Amazon Web Services, the fascinating infrastructure behind many of the web applications you probably use every day, is about to come out from the shadows and meet end users directly. Amazon DevPay entered general availability today. The system handles billing and payment collection for software built on Amazon storage and processing systems, if the developers wish to use it. In a world of online fraud and flaky customer service, the prospect of having Amazon handle payment collection for apps sounds great to us. Sponsor Amazon Web Services is actually bigger, bandwidth wise, than the rest of Amazon's web properties all...
Building a Hyper Energy Efficient Data Center View SlideShare presentation. (tags: cold aisle containment cix) I am speaking next week at a virtual conference called “bMighty - A Deep Dive on IT Infrastructure for SMBs” - apologies in advance for the state of the website(!) My talk is titled “How to build a hyper Energy-efficient Data Center” and is based on the CIX data center which I helped develop (and am still a director of). This is the slide deck I will be presenting there....
By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)Google App Engine, which was released in April 2008, is a platform for building, hosting and scaling web applications using Google's infrastructure. It allows a developer to build and test web applications without the worry of maintaining servers, and so forth. It's pretty much a plug and play type of solution, just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users. A lot of these applications are very raw and are just test beds for the developers. There are quite a few that are useful and have some potential. This post highlights 15 of...
In coming years, people who own electric cars will need someplace -- other than their homes -- to plug them in when they are out and about. Coulomb Technologies hopes to supply that service in the form of recharging stations located in public and private parking lots. To that end, Coulomb has expanded its reseller program to 28 states. A recharging station is simply a conveniently-placed electrical outlet that requires a prepaid debit card. Why not have them accept credit cards? "Because the credit card [service] charge will be more than the cost of the [electric] charge," explains one...
The electric car infrastructure race is on! A short while ago several mayors in the San Francisco Bay Area announced that they would be partnering with Better Place to bring electric vehicle charging stations to the area. Now Hawaii is going to do one better and become the first state to have Better Place charging stations across the entire state. Considering that the Bay Area has a population of about 7 million and Hawaii about 1.3 million, some semantic one-upmanship is at work here, but nevertheless this is great ne......
The list now includes Israel, Denmark, Australia, California, and Hawaii. “Hawaii, with its ready access to renewable energy resources like solar, wind, wave, and geothermal, is the ideal location to serve as a blueprint for the rest of the U.S. in terms of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, growing our renewable energy portfolio and creating an infrastructure that will stabilize our economy,” Agassi said in a statement to the press. Read full story here. Posted in Automobiles ...
Dear haha.nu-ers, We have upgraded our infrastructure, and the performance should be really better now. Also, there are some new features, like we get rid of the Math question of the comment form (antispam technique now is different), Avatar support for haha.nu-ers’ profiles, tags… If everything is working fine, we can think about adopting a new theme also. What do you think? @ haha.nu...
Last August, I saw the impact of Twitter's velocity first-hand with a fundraising experiment. I was able to raise $2,500 in 90 minutes at Gnomedex. I wondered whether or not those results would be replicable? Right before Thanksgiving, the TweetsGiving effort helped Epic Change raise over $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania. As Lucy Bernholz notes, this might be one more example of fundraising on Twitter is less marginal and moving to the middle.Lucy points to some implications for organizations to consider: Video, blogging, twitter, online payments, viral marketing, instant thank yous, etc as the minimal...
Tata Motors parent company, Tata Group, owns the Taj Mahal Hotel at the center of the deadly attacks in Mumbai ending this morning. News the same company producing the Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world, also owns one of the largest and nicest hotels in India shouldn't come as a surprise given the Tata Group owns almost 100 companies with operations in 85 countries. Ratan Tata, chairman of both Tata Group as well as Tata Motors, said the hotel had been warned of a possible attack and had increased security over the past few weeks but claimed it...
James Hamilton is one of the smartest and most accomplished engineers I know. He now leads Microsoft's Data Center Futures Team, and has been pushing the opportunities in data center efficiency and internet scale services both inside & outside Microsoft. His most recent post explores misconceptions about the Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers: I’m not sure how many times I’ve read or been told that power is the number one cost in a modern mega-data center, but it has been a frequent refrain. And, like many stories that get told and retold, there is an element of truth...
Image via apolloalliance.org. Change is definitely in the air these days. President-elect Obama is putting together his plans for some sort of New Deal-like program, which he has said will include massive investments in building public institutions like schools, renewable energy and infrastructure. Meanwhile, advocates for all sorts of policies are busy putting together their own proposals for the new administration in Washington. And with everyone from Wall Street traders to Detroit car makers bombarding the government w......
