Webcloud World

According to a recent Techcrunch post, Yahoo, Hp and Intel are about to announce something big today.
Given the actors involved and the recent move of other Internet big players (Google App Engin, Amazon Webservices…), we can guess it will deal with cloud computing : Yahoo supporting the open source distributed computing Hadoop, it [...]

Last week Appirio announced that it had secured Series B financing of .6 million led by Sequoia Capital, the investment firm which has become notorious for also backing Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, and PayPal. Sequoia also funded one of my previous employers, International Network Services (INS), one of the high-flyers of the 1990s.
Appirio’s latest round of [...]

Everyday, we hear new stories about a cool new startup and its success story.
Today, It was WalkScore.com. The website offers some great information about which neighborhood/city is more walkable than the rest (San francisco was #1 and Seattle was #6). Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, [...]

Does your desk look like this photo? No comment on where the photo was taken, of course… There’s hope!
Pixily just launched, with a business model that could be described as "NetFlix in reverse". They offer a plan that allows you to send them one envelope per month (envelopes can contain up
to 50 items) filled with [...]

We thought of trying out a new idea. Instead of working from our Amazon offices, for a change, we will be work for few hours, every last tuesday of the month, from an offsite.
We like to call it AWS “Office Hours”.
Offsite will be at the StartPad co-working office space in Pioneer Square in Seattle. [...]

I received an email message from a frustrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company executive yesterday asking if I could publish a commentary clarifying the difference between cloud computing and SaaS.
His plea was prompted by a trade publication article which basically referred to cloud computing and SaaS as one and the same.
Anyone who has been intimately involved in [...]

I am very happy to announce my white paper on Cloud Architectures is now ready. This is one incarnation of the Emerging Cloud Service Architectures that Jeff wrote about a few weeks ago.
If you are new to the cloud, the first section of the paper will help you understand the benefits of building applications in-the-cloud. [...]

Andras wrote to tell me about Jollat, a new graphical cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) management client for Amazon EC2 and S3. Available for free download (with a purchase option), the client includes a number of interesting features.
On the S3 side, Jollat handles bucket creation in both the US and EU zones, upload and [...]

Engine Yard, provider of a Ruby and Rails deployment platform, announced a Serie B financing round of $15 million, implicating New Enterprise Associates, Inc., Benchmark Capital and Amazon.
Here is the official announcement
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Despite growing customer adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), many companies and conservative industry observers still believe that SaaS solutions are simply a skinnied-down version of traditional, on-premise applications that offer little value add other than quicker deployment times and lower upfront costs.
IT/business decision-makers need look no further than at how today’s SaaS solutions are addressing age-old [...]