Kaiyzen Group

Amazon’s popular S3 cloud storage service is turning three years old.  In the three years since its launch S3 has opened up shop in Europe, drop prices, added auto backups for persistent storage on EC2, and plugged into their Cloudfront CDN service.

Three years and 52 billion stored objects later Amazon wants to say thank you by providing some birthday deals to developers out there.  Data transfer costs into S3 will cost $0.03 for the next three months instead of the traditional $0.10.

You can find out more information about the service at http://aws.amazon.com/s3

More cloud computing news involving Microsoft today via The Register.

At a partner event in London Mr. Ballmer mentioned that at the Professional Developers Conference Microsoft will announce a new OS dubbed “Windows Cloud”.

Ballmer metioned that this is just a working title and that the OS will have an actual name, hopefully one that doesnt have the word cloud in it.  Ballmer hints at geographic based replication and edge style computing will be built into the OS and that it will be one of the unique features that the new OS will provide developers.

This news is on the heals of the announcement from Amazon earlier today announcing that AWS will support Windows images and SQL Server on EC2.  This is all definite evidence that Microsoft’s software + services vision driven by Mr Ozzie will be taking shape over the next 12 months.  Be on the look out also for some big announcements from Microsofts data center team as they have been working away for the past couple years on building out ~$4/5 billion dollars worth of new facilities world wide.

Netflix with two big announcements and launches today.., first they are going to start streaming video from Starz.  This is a pretty significant deal as if it is successfull Netflix could be a few strategic moves away from becoming the ultimate ondemand provider.  They already have other providers in CBS and Disney and cut a deal with LG to support Netflix streaming to a new up and coming LG Blu Ray player.

Second, and a piece of news I am enjoying more is that they have opened up their system with a new API and the launch of their developer site.  This is great for any service based around entertainment whether it be TV or movies.  This should provide for some nice passive traffic and audience gains and in the longrun make it a good datasource competitor to IMDB.

I really do not like to make my own predictions but with a bunch of activity of late I figured I would throw out a couple thoughts/ideas I have been having:

1) FIM will purchase Pandora sometime within the next 12 months.  Pandora has continued pressure for lack of revenue and high streaming costs and with MySpace Music’s launch their IP is a perfect fit especially once their figure out the syndication issues

2) Amazon will continue to dominate the “cloud space” and pull in some big name enterprise customers with some nice PR around them and pull in Microsoft as a partner to offer their solutions on AWS.

3) Palm will turn heads in the first half of next year with their new devices and platform that will be coming down the pipeline

4) Android will get ~5% smartphone market share by the end of ‘09 and wireless devlepment will continue to be a huge pain in the ass till sometime in 2010

5) On their way to the $1 billion revenue mark Facebook will face some serious pushback with their Facebook ID program and continued efforts to push/pull activity stream info everywhere…, possibly also look for them to become a wrapper for LiveID to help move things along on the unified login front.

Amazon steps things up significantly with their continued web services strategy.., I received this from Amazon via email:

Oracle has officially certified Amazon EC2 as a supported platform on which to run
their software.  In addition, AWS has worked with Oracle to enable existing Oracle
Database licenses to be transferred to Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS.  This means that for no additional cost, you can use an existing Oracle license to run your database in AWS, saving yourself the cost and effort of managing your own infrastructure while keeping the same database software you are already running.  Oracle has also enabled Amazon S3 as one of the default backup locations for their RMAN service, making it easy for you to protect your data. Check out more details about running Oracle in Amazon EC2, http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/oracle, along with some easy-to-use tools,
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html, that can help you get
started.
 

I dont think this will have a huge impact in the short term but what it does say loud and clear is that Amazon wants the enterprise to use AWS for their experimental and initial development of their projects and that they will continue to stay steps ahead of the competition.

Enterprises that do not have super data sensitive projects should love this between the low cost and ability make use of an existing Oracle license.  A perfect example.., although they didnt use Oracle is the New York Times using AWS to process all of their archives into PDF files and make them searchable.

During Yahoo!’s Hack Day event one of the sessions covered their mobile tools for developers and specifically Blueprint.

Blueprint was born out of Yahoo!’s OneConnect efforts.  For those unfamiliar with OneConnect it is a fantastic mobile app that runs on many evices and has an open framework that third parties can piggy back on and install themselves as widgets on a users OneConnect setup.  Some apps of note are last.fm, ebay, wikipedia, etc.

OneConnect is pretty good, but falls short for those developers that really want to own the user experience and not just sit in as a widget…., this is where Blueprint comes into play.

BluePrint is a huge mobile play for Yahoo!  This is really where they set themselves apart in the mobile space from the rest of the big players.  Where Microsoft and Google are playing mostly on OS side of things to get developers involved, Yahoo! wants to own the dev relationship across all handsets and OS’s.

BluePrint has two main components to it.., one that is pretty ready for primetime.., another that needs some more time to bake going into the end of the year.

The first part that is ready for primetime is the mobile website BluePrint server.  Yahoo! has created a proxy server for rendering content and apps into mobile friendly sites.  When a user requests a mobile page from you, your site passes all of the content and, buttons, menus, etc in the BluePrint XML markup to the Yahoo! proxy.  The proxy then determines which handset is requesting and renders the page accordingly.

This is a pretty handy service for those devers out there whom do not want to get too into mobile development while still providing their users with a nicely designed and functioning mobile view into their property.

The second part of BluePrint.., that I am really excited about, but still needs some baking.., is their BluePrint platform for this client applications.  Yahoo! is throwing their hat in the ring with the rest of the mobile platform translation libraries to provide a one stop shop for developers to write an app once, and run anywhere.  They plan to support Java, .net, android, Symbian, and iPhone, as well as provide location based interfaces.

This is going to be fantastic for developers if Yahoo! delivers this close to how they presented it.  I have my doubts on the iPhone side of things as I have talked to several diferent vendors that provide platforms for universl app development and they have all had no luck when talking to Apple about opening up the iPhone to them.  We need  someone of Yahoo!’s size to help tip the balance in our favor and make Apple see the light.

Downside to BluePrint.., no planned media support yet, but that might come down the road as many devers would love to gain acess to the camera and any stored media on the device.

More on this in the coming months as Yahoo! opens things up more

I had the pleasure of attending and participating in Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day event held at their corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale here in the Bay Area.

This is the second time that Yahoo! has held an Open Hack…, the first time was almost two years ago in September of ‘06.  Unlike last time I had the pleasure of partaking in the hack…, our project took home a User Interface prize.., more on that in the future.

Hack Day began on Friday morning and ran through till early Sat night the following day.  The first day is setup so you attend sessions on various API and libary overview sessions.  Yahoo! uses this time to introduce some new things, giving a sneak peak for the 48 hrs, then taking it away to let things back some more.

Once again they did a fantastic job hosting the event.  This is probably the 5th tech event I have attended over the last 2 years hosted by Yahoo! and they are among the best.

Upwards of 50 groups hacked away overnight and presented their projects over 90 seconds. Here is the post on the winners:

Hackday Winners

Some more posts on a couple of the cool items that Yahoo! unveiled at the event to come.., stay tuned.