I Am Adam Smith

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.

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.

Ajax Resources

via

One is Scriptaculous library. It offers support for some nice visual effects, drag-and-drop and auto completion. It is a lively project with active contribution and friendly open source license (MIT-style). Here is a specific tutorial that demonstrates how to implement shopping cart drag-and-drop functionality using Scriptaculous.

Yahoo also offers their free AJAX framework Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI). They offer large number of core and user interface controls utilities. You can see these in action on most of the Yahoo's Web 2.0 pages. This library is offered under BSD license. For more details, specifically on drag and drop, check this YUI resource.

Dojo Toolkit, one of the more popular AJAX frameworks has a support for drag-and-drop as well. Documentation about Dojo's drag and drop implementation is available here on their Wiki. (I have to say that compared to other frameworks Dojo's documentation disappoints me)

Finally, my favorite: Google Web Toolkit (see my recent entries on GWT). It has its own implementation for AJAX-style drag-and-drop functionality in the form of an extension. You can access it here.

Fora.tv

Fora.tv looks interesting. Lectures and interviews from smart interesting people. Similar to Ted.com, but with broader participation.

Internet Stats + New Facebook Targeted Advertising

Couple of interesting things from Web 2.0 Summit. Talk by Mary Meaker of Stanley Morgan. Video | Slides, good overview of the state of the internet market.

Also, new facebook advertising initiative, via TechCrunch (this is some amazing targeting you can do.

As first reported on AllFacebook, the Flyers let you target by country, city, gender, age range, political views, relationship status, education level, workplace affiliation, or any keyword in a person’s stated interests. It’s that last option that could be really powerful. For instance, simply putting in different keywords into the Facebook Flyers ad-targeting page reveals that of the 19,951,900 Facebook members in the U.S., 101,000 are into rock climbing, 411,000 are into cooking, and 706,160 people are into traveling. Such targeting could theoretically allow advertisers to reach exactly the people they want, instead of the scatter-shot approach favored today. If you are a wedding planner in Salem, OR, for instance, there are 100 women on Facebook between 20 and 40 who live in Salem and are engaged. That’s pretty deep targeting. MySpace is also moving in this direction, allowing advertising by interest categories and sub-categories.

Find Photos with Flicr under a Creative Commons Licence

Flickr, the usefull, but hard to spell picture sharing service, allows people to apply a Creative Commons Licence.

Flickr is a picture sharing service that lets people create RSS feeds of their pictures and inlclude meta-data - Tags.

A Creative Commons Licence, is the brain child of Larry Lessig, The great defender of the public domain. This licence allows content creators (i.e. the guy who took the picture) to decide what kind of intellectual property protection he wants on it. The default today is LOTS of restrictive protection. Any work on any medium, is protected past the life of the creator. Whether you give a damn or not.

In order for anyone to use your work, or make a derivative, they need to get you to agree and fill out a bunch of legal paperwork. So you either:

a. steal it.

b. say "screw it" and don't use the work

or c. be a huge company, and actually licence the picture, drawing, story, whatever.

So, to solve this problem, Flicr lets people choose how much protection they want on their pictures.

Briefly...

Attribution means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike means:
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

The Silk Road Newsletter by Piper Jaffray

Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray writes a weekly newsletter, The Silk Road, on ecommerce companies. There's good coverage of the online travel industry here.

I've also started reading The Alarm Clock. Bunch of guys who used to work for Red Herring. They profile a startup company each week. They've cover a lot of ecommerce and social networking firms.

PubSub.com

Create your own RSS news watch feeds at PubSub.com

Email providers using digital domain keys

Cnet has an article on how Yahoo and other email providers are fighting spam by adding digital domain keys to emails. Not sure how this effects emulating email addresses from these providers. Assume you'd need to strike an agreement with the email provider.

Slashdot article on this, and Yahoo's info page.

Messages from its free e-mail service will include a "Domain Key," a system that creates a digital signature for outgoing e-mail and then lets receivers verify that the message comes from where it claims. The technology tries to thwart spam "phishing" attacks where messages pretend to originate from a familiar address and then launch viruses or social engineering hacks when opened.

The changes won't be noticeable to the Yahoo Mail user, since Domain Keys are resolved in Yahoo's servers and network infrastructure.

Users "simply use Yahoo Mail and get the benefit of knowing that we use Domain Keys to prevent attacks," said Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communications products at Yahoo.

While Yahoo has talked up Domain Keys as a powerful weapon against spam, for the system to work, outgoing and incoming e-mail services must use the keys. So far, Yahoo has picked up endorsements from EarthLink and its archrival Google. But the biggest e-mail providers, America Online and Microsoft, remain in the wings.

AOL and Microsoft have said they're looking at Domain Keys, but the providers are pushing their own antispam and e-mail authentication technologies. AOL's SPF and Microsoft's Sender ID check an e-mail's identity through its Internet protocol address, and can be used alongside Domain Keys.