So, we just enjoyed a few companies giving small showcases of their products. I’m not explaining all of them in detail so here is the short list.

Rawflow - live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming technology
Simply Media - creator, aggregator and distributor of digital video content
t5m - video-based, socially conscious entertainment and lifestyle network
Zattoo - peer-to-peer internet television provider

All of these companies were in one way or another trying to add some more value (and therefore revenue) to the online video model. I specifically enjoyed Zattoo, as they offer Satellite TV over IP to a little program that seems to also run on Mac. Unfortunately you need an “invite” so I will have to tackle the founder in a moment to get acces to their service.

So, I am at the Essential Mediatech conference here in London at the BFI IMAX theatre. I arrived a bit late but managed to be in time for the first keynote of Antti Ohrling from Blyk.

Blyk is a very interesting mobile phone service provider that is free, for 16 to 24 year olds, and sponsored by targeted advertisements. The talk was interesting, especially the fact that they get about 100x the response rate one would get from traditional advertisements like e-mail and banners. The service is currently available in the UK and free to any 16 to 24 year old who can get enough value from 43 minutes and 217 texts a month.

As anyone was supposed to, I gave a quick presentation during Barcamp Berlin. I decided to give a quick how-to about using Yahoo Pipes to make a lifestream like this. In the end I think it would have been more interesting to just have talked about Yahoo Pipes in general as the most people didn’t get what and how Yahoo Pipes works. An hour was way to long for my standard talk anyway so the ability to show people how Pipes works was a real joy. Below are the slides I used, and I will put on a post explaining my presentation in a bit more words soon.  

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So, yes Melinda and I bought a Leopard family license on a whim for our 3 macs, and yes had we got to wait in line 2.5 hours for a couple of t-shirts and a DVD in a fancy looking case, but for us it was all worth the effort and money.

Upgrading

When we got home I decided to be the first to do an upgrade, obviously first backing up my trusty Tiger install to an external drive. Two hours later I still didn’t have a running system as my upgrade had caused me an unresponsive (and unfortunately blue) startup screen, which didn’t have an error code but was quite similar to the Windows blue screen of death.

EDIT: This problem is now known to be related to a haxie container framework called Application Enhancer. If you did install ‘APE’, you should do a clean install.

I gave up soon after this and decided to just do a fresh install which went both faster and worked immediately. After me, Melinda tried an upgrade and hers ironically went without any bumps at all, so I guess my problem will only affect a small percentage of switchers. The official Apple support site already has a thread with 270 responses and maybe a few solutions.

In short: make sure you have a backup before you go into the process of upgrading as you might need to reset your tiger install or do a fresh install and transport the data.

3rd Party Applications

Once we both had Leopard running we started playing with its features and we were bot impressed by the speed. Leopard is fast, VERY FAST. Only a very few applications didn’t work properly though, mostly browser hacks like Saft and Inquisitor that use the now no longer supported InputManagers concept. We did find a little tool called PlugSuit that re-enables InputManager support and has let us use Inquisitor again (Saft didn’t work but SafariStand did most of what we wanted from Saft).

All and all I am happy with Leopard as it is a decent upgrade that, has a few very interesting features for everyone and probably doesn’t give you all the trouble an upgrade to Vista would give you.

A few unboxing photos

I went to the Apple Store in Regent Street today to get a free Leopard t-shirt. I was a bit early and noticed a line was forming so got a spot as 9th in line at about 3:30PM. Eventually hundreds of people got in line behind me and Melinda (and a few people even were arrogant enough to get in line in front of us, assholes!). At 6 the doors opened and I had to push some queue jumpers who were told a couple of times by us and Apple employees to *** off.

Strange thing is that, although we only went for the t-shirt (first 500 would get one), we eventually ended up buying a family license as we have 3 macs anyway. Most of the photos can be found below or on my flickr page.

PS: We got applauded at which felt really weird and cool at the same time.

Scaling is a hot topic in businesses, especially with startups that expect to become Slashdotted or Digged anytime soon. Google recently announced they would increase the speed at which their Gmail would gain storage capacity, mainly in response to Yahoo! and Microsoft recently upgrading and surpassing Google’s storage offerings.

Reason 1: Scaling is good for consumers

Google promised a continued increase of storage for Gmail but not for Picasa. The increase in storage for Gmail is a good thing as there is much more value in the promise of a service scaling with you, than a service that doesn’t make any clear plans. In time, we all collect more and more data and therefore need more and more storage. This doesn’t mean that our habits change, but just that it generates some nicely accumulated data.

Picasa doesn’t scale yet though, which generates some serious issues in scalability to users. For example, here is a simple graph showing a fanatic Picasa Web Albums user that (on average) uploads 4.3GB of photos per year, set over 5 years. It uses the current prices which might in time change, but at the moment it shows that a non scaling service could seriously affect your yearly costs.

As you can see, limited storage where the price doesn’t scale in time is seriously not a good deal for the consumers. In the beginning, 10GB of photo storage on Picasa will cost you $20 a year, but as you cross that limit you will have to go to $75 a year for 40GB. Although 10GB is a lot, my hypothetic user and many other users will inevitably cross this limit in time, meaning that would suddenly have to pay almost 4 times the price for the same behavior!

Note: Although Google promised a continued increase of storage, the speed might be a bit slow for some users, meaning that these services are still limited. Unlimited storage is often a good deal, but the best deal for any user is clearly highly dependent on the habits of the user.

Reason 2: Scaling is good for business

Scaling online storage is also good for (some) businesses, which is why Flickr decided to go for their model of unlimited storage. Flickr’s business model thrives on their community, and therefore getting an active community is important. Making their pro-accounts unlimited was a good thing for their customers as they got a better deal the more they uploaded. At the same time it was a good deal for Flickr as all those people uploading, tagging, commenting, and generally socializing around those photos made their business more valuable.

Obviously this doesn’t necessarily work for services where uploading more doesn’t directly add value to the product, but you would be surprised in how many cases it does make sense. In Gmail for example, the best reason for Google to add unlimited (or scalable) storage is that to them information equals money. If a lot of people start throwing away some of their “unimportant” emails because they don’t have any space left, Google loses information about us that they would love to use for showing us advertisements.

Conclusion

In short, if you ever want to offer some online storage, scalability is a good thing to think about for both consumers and business. If unlimited storage isn’t possible, making clear plans for the future of the storage adds some very nice incentive for customers to use your product over others.

The guys at Carsonified recently updated the page of the Future of Web Apps conference to include an archive of online slideshows and mp3 presentations. I was under the impression that they had also filmed some presentations, but I can’t seem to find any of these videos.

For now though, if you weren’t able to attend FOWA, you can now listen and watch to some of the presentations online and see what you missed. I’m personally actually going to go through a few of these as I obviously wasn’t able to attend all of the parallel sessions.

Matthew Mullenweg, founding father of Wordpress, had some nice insights on how to scale your business as a webstartup during FOWA. His presentation (to be found here) ranged from the technical side of scaling to the business side of scaling. In this business side he had some interesting insides that I a) didn’t know Wordpress did and b) hadn’t even ever thought about doing.

When we talk about Wordpress there are two products that can be recognized; Wordpress.org is the software that you can run on your own server, and Wordpress.com is the hosted solution for the less tech savvy people amongst us. When talking about scaling his business, Matt was talking about Wordpress.com which was gained users in exponential rate in the last few years.

Obviously at a certain time, any web application developer and decent entrepreneur will consider advertisement. In the age of Google with their Google-Adsense, ads have proven to be a successful stream of revenue for webapps, especially if your app has a big uptake on traffic. Still, many entrepreneurs that started with a social concept and a gathered a solid community will be hesitant about subjecting their loyal users to ads. As a result some find a different source of revenue (selling your statistics?) while others make Pro packages that let users get rid of the ads.

Wordpress.com went in an other direction when they made a clear distinction between loyal users and people reaching their blogs by accident. They noticed that a certain big percentage of their page visits came through search engines like Google. Clearly these people were already presented with ads at those points and adding the same kind of adds to the Wordpress page could be leveraged as some kind of second-level advertising. The cool thing about this though is, that by only offering these ads to people coming from the search engines, the loyal users and readers of Wordpress.com blogs were spared the advertisements and the annoyance.

The logic behind all this is pretty solid. People searching for something might actually be interested in the relevant product that is presented in the ads next to the articles. Loyal readers though will most of the time come to the site no matter what the content was as they are more interested in the user that writes the blog. This is enhanced by the effect that RSS feeds have on people actually being loyal readers no matter what someone writes.

Therefore, only offering ads to the people that are proven to be more likely to click on them makes perfect sense. The result is that when you are a Wordpress.com author or loyal reader, you will rarely even know there are ads.

Thank you Matt for this cool idea, and for saving us bloggers from a world of advertisements!

One of the talks at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) showed me a way to use OpenID that I hadn’t realize yet. Many people, when they think of OpenID, think of it as a way to log in a.k.a. authenticate themselves towards a system. Clearly you could give them anything you want as long as you give them the same OpenID every time you drop by.

Matt Biddulph from Dopplr though, showed some ways how OpenID could be used beyond authentication. Dopplr for example lets you add more than one OpenID account to your Dopplr account, which enables you to login to Dopplr with any OpenID provider. This becomes quite redundant when you add more than two OpenIDs, but Matt Biddulp showed that you can use people’s OpenID for more purposes besides authentication.

I already knew, you could use an OpenID to verify that a person is simply a member of a certain group of people. Much like you could use your student card to get discount at a cinema, an OpenID from your university would show that you are a student. Extending on this your national OpenID could prove your nationality, and your corporate OpenID could prove the company you work for.

Note that the actual identity of the user is not relevant and doesn’t really need to be checked as only the type of the OpenID is the important part. Even better, there is no extension like XRI needed to make this even work.

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A second example though showed how OpenID+Microformats would be able to give any application a nice read-only API. Imagine that you have an app, and you would like to give your user a simple way to add their friends from their other networks. A simple way to do this would be to let the user provide the OpenIDs of some other networks. Checking with the OpenID server if this OpenID really belongs to that user would be enough for you to then simply fetch the Microformatted contact lists from their profile pages on those sites, and compare that info with your own list of users.

Many networks like Twitter and Jaiku already present their friend lists using Microformats, but they don’t yet provide their users with an OpenID login that would allow any other app to actually verify if user X on your application is actually user Y on that other site. Currently Dopplr just scrapes your Twitter profile page for friends when you give them a username, so you could give them any name you want, but if Twitter would become an OpenID provider than they could use this to check if you are really that person on that network.

[More brainstorming on combining Microformats and OpenID]

In my time in London I have attended quite a few talks from Amazon people on their EC2 service that allows you to have an Elastic Computing Cloud, which can quickly scale up when your webservice lifts off, gets Dugg, or ends up on Slashdot. This cloud is easily scalable and the cool thing is that you only pay for the server power/storage/bandwidth that you use. At every one of these talks by Amazon though, people had two issues with EC2:

1. The physical hosting is located in the US, which means that any data you will store will fall under US copyright laws. Some people had some serious issues with this.
2. EC2 doesn’t really offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which means that they might take the service temporarily or permanently offline whenever they feel like it. This is obviously a risk to any business and means that people have been looking for alternatives.

One of the new alternatives is FlexiScale by the UK based company Xcalibre. A few startups like Huddle have already used their scalable servers and profited from their benefits when the product gained popularity. For a few bucks a month you can get a wide range of server options, fully scalable in storage, power, and numbers. Obviously they DO offer a SLA which means that this service is reliable for business.

The only problem I had was that their minimum option was still a bit expensive for me as a young/student developer to play with. I talked with the CEO Tony Lucas about this and he was willing to consider smaller packages as scaling down would be just as easy to them as scaling up. I’m looking forward to what they come up with.