Last week Amazon made a big announcement that did not seem to get picked up too broadly. They introduced S3, their new storage web service. And its cheap. Want a few Gigabytes in the sky? Amazon will host it for you for pennies per month. Google is rumored to be working on something similar.
Has storage become a commodity? If not yet, it sure looks like it will be soon.
Whether Google anticipated this happening when they introduced GMail or not, I don’t know, but I think the (unintended?) consequence was that it made everybody realize that storing the bits was soon becomming an old favorite: Free! So my guess is that Google’s competitors all set out on a quest to neutralize any competitive advantage Google had gotten because they had figured out how to make big storage really cheap.
What does this mean? Well it’s great news for us the users and another big boost for innovation. Companies like Plum no longer have to think too hard about building and hosting huge server farms to store big media files such as photos, podcasts and video. Just plug in to the grid and there it is… well, almost. It means we can offer almost unlimited storage to you, our users at very low cost. This is going to be very exciting.
-hans peter
4.9.06
I have written about S3 and the implications of storage as a service in greater depth in my recent column Bits Also Want To Be Free.
I spent most of the week at ETech. It was my first O’Reilly conference and I really enjoyed it. Quality of sessions was generally good and I met some neat new people and re-connected with folks I had not seen for years. I especially enjoyed Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra and Dana Boyd’s G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide. Linda Stone’s talk got rave reviews (although I managed to miss it) and Bradley Horowitz was quite impressive laying out the Yahoo! story which is increasingly open and developer friendly. Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie’s demonstrated a new clipboard hack (using Firefox to show his demo!) and spoke about Windows live, creating some buzz too.
A dominant theme in Tim O’Reilly’s, Bruce Sterling’s and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk keynotes can best be summarized as "we have discovered that there is intelligence on the web… and it’s you". O’Reilly said that "it’s not about artificial intelligence, but about intelligence augmentation" and that this was all about "making connections in some profound way". Sterling poised that intelligence would arise through decidedly low-tech means of human "sorting, tagging, ranking and researching". I think this signifies a pretty major shift in how people are thinking about the web. More and more smart people are looking beyond search and page rank and to the one billion people now connected through this network in order to discover and add value. The social net is emerging and it will be about a lot more than socializing with people, it will increasingly be about socializing knowledge with the help of people.
Noticeably absent were Google. They had a recruiting station, but no real presence from key people.
-hans peter
Some of our open programming interfaces are up on the developer section of plum.com. (Uhm, "developer page" for now). Here is a simple example that I did on my personal site in the last 24 hours while at ETech in San Diego. It uses data from a plug-in script that Hans Peter wrote for the Plummer (our desktop collection tool) extending it to support collecting from the Macintosh Address book. Items collected from the Address book are displayed on a Y! map by the mashup even though the internals of Plum still doesn’t have any understanding of what an "address" is.
-margaret
Fred Wilson has a good post today on the search for better search where he points to several problems with the keyword search and page rank model. Is social search, tagging and all that, going to make a big difference for the regular web user? Will user generated tag clouds and folksonomies (see Wikipedia definitions for tag cloud and folksonomy) make it easier to find the stuff you are looking for by relying on smart mobs applying their collective knowledge and filters?
I don’t know what the next killer application of search is going to be, but I tend to lean towards a belief that extracting information from the things we do and say and using that as a way to help inform our search for related information is one important and as of yet pretty unexplored area ripe for innovation. If I am planning a trip to Hawaii or listening to a lot of Moby or reading and writing mostly about folksonomies and tagging, then shouldn’t all that inform how I show up when people search for me. And should it not also inform my own search results?
Oh, and while I’m at it, Fred also commented on Adam Lashinsky’s fun piece in Fortune Magazine about the dynamics of the start-up / VC dating game. I agree with Fred’s comment that VCs need to re-think what is success and even their underlying models in the ever changing landscape of startupiland. The expectations of what is a successful VC outcome must evolve beyond mega returns with big $$ invested. Until it does, VCs and the entrepreneurs they back will far too often find themselves on opposite sides of the table. I commented on this in more detail on Allen’s blog a few weeks ago as well.
-hans peter
