Archive for September, 2009

We've removed the distinction between Amazon EC2 running Windows and Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services, allowing all of our Windows instances to make use of Authentication Services such as LDAP, RADIUS, and Kerberos. With this change, any Windows instance can host a Domain Controller or join an existing domain. File sharing services such as SMB between instances will now automatically default to SMB-over-TCP in all cases, and will also be able to negotiate more secure authentication.

Existing Windows with Authentication Services instances will now be charged the same price as Windows instances, a savings of 50% on the hourly rate. All newly launched instances will be charged the new, lower price (starting at 12.5 cents per hour for a 32-bit instance in the US). Applications requiring logins can now be run on the Amazon EC2 running Windows AMIs.

As a result of these changes, our Windows AMI lineup now looks like this:

• US:
  • Amazon EC2 running Windows (32 bit) – English.
  • Amazon EC2 running Windows (64 bit) – English.
  • Amazon EC2 running Windows With SQL Server (64 bit) – English.
• Europe:
  • Amazon EC2 running Windows (32 bit) – English, German, French, Spanish, Italian.
  • Amazon EC2 running Windows (64 bit) – English, German, French, Spanish, Italian.
  • Amazon EC2 running Windows With SQL Server (64 bit) – English, German, French, Spanish, Italian.

If you are using Amazon DevPay in conjunction with Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services you will need to create new AMIs and adjust your pricing plan before November 1, 2009.

We continue to strive for simplicity and cost effectiveness; this is a good example of both!

– Jeff;

PS – I know that a lot of you have been asking us to support Windows Server 2008.  I don't have a release date for you yet, but I can assure you that we've prioritized the work needed to properly support it.

My name is Nick Kallen (@nk) and I’m the project lead on Lists, a new feature we’re testing with a small subset of users. The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.

Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you’ve created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com—the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.

We’re just doing limited testing for now. But once we’ve tested the feature out a bit, we’ll launch it for all accounts!

Thanks to @rael, @vl and the rest of the team who worked to get this limited release out today.

Mark time in your calendars for a cloud security webinar co-presented by Amazon Web Services and enStratus on Wednesday October 7, 2009 at 11:30 AM – 12:15 PM Central Time US.

Sign up today

Public cloud computing has evolved into a mainstream approach for building out components of an IT infrastructure. Cost saving opportunities make the development of a public cloud strategy absolutely critical. Even before taking on pilot projects in the cloud, however, you should have a solid understanding of the security implications and opportunities in public cloud computing. Amazon Web Services and enStratus have teamed up for this webinar detailing how businesses moving into the cloud can understand the security issues in public cloud computing and how to secure a public cloud infrastructure.

Among the most critical components in cloud security is transparency from your cloud providers. AWS has built out an infrastructure and established processes to mitigate common vulnerabilities and offer a safe compute and storage environment. enStratus operates outside of the AWS cloud, watching over its operations, and keeping your authentication and encryption credentials safe outside the cloud while encrypting the data inside the cloud both in transit and at rest.

Steve Riley from AWS and George Reese from enStratus will discuss common cloud security concerns and show you how to take advantage of the security features AWS and enStratus provide you to build a secure public cloud infrastructure.

Key Learnings

• How does AWS protect its infrastructure and, by extension, your data?
• What can you do with tools like enStratus to further protect your data?
• How can you use enStratus to protect your data from third-party subpoenas or subpoenas targeted at AWS?
• How can I manage user access to my AWS infrastructure?
• What issues impact compliance with various standards/regulations in the AWS cloud?

Speakers

George Reese, O'Reilly cloud computing author and CTO for enStratus, a leading cloud management platform.

Steve Riley, Sr. Technical Program Manager for Amazon Web Services.

>> Steve <<

This past weekend YDN attended the 2009 edition of OverTheAir, the mobile meetup which took place in Imperial College, London. It was two days of incredible fun, good presentations and interesting hacks (including a colourful attempt to recreate Dr Who’s Holodeck).

The whole event was full of good happenings, from the threatening presence of a full-size Dalek guarding the beanbag area to the superinteresting Teen’s Dragons Den session, where several teenagers judged if they would invest in the different mobile companies some of our mobile entrepreneurs were presenting.

Photo credit: Matt Cashmore

We had the opportunity to attend several talks, around such hot topics as mobile accessibility, augmented reality, widgets from different platforms, and how to properly design mobile applications.

From YDN we also contributed talks on Blueprint for Mobile sites and how to use Yahoo APIs to add more value to your mobile application. The slides are published in slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/phobeo/yahoo-apis-for-mobile-content-location-and-context-overtheair-2009.

We also had the tough task of sitting on the judging panel for the different hacks that were presented. We are proud to announce that the prize for best hack using Yahoo APIs was given to project “Something Around You”, an augmented reality application that used YQL to display different sources of data like local restaurants, flickr photos and cinema information, overlayed using Wikitude API in an Android phone. Congratulations to Robert Munro, Alfredo Morresi and Stefano Zingarini! They took home a nice Nespresso machine that hopefully will help them alleviate the sleep deprivation after their overnight coding work!

Photo credit: Rain Ashford

We’d like to thank the organisers and all the attendees for putting together such a great event. We can hardly wait for the 2010 edition!

Ricardo Varela
Yahoo! Mobile Architect

Are You Employing Leverage?

A few months back I had a chat with ShoeMoney and we talked about a lot of marketing stuff. He always speaks of the importance of being able to leverage success to build other related projects. It is typically worth far more money to be a lead player with projects that build off of each other than it is to be a #10 player in many different markets trying to build disconnected brands that can’t feed off each other. Even traditional slow moving publishing organizations like newspapers are aggressively leveraging network effects in their SEO strategy.

Networks Allow You to Come From Behind

When you look at Theme Forest they came late to the market, and yet are many times as large as competing businesses that are twice as old. Envato was launched in 2006, and in spite of coming late to market they were nearly instantly successful. Owning popular blogs helped them create thriving marketplaces, and the marketplaces help them make the blogs more popular. The promotion is circular.

Most Leading Web Companies Use Networks

Larger web networks like IAC, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Internet Brands, Quinstreet, Expedia, Classified Ventures, BankRate, Monster.com, and Demand Media employ the same tactics. At $170 million Mint was a cheap buy for Intuit just to block out competition. Any additional distribution and cost savings are a bonus. Once you have distribution you have free inventory to promote a new site into a related vertical. And this strategy works with smaller niche sites as well. Publishing this site made it easy for us to get a lot of exposure for my wife’s PPC strategy flowchart.

Subsidizing New Channels

Everything that is free is subsidized. And rather than trying to squeeze the maximum returns out of any given project it is often better to look for ways to add more value. The best businesses that are sustainable create more value than they capture. Once you have multiple monetization models and multiple income streams you can be flexible with your approach to growth.

Keep Bolting On Pieces

We originally gave away free SEO tools mainly with the ideas of building links and promotion in mind. But now they also help establish a customer funnel while commoditizing the value of some similar business models. And because many of the tools are decentralized (as Firefox extensions) maintenance costs are much lower than someone who centralizes everything. Our customers on average tend to be toward the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, so giving away useful and extensible tools helps us meet that market. But a lot of our business strategy has been made up as we went along, rather than having an aggressive master plan in place.

Watching Big Companies Develop Strategy

Some companies are driven by big goals and 5 (and 10) year plans. Adobe bought Omniture and plans on offering deep analytics into user interactions with flash widget ads. Out of nowhere Adobe entered the ad market.

Renting vs Building

As Seth Godin highlighted, marketing has moved from renting an audience to building one:

This might be the most subtle yet important shift that marketers face as they deal with the reality of new media. Marketers aren’t renters, now they own.

For generations, marketers were trained to buy (actually rent) eyeballs.
…
Suddenly the new media comes along and the rules are different. You’re not renting an audience, you’re building one.

Google is GOD of the Web

One of the best companies to study from the perspective of using market leverage to enter new markets is Google. Recently they struck a deal with Warner to bring their music back to Youtube. But even while their music was not on Youtube I was still able to listen to it – on Youtube

Want to try Google’s newest software in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? Continue at your own Peril!

Google is constantly trying to extend search. And their 4 step process to entering a new market usually consists of…

• Make the service essentially free to buy marketshare, become the marketplace, and kill the business model for competing start ups in the space.
• Promote it across search, the AdSense content network, and via a thick public relations program.
• Use the work of thieves and the blurry parts of copyright law to diminish the value of non-partner content to try to force non-partners into a formal partnership.
• 12 to 36 months later start charging a fair to normal market rate for the service. Claim the service makes no profits until it is an undeniable cash cow.

One of the more cynical, but perhaps accurate, in depth research reports on Google’s use of market leverage is Scott Cleland’s Googleopoly [PDF]. You might not be able to apply every idea in there to your projects, but it should help you understand where Google intends to intersect with your market and how you can leverage some of those touch-points to your advantage.

One last tip, from Larry Ellison, “Pick your competitors carefully for you will quickly come to resemble the companies you compete with.”