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.

FOWA is all about webapps, so I was amazed to see a stand that had a cool piece of software running in Mac OS X. The company is Blurb, and their self publishing tool runs on both Windows and Mac. The choice for an offline editor for an online service is interesting but in the end actually quite understanding.

In a time of webapplications that make you order your businesscards using Flickr photos, and order your self published books via Lulu, it has become common practice to have an online editor for these physical products. Still, on the other hand there are tools like iPhoto and Picasa that make it more of a pleasure to use your photo library to make a physical product without doing the editing in a sometimes not perfect webapp. The BookSmart software of Blurb takes the middle road, allowing people to use online and offline libraries to publish via the webservice by Blurb.

The actual really thing that I noticed abotu Blurb was the fact that it is dirty cheap. Melinda and I have been looking at some other websites like QOOP to make a photobook or calendar for our parents for christmas, and the Blurb service is simply way cheaper. The quality is really good, as they had a wide range of their books lying around. They even did the “24 hours of Flickr” book, so the photo quality is guaranteed to be good.A simple softcover (18×18cm, 20-40 pages) photobook that you can style yourself will set you back €9.95, a large hardcover version (33×28cm, 20-40 pages) will cost you about €41,95. Compare this to QOOP this is at least €10 cheaper. More prices can be found here. Shipping is from Amsterdam, and if you use the promo code “FOWA” you will even get the shipping costs for free!

The only problem for now is that I can’t seem to get the BookSmart software to work with iPhoto ‘08, but I have reported the bug. I hope to show my first book someday soon.

I just noticed that another Future of Web Apps attendee “Second Brain“, much like MeeCard, was focussing on aggregating your online life (aka lifestream). I hadn’t noticed them in the two days and wonder if they were even there. This company though has made it’s service public already which makes analyzing and reviewing it a bit easier.

Unlike MeeCard and more like Jaiku, this app focusses a bit more on creating an online lifestream for you to share to others. I therefore would miss the option to use this site as an online businesscard (with lifestream aggregation). Further more I noticed there is no “aggregated” RSS feed that your friends could subscribe to, which would make it probably a more useful tool (add a new feed to you aggregation and your friends will be subscribed instantly!).It seems to be a cool trend of sites (I even have another one that I will review soon) that try and make it interesting for people with an active online social life to have one local repository to share their information and lifestreams. Still, I can’t see one that makes it a business.