reliable and productive. I know I love mine. But ask any of those happy MacBook-toting people what they have on their desks at work, and they’ll admit to having a Dell.
So I found it interesting that at Apple’s big Mac event yesterday, Apple blew it with the Mac again. Steve fielded some questions about Mac adoption in the workplace, and another about price. But he skirts completely around the issue at hand: Apple has a huge, gaping hole in their desktop lineup. They have an iMac, a Mac mini, and a Mac Pro. But where’s the Mac?
At SmugMug, we’d put a Mac on every employee’s desk tomorrow. So what exactly is a Mac? That’s easy – it’s a Mac Pro with one dual-core Desktop class Intel CPU in it. Two (or four!) Server class dual-core CPUs (Xeons) are overkill both for performance and for budgets. I know – we’ve got some at our office, and I’m writing this on my Mac Pro at home.
Why not just use iMacs? Please. No business is going to buy desktop computers that require you to throw the display out when the CPU/RAM/etc get old. Displays last multiple generations of CPUs, particularly in the workplace.
Why not use Mac minis? Man, I wish! I love the little guys. But our employees, especially those writing code or doing lots of Photoshop work, are more productive with dual-displays. (Dual 30″ displays, if you really want to know). The Mac mini can only drive one, and not even the 30″ models. (You’d think Apple would want to drive sales of those 30″ displays, but I guess not?). So 2 x dual-link DVI is a requirement, and it’s a lot more common than you might think. Been to Google lately?
Also, like many IT departments in this day-and-age of cheap hard disks, we like to do RAID-1 on our employee’s desktops to reduce data loss. Mac OS X does great RAID-1 out-of-the-box, if only there were desktop computers to run it on…
So we need a Mac. Something like $500-1000 cheaper than a Mac Pro, powerful enough for most employees, and flexible enough for most jobs. Perfection – not to mention completing Apple’s lineup.
Oh, and when I talk to those same tech conference attendees (or their bosses!), I hear the same sad story. We’re all forced to head on over to dell.com to fill the void instead – or pony up extra for Mac Pros that we really don’t need.
Guess which option most employers choose. 😦
UPDATE: Lots of comments all over the web on this story and how it’s not just for the workplace. Complaints about poor graphics cards in iMac/Mac mini making gaming impossible, people upset that they’d have to throw away their iMac monitor along with the CPU, etc. As a hard-core gamer, I have to agree – the gap is wider than just work machines. I’d rather have a Mac than a Mac Pro at home, too.
Feed readers: Digg this story
Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS)
To answer the questions, yes, we’re definitely going to be using FPS in a big way (millions of dollars per year) shortly. We aren’t, though, going to be using the part that all the press are talking about – the so-called ‘PayPal killer’. We don’t talk about un-released features at SmugMug, so I’m afraid I have to leave it at that – but feel free to speculate. 🙂
On a personal note, I’m really excited about FPS because, like many, I hate PayPal. When we were getting SmugMug off the ground, I was interested in using PayPal either as our main payment option, or at least as an alternative. Their developer support was terrible, though, and the ability to do big batches was apparently nonexistent. I even knew people over there, and they’d just shrug with a ‘what can you do?’ look on their faces when I’d ask them if we could use their stuff.
Definitely not Amazon’s approach. 🙂
UPDATE: Apparently I was too abstract in my initial post about how we’d be using it, so here’s a quick clarification. We’re not going to use FPS to enable you to signup for SmugMug service or buy prints & gifts using FPS. We have something else in mind. 🙂
Why not use FPS (or PayPal, for that matter) for signup & purchase, you might ask. Our answer is that we’re not totally comfortable passing customers along to a UI we don’t control and isn’t branded at such a crucial point in our monetization process. The establishment of brand, and even more specifically, trust in that brand, is extremely important to us. These are people’s priceless photos, afterall, and we want to be clear on who’s taking care of them. It’s entirely possible we’re shooting ourselves in the foot with this stance, but that’s our prerogative.
More SmugMug on iPhone
When I’m not busy screaming at my iPhone because it’s hard to sync with my LOST episodes, I’m busy rolling out new SmugMug features specifically for iPhone with the help of GreenJimmy and BigWebGuy. Here ya go:
- Global SmugMug interface now. You can search & browse through the entire SmugMug site using iPhone, not just individual homepages.
- Added search to both the global and user interfaces.
- Added Friends & Family links so you can easily browse through your social network and that of your friends and their friends and….
- Added a Keywords browsing interface. I’m not really happy with it, so I think we’ll keep playing, but traditional keyword clouds don’t work well with finger tips on this small of a screen, so we’ll have to get creative. Ideas in the comments, please?
- Spiffy UI improvements to make things look nicer and feel faster.
- Fixed a rotation bug where the images wouldn’t properly re-render.
Enjoy. I know I am. 🙂
Stupid iPhone!@#$
Ok, love my iPhone, but that just means that when it lets me down, I’m even more upset. Passion’s funny that way. Here we go:
- Bought a season pass to LOST on iTunes Music Store so I can catch up.
- Loving watching it on my AppleTV in my home theater.
- Want to sync episodes to my iPhone to watch on-the-go. I’ve watched up to episode 16.
- Selected “All unwatched” and hit Sync.
- “Not enough space” error. Fair enough, it’s only 8GB.
- Selected “3 most recent unwatched” and hit Sync.
- Ended up with Episodes 24, 23, and 22!
- Realized “Most recent” is useless because what you really want is “Next in line by episode #”
- Realized that there’s absolutely no way to get episodes 16, 17, and 18 onto my iPhone short of manually editing playlists, which gets really tedious.
- Blogged about it, because it’s the only way I can vent.
Basically, you can’t watch TV on the thing. Because you can’t drag shows to it (like you can with an iPod), you can’t sync them (because it sync’s them in wrong order), and it doesn’t have enough storage to “Sync All”. Even Smart Playlists don’t work, because you can’t have a formula that orders by episode #.
Isn’t this stuff supposed to *slurping noise* Just Work?
Has anyone smarter than I thought of a solution? Please share!
UPDATE: The magic Smart Playlist recipe to make this behave, thanks to reader Nick T, is as follows:
- Show is ‘LOST’
- Play Count is ‘0’
- Limit to 3 items selected by album
Still not great, but much improved. Thanks Nick!
Datacenter love: Equinix
I write a lot about products and companies that have potential, but aren’t quite perfect, like Amazon Unbox on TiVo and lots of Sun stuff. But this week’s outage at 365 Main, a datacenter in San Francisco (which we don’t use), reminded me that there are a few products and companies we love that I don’t say nearly enough about. So I’ll start with our datacenter, Equinix, and try to post about some of the others, too.
SmugMug got its start with 3 old used VA Linux boxes (dual 700mhz Pentium 3s with 2GB of RAM which are still in production today and have been our most reliable boxes) from a dead dotcom, which we threw into a friend’s cheap rack at Hurricane Electric. Once the money started flowing in, and we ran into HE’s power contraints and poor bandwidth, we hunted around for datacenter space. Equinix had the very best reputation among the Operations crowd here in Silicon Valley, so we gave them a shot and pulled out of Hurricane Electric.
I should warn you up front that there’s a little “sticker shock” when you first talk with Equinix (ok, and every time you need to buy more stuff from them, it returns), but in the end, it’s well worth it. It turns out that in life, some things are worth paying for. Datacenter space is certainly one of those things (and we feel like photo sharing is too!).
In the ~4 years we’ve been with Equinix, we’ve had only one major problem: They sold our power out from under us (to Yahoo) which forced us to move from one of their locations to another. Ugh. Datacenter moves, especially with hundreds of terabytes of disks, really suck. Luckily, thanks to decent system architecture and some magic from Amazon S3, we were able to do 99% of our move during normal business hours over the course of a month with no impact on our users.
In all fairness to Equinix (though this is no excuse), they weren’t the only datacenter that had poorly prepared for the ‘Power is King’ change in the datacenter landscape that happened a few years back. Plenty of other companies with other providers tell me the same story, so we’re not alone. Datacenters all over the place used to sell you mostly based on space (square footage) rather than power (watts). They all got burned when CPU and server vendors started getting really fast & dense gear. Nowadays, almost the entire negotiation is regarding power and everyone has empty dead space in their rented cages. Such is life.
On the bright side, everything else about Equinix rocks:
- Power. I’m surprised to hear all of the horror stories out of 365 Main because I assumed they were as good as Equinix has been for us. We haven’t had a single power-related outage in all of the years we’ve been there. It just works – and it’d better, that’s the biggest reason we use a datacenter.
- Metro cross-connects. If you’re hosted in multiple Equinix datacenters in a single metro area, like we are, you can get cheap (a few hundred bucks per month) GigE cross-connects wired between your various locations.
- Support. I’m still surprised every time we need to use Equinix’s support staff and they’re actually super-knowledgeable and helpful. I’m talking about hardcore networking and routing questions. BGP, whatever, you name it – they know it. Better than we do.
- Equinix Direct. I’m always surprised when I talk to other Equinix customers who don’t know about this gem. It’s a way to provision your IP transit providers on a month-by-month basis with no minimum commits or contracts. You pick your providers and pay-as-you-go. Pretty sweet. We’re already directly multi-homed on GigE with multiple providers, but we mix in Equinix Direct to have access to still more. Best thing? ED doesn’t add an extra BGP hop, so your routes still look fast (as opposed to someone like InterNAP who adds an extra BGP hop to do similar stuff).
- Security. 5 biometric scanners are between you and your cage when you enter the building, with live security on hand 24/7. Stuff like this is fairly common at high-end datacenters, but it’s important, so I’m mentioning it anyway.
- Bandwidth providers. Equinix is a carrier-neutral facility, and basically everyone has connectivity there, so you can easily pick whomever you’d like to carry your traffic.
Of course, they do all of the other myriad things a datacenter is supposed to do. One of the reasons I haven’t blogged about them in the past is because they just work – and they work so well, I just don’t spend much time thinking about them.
Which, of course, is the way it’s supposed to be. 🙂
(Now, of course, I’ve jinxed the whole thing like Red Envelope and our datacenters are going to explode in a Martian Invasion. Sorry about that!)
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 