I Am Adam Smith

SaaS Summit 2008

I'll be attending SaaS Summit 2008 this week in San Fran. Lots of interesting speakers talking about trends in Software as a Service and Web 2.0. Let me know (contact info) if you'll be attending the conference or are in the area and would like to get together.

RackSpace launches Cloud Computing: Mosso

As far as I can tell, cloud computing is a cheaper more efficient way of serving web pages.

From TechCrunch:

Today, hosting provider Rackspace is offering a new cloud computing service through its subsidiary Mosso. (Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). The service competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), although it doesn’t require any load balancing or other administration. It also competes with Joyent and Media Temple’s Grid Service. Pricing starts at $100 a month for:

—50 GB of storage
—500 GB of bandwidth for transferring data
—3 million HTTP requests.

From there additional capacity per month costs:

—$0.50/GB of storage
—$0.25/GB of bandwidth
—$0.03/1,000 HTTP requests

This is a bit more expensive than Amazon (which charges in a different way) but a lot cheaper than the $350 to $400 a month Rackspace charges to host a dedicated server for a Website.

PageOnce

Pageonce is a personal content aggregation service. Keeps all your RSS feeds, bank accounts, travel info, email all together in one spot. I like the concept, and the web design looks slick.

Might be a partnership opportunity for TripInvite in the future.

Facebook App Networks

According to Techcrunch, there are now 16,000 apps on Facebook, and its hard to get noticed unless your a high profile app developer, or associated with them. Some of these such as Slide  are charging develoeprs $.50 an install.

But now we are beginning to see networks starting to form across specific application genres.

In the social gaming category alone, a battle is brewing between the Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Zynga. Tomorrow, both will launch separate developer platforms for other gaming applications. The appeal to smaller social game developers is similar: join one of the gaming networks and see your game promoted on the toolbar or gaming page when people are playing other games in the network. Fred Wilson, the partner at Union Square Ventures, who invested in Zynga, explains to me:

It is the exact same value proposition why you would want to build your app on Facebook as opposed to the Web. You can rapidly develop an audience. It is access to audience and monetization.

Nuconomy: Web Analytics Measuring Interactions

New startup which will do web analytics thats more relevent to today's 2.0 sites. Nuconomy is still in beta. I've signed up for the beta, and will see how well this all works.

From their blog:

Let’s take an example:
User A, goes into YouTube. He goes through a few channels and user pages. He browse about 30 pages which brings him deep into the site, but he doesn’t watch even a single video.
User B goes into YouTube. He watch the top 5 videos in the home page. He rate 3 of them and make comments on the other two. He than continue to upload two videos of its own. During all this time, he doesn’t browse more than 5 pages in the site.
Now - Which of the users do you think is more engaged with the YouTube brand?

This kind of measurement is exactly what’s in the heart of our product NuConomy Studio. We let you measure all kind of user interactions, and even combine them to get a definite "engagement" rank to each of your users or content pieces.