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Web 2.0 Summit: Launch Pad
I’m at the Web 2.0 Summit and watching the Launch Pad demos where new startups get a chance to show off their hot new stuff. Most of last year’s launch pad don’t seem to have changed the world (yet?). Be interesting to see what this year’s crop is up to:
First up, In The Chair is some hot music education software. It lets you put yourself into the rest of an orchestra, see the other instruments playing, and hear how you mesh up. Seems like a great way to practice your music.
Next, Instructables has a new offering for collaboration. People can share their projects, how they built them, and how you can do the same with everyone else on the web. Seems great for hobbyists and hackers alike.
Klostu (“close to”) is doing something neat with message boards. They’re trying to build a super-social network. They’re hoping to connect all of the message boards together into one big network. Very interesting proposition – I’m often tempted to post on boards I lurk on, but the signup process is so laborious, I usually don’t. Searching, keeping track of conversations, etc across multiple boards. Works with Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc. (I assume SmugMug, but if not, someone should email them. 🙂 ) They claim their reach is 300M people. Could be pretty huge.
Sharpcast isn’t technically a new launch, since they launched at the D Conference in May, but they’re interesting. They make it super-simple to synchonize your photos (and other data) between your PCs, your online experience, and your mobile devices. The interface is clean, fast, and efficient. They claim that it’s taken them years to write the technology, but I seem to recall some applications built on SmugMug’s API that do similar things, so I may be missing something.
Their big announcement here at Web 2.0 is codenamed “Project Hummingbird” which basically does the same thing for non-photo data, like documents. When you edit a document on one of your PCs and save it, it gets auto-sychronized with the web version and other clients you’d like to sync. I’m not totally clear on how this is different from FolderShare, which I use and love, but I’m sure they’ll explain it at some point. Or maybe not – their pitch is over.
Stikkit is web-based note taking. I’m dying for for a good service like this – but alas, I’ve tried dozens of apps and web services that have all let me down. Hopefully this one won’t. It’s web-based, so you can collaborate easily with the people in your life. It’s available anywhere you are, like reminders on your mobile device, access on your laptop, etc. Their organization mechanism makes sense, and works well with “messy data”. It doesn’t try to do AI or anything to get in your way, which is nice. Post-Its are messy and dumb and work fine. This is trying to do the web-version: just getting things done.
Turn is trying to apply “search-like” technology to online advertising. They maintain there’s no manual targetting or keywords at all – it’s fully automatic. You go to Turn and set your goals, say $10 per signup. You then upload your ads. Turn analyzes the ads, your website, and everything else they can using online sources. When ad requests come in from destination sites, they analyze the request and see if it matches your ads, company, product, or brand. If they determine that there’s a good probability of a match, they compare bid price to the probability to decide whether to serve the ad. Sounds incredibly interesting.
Sphere, which I believe I heard about a year ago, is YABSE (Yet Another Blog Search Engine). Their twist is that they now are working with mainstream media to integrate blogs with traditional articles. When you’re reading a MarketWatch article, for example, there’s now a link to read related blog entries. It analyzes the article you’re reading, searches their blog index, and provides results. It also shows related articles throughout the rest of MarketWatch, too. It’s sorta like a localized immediate version of TechMeme or TailRank, and I’ve been wondering when the big newspapers, magazines, and media websites would do something like this. Sphere says it’s one line of JavaScript to drop onto your pages. You can customize the look & feel to make it match your look & feel, too. Very cool – I’m a huge fan of TailRank and TechMeme and would love to have the blog content brought one step closer, right into my favorite articles.
OmniDrive is an online storage aggregator. This is something that’s been on my mind a lot since S3 launched, since I’d love to have most of my storage “in the cloud” where I can get to it from anywhere. A buddy of mine wrote Jungle Disk, which is very cool, using S3. I wouldn’t be surprised if OmniDrive is also using S3, but they haven’t said. The big idea is that your stuff, whether it’s your documents, photos, videos, music, whatever is normally “stuck” on your PC where you can’t get at it if you’re somewhere else. It’s also prone to loss, since your PC could crash or get infected with a virus or something. Using OmniDrive, you can get that data from anywhere. OmniDrive seems like most of the other online storage providers that have been around for awhile, and plenty more are cropping up now. I’m not sure what’s unique about their offering – their pitch sounded very similar to existing services. Nonetheless, it’s something that everyone wants, whether they realize it or not. Personally, I’m afraid things like Time Machine in Leopard are going to obsolete stuff like this, if Apple (and Microsoft) start linking to things like dot Mac, LiveDrive, or S3 for storage.
ADiFY enables small, focus groups to create their own ad networks online. You can build your own newtork, invite and recruit publishers, and sell ads on your new network. The big play here is that you can build networks which are highly specific for a given target demographic, and thus the ads that are run there will be more lucrative because they’re so targeted. Their target networks are passionate enthusiast communities, something we know a lot about here at SmugMug. 🙂 Sounds powerful.
3B is attempting to build a 3D interface to web browsing. This is something of a pet passion of mine, having spent a few years in the video game industry. Unfortunately, their interface isn’t pretty and seems quite slow. Clicking is so efficient, it’s tough to match with an avatar that “walks” through a 3D world made up of your web pages. Maybe if the renderer was a little heavier duty, with nice art and modern shaders, it’d help – but I doubt it. The UI being fast and seamless is so crucial. 3B is the latest in a long line of companies that have tried to do things like this, and I’m afraid they’ll join the junk heap soon enough. Too bad – I’d love to see a serious, good attempt at using 3D graphics to create a richer interface, rather than a lesser one.
oDesk lets you quickly find and hire talented developers (something that’s difficult and of personal interest to us). It’s a global model, so you can hire people from all over the world. All the programmers are tested and screened, and you can see what their test scores are. Posting jobs, interviewing applicants, etc all seems fast and seamless. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl for our open developer position.
Venyo is a univeral reputation tool for bloggers to use. Turns out that people don’t really trust blogs as a realiable source of information. So Venyo is basically doing the eBay seller / buying ratings for bloggers. You can establish a Venyo reputation and other users can verify that you’re a reputable blogger. If Venyo, or something like it, can establish a toehold and a brand, it could easily become a big factor in blog search engines. I’m not clear, though, on exactly how this establishes that your information is good, rather than your information is popular. It’s pretty obvious that the two are often at odds. I suppose we’ll all have to play with it to find out.
I was hoping TimeBridge was going to finally solve the Outlook problem. (As in “I hate Outlook and Exchange Server, but it’s really the only good group meeting organizer. Where are the open-source and/or web-accessible alternatives already?!”). Unfortunately, it’s not. What it is, though, is a method to have TimeBridge handle all of the back-and-forth communication for scheduling meetings using Outlook. Instead of lots of back-and-forth over times, locations, etc, it collects everyones available options and semi-automatically sets up the best possible fit. Sounds great, if you use Outlook, but we don’t. Dang.
These were 5 minute pitches, so who knows how good or fully fleshed they are. But, still, let’s make some bets, shall we? Big potential: Klostu, Stikkit, Sphere, and Turn.
UPDATE: Richard McManus has a brief rundown of his impressions, and we clearly got different impressions of 3B. Might wanna check it out. 🙂
Michael Arrington also has his thoughts up at TechCrunch. He seems to lean more in my direction with 3B, so maybe it’s a taste preference thing. *shrug*
Amazon + Two Guys + $0 = Next YouTube
The next YouTube will be built on Amazon’s Web Services by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0.
BusinessWeek has an article up about Amazon’s push into web services. GigaOM’s got a little coverage, and I see it spreading a bit over on TechMeme and TailRank.
We’re in the article, since we’re a big believer in this “new” vision of Amazon’s. Amazon calls the stuff they’re exposing the “muck” of doing business online, and I think it’s a perfect term. Some people see this as some radical departure from Amazon’s core business, but I don’t at all. Just like much of Amazon’s business, it’s an evolution. They began as a bookstore online (no-one remembers this, but they weren’t the first. BookStacks was relatively huge when Amazon launched), and eventually evolved by adding more and more products. They sell nearly everything, including groceries, now.
Why? Because once they had some of the infrastructure built to sell books, it made sense to add DVDs and CDs. And then once that was built, it made sense to add electronics and video games and gardening supplies and everything else under the sun. Why? Because they had even more infrastructure built. The average person doesn’t appreciate just how difficult the fulfillment piece of Amazon is, from warehousing, inventory control, packing, and shipping, but those who do boggle both at how difficult it is and at how well they do it. May as well leverage that expertise across other product lines where it makes sense, right?
Along the way, they also happened to get extremely good at systems. My father co-founded and successfully ran a direct competitor to Amazon, fatbrain.com, so we got a good, close look at just how good they were. While eBay was having massive outages, Amazon continued to purr along, scaling well and fast. When Toys R Us had a disastrous holiday season one year because they couldn’t scale their systems, who did they call? That’s right, Amazon.
I don’t have any direct knowledge of the chain of events, but I’ll bet it was something like that which caused the initial light bulb to start glowing. Dimly, at first, but glowing none-the-less. The thought process probably went something like this: “Hmm, you know, this letting other businesses like Target, Borders, and Toys R Us build their businesses on ours is turning out to be a good deal. It leverages our existing infrastructure and knowledge to grow our sales. I wonder how we can let other businesses build and grow on ours?”
Enter Amazon Web Services, zShops, Marketplace, and the other programs to let people sell things on Amazon without actually being a part of Amazon. The first Web Service, E-Commerce Services (ECS), allowed anyone to build their own shop online, using their own URL and look-and-feel to sell, say, TVs. But Amazon would handle all the nasty bits of the process, like actually acquiring and shipping the TVs. To use their terminology again, the “muck” of running an online retailer was taken out of the equation – the online TV shop could focus on customer acquisition rather than fulfillment headaches.
From there, it’s really a fairly small step, rather than a giant leap, for Amazon to say “Hey, we really like people building their businesses on ours. What else do we have hiding around here that would help businesses out?” And it turns out the answer revolves around their other core knowledge and infrastructure investment: datacenters, storage, and servers. Just like physical fulfillment, Amazon is one of the few truly experienced web-scale companies in the world. And just like physical fulfillment, the more volume you do, the more efficient you can get and the more you can lower costs. (Assuming you’re talented, that is, which is a large assumption).
As Amazon ships more items, they get better shipping rates. As they buy more bandwidth, they get better bandwidth rates. And that doesn’t even take into account the knowledge, software, and other intangibles that continue to get more precise as they scale, both in their warehouses and their datacenters.
It’s sorta silly that some of this stuff hasn’t become a commodity already. I think if you took a close look at how SmugMug has built and scaled, say, storage and how Flickr or YouTube or any other recent startup has, you’d see we’ve all done it in remarkably similar fashions. We’re all re-inventing and re-building the same wheel, over and over again. And it’s expensive, time consuming, and not core to our value proposition – except that without it, we can’t build our business. In other words, it’s “muck.”
At SmugMug, we want to focus on the customer experience, from user interface to customer service, and not have to worry about storage. For us, it’s a necessary evil that detracts from our ability to deliver better features faster. We’re actively investigating plenty of other web services at Amazon, both announced and otherwise, and are extremely excited about how much more time we’ll be able to spend with our customers instead of our datacenters.
Finally, I think it’s worth mentioning that we love web services of all shapes and sizes. We publish our own API, we consume web services from Google and Yahoo already, and we plan to add more to the mix. But while everyone else’s web services allow us to add whizzy features, like Google Maps, or Yahoo’s Geocoder, Amazon’s solve real hard problems down deep where no-one will notice them. The “muck.”
They’re really building the very foundation of future web applications.
Quickies: Hack Day, Sun T1000, Amazon S3
Really quick…
Yahoo! Hack Day
SmugMug was in the house at Hack Day 2006, and we had a great time! Many thanks to Yahoo for putting on such a great event – we learned a lot about Yahoo technologies and put together a great demo. Anytime they want to throw another one, we’ll be there. Fantastic group of people over at Yahoo.
Best part about it is that our demo will shortly be a shipping product our customers will love and that’ll generate extra revenue for our company. Oh, and BigWebGuy got his official hazing there at Hack Day – he coded for 36 hours straight (no sleep!) his first week on the job even though he was sick! Welcome to the family, Lee!
Sun T1000
The Sun T1000 is very much still on our radar. I don’t want to do an in-depth update until we’re absolutely sure about what’s going on, but here’s a short summary of where we are.
I spent 5 hours over at Sun a few days after our initial results were posted with some very intelligent people. They were as perplexed at the results as I was, and were determined to get to the bottom of it. The good news is we now have a T1000 running Solaris side-by-side with a T1000 running Ubuntu which is side-by-side with our dual dual-core Opteron running Red Hat. The bad news is the Sun guys weren’t able to coax any more performance (yet!) out of the T1000.
We have a theory that we might be saturating the GigE port with raw # of interrupts per second, so it’s getting throttled there and starving the CPUs. So we have a gameplan for what to attack next – I’ve just been too swamped to deal with it for the last few weeks. We’ll get to it, though, I promise and I’ll share all the details.
Amazon S3
I still haven’t posted the in-depth technical details and code samples I promised about our use of Amazon S3, but fear not – I’m actively working on it and will post it as soon as it’s done.
Just wanted you to know I hadn’t forgotten about you. 🙂
Incidentally, Jeremy Zawodny is playing around with using it for his personal backup storage. Sounds sweet!
Shutterfly buying SmugMug? Say it ain't so!
It ain’t so.
Some of our customers are worried that we might be selling, based on Bambi Francisco’s latest newsletter at MarketWatch.
Bambi is a great journalist, and I’m flattered that we’re on her radar, but I’m afraid we’re not for sale.
We love our business, we love our customers, and we love the people we work with. Not only that, but it pays the bills – we’re profitable, with no debt and no investors! Why mess with a good thing?
Besides, I’m still trying to wrap my head around why anyone would want to invest in Shutterfly in the first place. Alan Meckler, CEO of JupiterMedia, has a write-up that resonated with me. Let’s take a quick look at their business (I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t really paid that much attention to the whole thing, being buried in our own business, so fact-check my stuff before quoting me):
- Devoured a massive (I believe >$100MM over multiple rounds) investment.
- Has trouble turning a profit ($24M of their $28M last year was apparently a one-time tax benefit)
- Incredibly competitive marketplace, complete with a nasty price war ($0.12 4×6 prints) and deep-pocketed competitors (Kodak and HP)
- First quarter loss increased by nearly 2.5X this year compared to last year
- HP’s Snapfish seems to have the best product, marketing, and awareness in the online photo printing space. (In other words, they seem to be winning)
We’re small, fun, happy, and profitable. Best of all, our customers love us. Does it get any better than this?
Flickr doesn't suck.
Kord Campbell, CEO of Zoto.com, seems to think Flickr sucks. It doesn’t. His point is that the rest of us didn’t get enough credit when Flickr finally introduced geotagging. He mentions that Zoto, SmugMug, and Zooomr have had geotagging for years. He’s right, but who cares?
The Flickr wannabees are always screaming about how they don’t get any recognition and that Flickr steals all the press. One of the Webshots founders recently said ‘Pound for pound [Flickr] is certainly the greatest PR machine in net history.’ That’s very true, but again, so what?
Flickr isn’t even the market leader (Webshots is, and Yahoo! Photos is much larger even at Yahoo), but they’re still an incredibly cool site with a very low barrier to entry – no fees, simple signup, and a great community.
The press and people who don’t really understand business always latch on to a market leader or a company with a ton of momentum and declare victory. Remember when Google couldn’t get any respect because AltaVista had “won” the search engine wars? What’s their market cap? Remember when fatbrain.com was dismissed because Amazon owned bookselling online? So how’d they become a $100M-in-sales, profitable company? For decades, pundits have been speculating that one of the car companies will own the market and we’ll all drive the same make.
It’s not gonna happen. There’s plenty of room for everyone to play – you just have to find your market, find your business model, and go for it. Google’s approach was anti-portal with a little PageRank mixed in. fatbrain.com went after the technical and business market, and provided in-house bookstores for the likes of IBM and Sun. And duh, we’d not all driving the same car. There’s room for BMW alongside Toyota.
At SmugMug, we have a lot of respect for Flickr and what they’ve been able to achieve. They deserve all the credit in the world. Personally, I wish their innovation rate hadn’t slowed way down when they got acquired by Yahoo – but I can’t think of a single ‘large company buys small company’ event that hasn’t caused that. Can you?
We have no desire to play in Flickr’s market, and never have. It costs money to use SmugMug – we have no free offering. We launched years before Flickr did, and we were profitable before Flickr even entered the market. We still are. We have a very different approach to the business and to our customers than Flickr does. Does that mean Flickr’s wrong and we’re right? Of course not. Do we wish we got more press coverage? Of course we do, every company does. But we’ll buckle down and earn it.
Companies triumph over market leaders all the time. They do it by innovating and executing brilliantly. If Flickr is stealing your customers or your press, it’s your own fault. Victory is there for the taking – but I think the first thing to do is to acknowledge that your competition doesn’t suck. Once you realize they’re talented and aggressive, you can fight them on their own turf.
Take a peek inside our datacenters
Our customers often ask us what sort of hardware we use. I’ve meant to put up a page detailing all of the stuff we love (like Apple’s XServe RAID arrays and Rackable servers), but I’m a big procrastinator. 🙂
In the meantime, you can watch a video of me describing a portion of our storage infrastructure here, both our physical local storage, and little bit about Amazon’s S3.
Also on CNet is a video interview we set up with Equinix, the people who provide our datacenter space, power and cooling.
Take a peek inside, see what you think.
It's about time, Flickr
The news broke on TechCrunch first, but it’s now over on the FlickrBlog: Flickr has finally added real geography support. I guess the only real question is – why on earth did it take so long?
I’ve only spent a few minutes playing with it, but it’s really good so far. They did a nice job with the interface, especially “clustering” photos together as you zoom in and out.
I’m excited about this. Our customers have been enjoying geotagging support for more than a year (see Tim’s post about it), and I know Zooomr’s had good support for awhile, too. But Flickr has lot more market share, mind share, and PR leverage than the rest of us do, so hopefully this will get camera manufacturers to get on the ball and make this a standard checklist feature. Let’s hope so.
foo, nofoo, barcamp
I wasn’t invited to foo camp this year – and that’s a good thing.
I attend quite a few conferences each year, and wish I had a lot of time to attend even more. Half of them match up with the ‘Chief Geek’ half of my title, like MySQL UC and OSCON, and the others fall into the ‘CEO’ half of my title, like D and Web 2.0 (though I can’t for the life of me seem to get an invitation to Web 2.0 this year, despite being a previous attendee and a Web 2.0 CEO. Other people at SmugMug have, though. Go figure.).
But foo camp is the best there is. I learn more in the two days at foo than any two months the rest of the year combined. It’s like mind-melding with super-brilliant people and having your brain sucked while you’re sucking theirs. Not to mention the best Werewolf games I’ve ever played. 🙂
Over the weekend, there were some alternatives to foo in the area. Scoble had his nofoo fireside chat at the Ritz (you can read more about our discussions) which was a ton of fun, and easily had the best view. But it wasn’t foo.
On Sunday morning, I stopped by BarCamp Stanford for a few hours, and there was some interesting stuff going on there. One Stanford student showed us his HCI work with the Staples button which was fascinating, and someone from Yahoo showed us a really cool search widget using JSON. But it wasn’t foo.
And it finally dawned on me why foo is so excellent and so difficult to replicate. It’s because Tim & Co. apply a filter to those who are invited. Now, before your hair catches on fire, I’m not talking about a quality filter – there were clearly quality people at both nofoo and barcamp. I’m talking about a diversity filter.
At foo, it’s not all Web 2.0 geeks. You’re eating dinner that first night with one of the guys on the original US spy satellite program to snoop on the Soviets – and he’s got photos, diagrams, and details of exactly how the cameras worked, how they’d get the film back, and how they’d get it developed. During the Geodata & Geomapping session, it’s not just Google Maps mashup artists like us – there are hardware guys asking the mashup guys what they’d like to see next year, and whipping out prototype GPS chips that can be embedded in anything. One session you learn about bioengineering and the state of getting your own chunk of DNA printed. The next, you’re watching someone show off their chocolate printer. Yes, we went from printing DNA to printing chocolate.
The point is that foo is diverse and unique. They intentionally don’t invite the same people every year for this very reason (see? I really am glad I didn’t get invited this year). With completely open-ended things, like nofoo and barcamp, I’m afraid it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Web geeks show up because they read blogs and heard other web geeks were going to be there. Rinse, lather, repeat.
(I think it’s only fair at this point to mention that foo and its diversity does have its fair share of problems. The O’Reilly team puts this on for free for us every year, so I’m happy to help put chairs away, clean up trash, etc for a few hours every Sunday afternoon. So are quite a few other campers. But there’s a large contingent that just sits on the porch chatting away, watching the O’Reilly team lug stuff around. Seems rather rude if you’re really ‘friends’ of O’Reilly. I have a feeling everyone at BarCamp pitched in and cleaned up together.)
I’ve become a big fan of applying non-standard thinking to a given problem. Freakonomics applied economic thinking to (at least on the surface) non-economic problems – with fascinating results. The Culture Code does the same thing – applying psychology to marketing with amazing results. foo is like that – the application of brilliant, non-standard thinking from people who are not experts in your field is enlightening.
Scoble @ The Ritz
My wife and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary (and first overnighter away from the twins!) last weekend. During lunch on Saturday, I spied a Google hat across the room and recognized the face beneath – Robert Scoble. I don’t know how we kept passing in the night at tech conferences, but we’d never met. I ambled on over and introduced myself and met Jeremy Wright as well.
You never know what to expect when you meet high-profile geek bloggers (I’ve been disappointed by more than a few), but I gotta tell you, Scoble is The Real Deal – a truly nice guy. Nice guys are rarer than they should be in the Valley, but Scoble was warm, friendly, funny and personable. Later that afternoon, while my wife caught some Zs, we had fun filming the inaurugal Mojito Show. I’m hoping I can make a repeat appearance this Saturday, but we’ll see.
Jeremy was fun, too, and sounds like he’s built an interesting business around blogging (and did it fast – only 11 months) with b5media. Oh, and he’s got a great business card with plenty of attitude.
Best part of the interview? Scoble said something like “Wait, you’re profitable? You can’t be Web 2.0!”. 🙂
Sun Fire 'CoolThreads' T1000 review
Ever since they first announced the Niagara processors at Sun, I’ve been excited. Could Niagara change my business? Who wouldn’t want tons of physical cores coupled with tons of virtual cores? At every tech conference I’ve tried to get hard data from the people manning Sun’s booths. At MySQL User’s Conference they were hyping MySQL performance, for example – yet there’s a huge MySQL bug where performance degrades with more CPUs, so that’s clearly not a great target for us (yet).
Nonetheless, the geek in me remained intrigued – I’ve believed for years that scaling # of CPUs, rather than purely speed of CPUs, was the future. One of the great parts of my job is that I get to play around with new toys and new technology, like Amazon’s S3 and Niagara, that can enhance our business or change it in some way. And every geek wants to dream that there’s some hot new CPU around the corner that’ll solve all their problems, right?
Sun has a great 60-day Try & Buy program. They make it basically as painless as clicking on the server you want, and a few days later it arrives. Very cool. Unfortunately, I haven’t used Sun gear since 1994, when I was using SunOS 4 (remember when SunOS was BSD-based?), so it would likely be time-consuming to try out both new hardware and new software. No thanks, I’m a busy guy.
Enter Jonathan Schwartz and his famous blog. Jonathan probably doesn’t remember me, but when I was 12 years old, I’d haunt the halls at NeXT every second I got and crashed NeXTWorld every year. I remember him. He was NeXT’s most important developer, and my father got the thankless task of buffering Steve Jobs and Jonathan. Both of them needed the other, but they couldn’t stand each other. Fun fun. 🙂
I’ve been meaning to touch base with Jonathan and see how he’s doing at his new job – and to see if a small web company like ours can shed any light on Sun’s direction. I think he’s got a very tough endeavor ahead of him – he’s gotta turn a massive company with lots of inertia around to compete in a whole new ballgame. For more than a decade now, datacenter computing has been shifting more and more rapidly towards free operating systems coupled with commodity hardware, and Sun nearly missed the boat. Now they’re scrambling to catch up. I believe Jonthan “gets it”, but we’ll have to see if he has the time and energy to really make the shift.
On June 16th, Jonathan posted a blog entry where he announced that Ubuntu Linux ran on Niagara, and that anyone who writes a thorough review would get to keep the box in question. Fantastic idea – I get to run Linux, which I know like the back of my hand, play with some hot new technology, and I get to keep the hardware for my time. Sold! So here we are, 60 days later, with a thorough review.
UPDATE: Jonathan has a new blog entry this morning about Niagara’s power savings. Pretty cool that you can get a rebate for using lower-power servers – but it doesn’t materially impact the conclusion of this review.
UPDATE #2: The comments here and on digg are pretty clear – you’d like to see Solaris results. Me too. Here’s an open call for help from Sun.
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/hardware/Amazing_comparison_of_a_32_core_Sun_running_Ubuntu_versus_4_core_AMD’;
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 