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Back in early February, while aboard a red-eye to New York, Dave McClure wrote a long,
humorous, rambling, profanity-laden rant of a blog post that focused on startup business
models. While it makes for an entertaining read, McClure's post is also very insightful and makes
a solid case for why startups should shift from advertising models and instead build their new
businesses on subscriptions and micropayments. Earlier this month I had the chance to visit the
headquarters of ZooLoo, a startup that witnessed this very shift
first-hand with their own business model.
Sponsor
During my visit I spoke with Aaron Baer, Director of Communications at the Scottsdale-based
ZooLoo, a site that provides individuals with the ability to share and manage content on their
own domain. Like many startups in the past decade, ZooLoo opened for business under an
advertising business model, but eventually caught on to the changing trend McClure evangelized on
his blog.
"[ZooLoo's original model] was an advertising platform, we had a shopping page, we would do
affiliate marketing, you could buy and order prints off of our website - we had a very broad
business model," says Baer. "We discovered that didn't work."
They also realized that it wasn't the model their customers wanted. Under the old model, users
were presented with two options: a free basic service, and a premium service with more features
in an "all or nothing," fashion. Customers complained that they wanted to upgrade and purchase
premium services, but that they weren't willing to pony up the full price for a bunch of other
features they didn't want.
In January, ZooLoo fundamentally changed their business model by creating a storefront through
which customers could pick and choose features on a micropayment level. Now if a user wants to
purchase their own domain name, but doesn't want to pay for ZooLoo's SEO services, they can do
that instead of being forced into picking from a tiered package.
While customer feedback was a substantial motivator for the change, Baer says that potential
investors also played a role in the addition of the storefront. "The investors said, 'You have a
solid product, but I want to see you find a better way to package it, and a better way to sell
it'," he says.
And the change worked. Since adding their micropayment storefront, ZooLoo has seen an increase in
purchases of their premium services. The company is making more money marketing virtual goods in
a micropayment system than they were when they bundled everything together at a higher price and
relied on advertising and affiliate marketing. This is the exact paradigm shift in online
marketing that Dave McClure preaches in his post mentioned earlier.
"Gradually we are discovering that the default revenue model on the internet should probably be
the simplest one," writes McClure. "That is: basic transactions for physical or digital goods,
and recurring transactions (aka subscriptions) for repeat usage."
Without repeat usage, McClure says that the biggest obstacle in the way of getting users on board
with micropayments is that they forget their password. Honestly, if I was asked to login to my
Amazon or PayPal accounts right
now, I would be playing a guessing game with a handful of passwords because I don't use those
services too often. But for iTunes, Google and Facebook - the services
McClure says will be the leaders in eCommerce login in five years - I use those every day, and
surely remember my password.
ZooLoo realizes this too, which is why they foster repeat usage by connecting their services with
Twitter, Facebook, and other popular online social networks. Users can also log into ZooLoo using
Facebook Connect, which eliminates the problem of remembering a less frequently used password.
ZooLoo and Baer are fully on board with this emerging model, and suggest others hop on as well.
"There is this social media bubble forming where all these services are saying, 'We're free, come
use us!', but eventually those services need to make money," says Baer. "We think micropayments
are the next big thing."
As promised, the brand new 0.3 version of siggy is out
You can get the source code and package at garage, and it has also been uploaded to the
extras-devel repository. You can check the source code from its git repository as well.
When developing this version, my idea was to add some way to get information from the data stored
in the database. So I thought of two views. One of them would be a statistical view, where I
could check how I’ve been evolving during a period of time, showing totals, average values,
etc.
The other view would be a kind of chart representing the amount of money spent during a period in
each of the items defined in the application.
Some hours coding and this is the result:
What do you think? Could this be useful to you?
Unfortunately, the next mayor update is not out yet, so the limitation to move the package from
extras-devel to extras-testing is still there. Anyway, this can be seen as an advantage
For the upcoming 0.4 version, I have planned a couple of features requested by you:
The first one is adding support multiple accounts, just in case someone wants to handle more
than one of them.
The second one is adding to the expenses in the database some kind of unique id that would
allow synchronisation with a centralized service/database. This one opens a new and really
interesting functionality for the application: it could be used by workers from a company to
write down their work expenses. Periodically, the workers might sinchronize their expenses with
the central server, so they are automatically queued to be paid as allowances. Sounds cool,
doesn’t it?
If I have enough time, I will also add password protection to open the application
So, why the delay in the mayor update is an advantage? All these new features require changes in
the database tables, which means problems for those who have started to use the application using
a previous vesion. So, my advice is: test the application as much as you can, report bugs,
patches, translations, etc, but don’t start to use it regularly yet. Wait a bit more.
I’ll try to have the next version ready before the upcoming mayor update. This way, when
the update is out, you’ll be able to install the new version without migration problems
Anyway, if there’s someone who wants to start using it asap, just tell me, and I’ll
provide a script to update the database together with the new version.
I’m eager to get feedback from you!!
(Update: I put https URLs instead of http. Sorry! Should be fixed now.)
TechRepublic: "Should you change your passwords often? What's the risk if you
don't? Little did I know, listening to one podcast would cause me to rethink how I would answer
those questions."
Commenteer 1.0.5Commenteer is a drop utility for managing file comments in batch.
You can use the program for
Erasing comments
Setting comments
Appending extensions to comments
Prepending prefixes to comments
Listing comments
of a group of files.
Commenteer is part of the Limit Point Software Utilities Bundle :
http://www.limit-point.com/Utilities.html. Purchase a Utilities password to activate all the
utilities, including Commenteer. Updates are always free, new products always included!
WHAT'S NEWVersion 1.0.5:
A new operation called "Set Comments From EXIF Date" is now available. This operation sets
the comment of an image file to its EXIF, if one can be found.
On this week's clip joint, Spoom does a double take on the best film clips featuring identical
twins
Identical twins or "multiples" as I believe they're more correctly termed, in a slightly
unsettling, Minority Report sort of way, hold – for me, at least
– a unique fascination. Can you imagine having someone who looks exactly like
you hanging around all the time?
Actors probably wouldn't mind though. Any actor who loves themselves – and, if
we're being honest, that's probably the majority – would give their right arm
to play identical twins. What better way is there to show your range, your sheer, awards-worth
versatility, than appearing as two different people in the same movie? Plus: double screen time!
You do the maths.
No wonder they've proved popular fodder for the cinema, then – as Matt Lucas's
Tweedledum and Tweedledee double-act in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland reminds us. So in honour
of identical twins everywhere here are my top five onscreen siblings with the same face. Some are
controlling, some are sweet and some are ... well, some are something else.
Here are my picks, please give us yours below. And feel free to shout "Snap!" to any double post
...
1) Boris Karloff (with great hair) plays the De Berghman brothers in The Black Room, a sinister
tale with a strikingly good tagline: "Embraced by the Devil Monster ... his kiss the
password to oblivion!"
2) Warring sisters battle for the love of Glenn Ford in Curtis Bernhardt's 1946 melodrama A
Stolen Life. Bette Davis does all manner of strange and clever tricks with her face in this
amazing scene.
3) Ever wondered what two slightly fat, Nic Cages with afros would look like? Adaptation revealed
all. Here, cocksure Donald gives socially stunted Charlie some life advice in a swamp while
hiding from Meryl Streep.
4) Jeremy Irons creeps everybody out twice in David Cronenberg's classic Dead Ringers. Here we
have double trouble as the twins discuss another set of twins.
5) "Come and play with us, Danny!" An untempting offer in an endlessly-referenced scene from The
Shining.
On last
week's Clip joint, Becky Carroll dished our her own personal awards for the best film clips
featuring the Oscars. Here are her top prizewinners from your suggestions.
1) An Oscar-winning Matt Dillon takes his lead from Tom Hanks by inadvertently outing his
mentor in the 90s comedy In and Out.
2) Mike Myers makes a blatant Oscar
pitch with his tearful tour-de-force in Wayne's World. And in French, no less.
3) Does Myers have a monopoly on Oscar-themed comedy? Here he is again, getting shot
down by an award-wielding Steven Spielberg on the film of the the film of Austin Powers.
4) Veering off-topic but impossible to ignore: your foolproof guide to making the perfect
Oscar-bait blockbuster.
5) And the Oscar goes to ... Mr Wormold for reminding us that Robert Downey Jr
really was nominated for an Oscar for
playing a dude who was playing a dude who was playing for an Oscar. Here's Kirk Lazarus out of
Tropic Thunder.
Thanks to nodule, rossvross, windupbirdchronicles and steenbeck for taking the role of
gallant nominees.
Fancy writing Clip joint? Email Catherine
Shoard for more details.
Jeremy Colman, the ex-Auditor General for Wales, has appeared before magistrates on 14 charges of
making and possessing child sexual abuse images and failing to disclose a password....
This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a
unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion,
please see the details here. The series is made
possible by
Microsoft BizSpark.
Quick Pitch: DooID combines the basic ideas of business card websites and e-mail
signatures to create a useful service for everyone.
Genius Idea: DooID is a free business card website tool that lets you put an
attractive, accessible page together with all of your social networks, contact information and
work info in one place. You can also choose to make some information available only to users who
have access to a special “guest password.”
Inspired by Tim Van Damme’s beautiful
business card website, DooID is a nice option for users that want a way to showcase all of their
information, but either lack the time to handcode the JavaScript or CSS or don’t know where
to start.
When you sign up for the service, you choose a username that will become the basis for your DooID
URL. From that point, you fill in information you want to share. You can add in user profiles
from social networking sites like Twitter,
Facebook and more. Plus, you can add links to
other websites.
You can also choose to add your personal and business contact information. This information can
be publicly available, or you can choose to make things the details viewable only to users who
are given your guest password.
We really like that you can customize the look of your DooID. Here’s what mine looks like,
using one of the pre-built color templates and font options:
DooID has pro features that you can purchase for either $35.88 per year (or $2.99 per month) if
you pay at once or $3.99 per month. This lets you add an e-mail contact form, upload your CV as
PDF, have more control over your RSS feed, have access to more themes and also have access to an
iPhone version of the site for an enhanced mobile look.
DooID lets all users — pro or free — embed an easy link to their DooID onto their
website or on other social networks.
We really liked how easy it was to create a DooID, and think that this is a great idea,
especially for users that don’t have time to build something themselves. If we had any
requests, it would be that a) The Twitter icon get reversed (the “t” is currently
backwards) and b) That the pro option also include the ability to map to an external domain. Even
if domain mapping was a feature that cost more money, I think it would make DooID a really good
option for users looking for a good landing page.
Do you have a digital business card website? If so, how did you build it? Let us know!
Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the
latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of
investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned,
less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can
sign up today.
Buying and selling stock online is big business. It also carries it's own risks. And we don't mean
the risk of doing bad investments; we mean loosing access to your trading account because your
computer got infected by a keylogger.
Take a case of Mr. Valery Maltsev from St. Petersburg.
Maltsev runs an investment company called Broco Investments (available online at
www.brocompany.com).
Unfortunately (to him), Maltsev was yesterday charged by US Securities &
Exchange commission.
They claim that Maltsev's extraordinary gains in thinly traded NASDAQ and
NYSE stocks were not a co-incidence. Apparently Maltsev used malware with
keyloggers to gain access to other people's online trading accounts. With such accounts, he could
buy stocks at inflated prices, and use his real account to sell the same stock, for instant
gains.
Quoting from the SEC Complaint:
On December 21,2009, at 13:37, BroCo bought shares of Ameriserv
Financial, Inc (ASRV) at a price of $1.51 per
share. Approximately one minute later, three accounts at Scottrade were illegally accessed and used
to purchase shares of ASRV at prices ranging from $1.545 to $1.828 per share. While this was
happening, BroCo sold shares of ASRV at prices ranging from $1.70 to $1.80 per share, finishing at
13:52. By trading shares of ASRV within minutes of unauthorized trading through
the compromised accounts, Maltsev and BroCo grossed $141,500 in approximately fifteen
minutes, realizing a net profit of $17,760.
Here's the stock chart for Ameriserv Financial. You can clearly see the unusually high trading
levels on December 21st.
SEC claims that overall, Maltsev made more than $250,000. More details in the
original SEC Complaint
(PDF file)
And this is not the first time we've seen this. There was a very similar case in 2006, where Mr.
Jevgeny Gashichev was running a fake Estonian company called Grand
Logistics
His tactic was almost identical: he used keyloggers and phishing attacks to gain access to stock
trading passwords, inflated the price of a penny stocks and cashed in.
SEC claims that Gashichev made more than $350,000. Again, more details in the
original SEC Complaint
(PDF file)
C'est en lisant le dernier
GLMF que je suis tombé sur l'article de Carl Chenet sur le serveur Web Cherokee. Ce serveur libre (licence GPL)
s'annonce stable (comme Apache), rapide (plus qu'Apache) et facile à configurer
(pas comme Apache).Écrit en langage C, il propose en standard une interface Web de
configuration et un système de plugins permettant de facilement adapter le serveur à
nos besoins.
Nous allons donc voir le détail de l'installation de Cherokee sur une distribution GNU/Linux
Ubuntu 9.10 ainsi que sa configuration standard.
Une vidéo de mise en bouche
Avant de commencer, voici un screencast d'introduction à Cherokee (en Anglais):
Cherokee se trouve dans les dépôts standard d'Ubuntu. Seulement, la version disponible
date un peut (0.99.19-1build1 au moement de l'écriture de cet article). Heureusement, il
existe dans les PPA une version plus récente. On commence donc par ajouter le
dépôt PPA en question:
On teste l'installation en pointant son navigateur Web vers l'URL:
http://192.168.29.129/ (remplacer l'adresse IP par celle du serveur sur lequel
vous avez installé Cherokee...). La page suivante devrait apparaitre devant vos yeux
ébahis.
Si vous avez lu l'introduction vous avez noté qu'il y a une interface Web de configuration
(pas besoin d'aller trifouiller des tonnes de fichiers textes...). La configuration
cette interface d'administration (sic...) s'effectue grâce aux commandes suivantes:
cherokee-admin -b Login:
User:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
admin One-time Password: goixKrnGLTtV4nZt Web Interface:
URL:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
http://localhost:9090/
Il est possible de filtrer les adresses IP sources (celle qui on le droit d'administrer Cherokee
en utilisant l'option -b=192.168.29.100 seul la machine d'adresse IP
192.168.29.100 pourra accéder à l'interface d'adminsitration).
Il ne reste plus qu'a pointer son navigateur Web vers l'URL: http://192.168.29.129:9090
(ou http://localhost:9090 si vous êtes directement sur la machine).
Configuration de Cherokee
On commence la visite du propriétaire avec le menu Etat qui permet d'avoir
une vue sur votre serveur Web avec notamment un graphe sur la charge du serveur (grâce
à RRD):
On peut également y voir le répertoire par défaut ou doit être stocké le
contenu de votre site: "Default WWW:Â Â
 /var/www"
Par exemple on va créer la superbe page HTML suivante:
cd /var/www mv index.html index.html.old vi index.html Une belle page HTML
Il suffit de recharger l'URL http://192.168.29.129/ pour voir s'afficher la
page.
On poursuit par la découverte du deuxième menu de l'interface d'administration de
Cherokee: Général. L'onglet Réseau permet de
configurer le comportement de votre serveur. C'est notamment là qu'il faut activer le type
de graphe RRDtools afin d'avoir de beau graphes dans le menu Etat.
On passe ensuite à l'onglet Port à écouter qui comme son nom
l'indique permet de configurer les ports TCP en écoutes pour les requêtes HTTP (c'est
le port 80 qui est défini par défaut). Il est possible de configurer plusieurs ports
d'écoutes en HTTP et HTTPs (on reviendra sur ce point un peu plus loin):
On passe ensuite à l'onglet Permission du serveur ou l'on peut configurer
le nom et le groupe système avec lequel Cherokee va être lancé:
On passe ensuite à la partie que je trouve la plus intéressante par rapport aux autres
serveurs Web: la simplicité de création des Serveurs Virtuels.
Un serveur web virtuel permet d'associer un nom de machine (par exemple blog.mondomaine.com)
à une arborescence précise de mon serveur Web (par exemple /var/www/blog). Il est bien
sûr possible de créer autant de serveurs web virtuels que de besoins.
La première fonction permet d'ajouter simplement une association "nom de machine" /
"répertoire" (option Ajouter un nouveau serveur virtuel):
Pour le support du langage PHP (Cherokee supporte également le langage PHP via le module
php5-cgi, installé dans la première partie de cet article) sur un serveur virtuel
existant. Il faut cliquer sur le serveur en question dans la liste puis se rendre dans l'onglet
Behavior, cliquer sur le bouton Assistants puis choisir
PHP dans la liste (sous menu Langues) et enfin cliquer sur
Run Wizard:
La ligne PHP va être ajouté dans la liste des Behavior:
Il faut ensuite cliquer sur le radio bouton Final
On peut tester simplement la configuration en ajoutant un fichier de test index.php contenant les
lignes suivantes à la racine de votre serveur virtuel:
Et le résultat de l'URL http://192.168.29.129/index.php
Pour créer un serveur virtuel il est également possible de suivre un
Assistant qui va vous proposer d'installer pour vous une liste de services
(Liferay, Wordpress, Dupral, Zend, Trac, MoinMoin, PhpBB, ...).
Sécuriser les échanges
On va ici parler de HTTPs qui permet de chiffrer les échanges entre votre navigateur Web et
votre serveur Cherokee. Cette étape de configuration est bien sûr optionnelle.
On commence par configurer OpenSSL (le module qui va chiffrer) pour qu'il génère des
certificats dédiés à notre serveur (virtuel ou pas).
openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out serverdefault.crt -keyout serverdefault.key Generating a
1024 bit RSA private key ...........++++++ ......................++++++ unable to write 'random
state' writing new private key to 'serverdefault.key' ----- You are about to be asked to enter
information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is
what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some
blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left
blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:FR State or Province Name (full name)
[Some-State]:PACA Locality Name (eg, city) []:Cannes Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet
Widgits Pty Ltd]:Nicolargo Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name)
[]: Email Address []:
On copie alors les deux fichiers générés dans le répertoire /etc/cherokee:
This is the third entry in our exploratory series "Will One Company Dominate
the Cloud". Today we're blinking twice after reviewing the innovation engine at Amazon.
The Amazon AWS product is all about services. While others are marketing the cloud with an
explanation point, the cloud leader is focused on the raw building blocks. This includes
everything from storage to people. Amazon is learning how to find new ways to optimize
connections and monetize them in increments of time.
Sponsor
Amazon, the Verb: Motion
When thinking of Amazon as a verb, one word stands out, motion. When Amazon was first introduced
as the Internet bookstore, it immediately created a change in the landscape.
It seemed like the writing was on the wall for brick and mortar retail, and to a large degree, it
was. In a mere 15 years, it has disrupted the entire book vertical with an end-to-end digital
system. Amazon is now in the position to completely automate the flow of content bits from
upstream to downstream.
Now let's look at the AWS services to see if can it do the same for computing.
We'll analyze the services Amazon offers and how they work together, specifically in four areas:
computing, storage, networking, and people.
(Although we didn't include several areas in this roundup, including database and monitoring, we
see them as clear signs of momentum and scope of Amazon's evolution.)
Compute
We signed up (again, as a new user,) for EC2 to refresh ourselves
with its offerings and to remind ourselves what it means to be utility-based.
Amazon defines workload in relationship to the types of instances the company offers in the EC2
solution.
Windows on EC2 is
optimized around bringing a three-tier Windows web environment into the Amazon stack. It supports
ASP.Net, AJAX, IIS, and SQL Server. Amazon has also tuned it's network and storage offerings to
nicely plug into the Windows on EC2 package and offer seamless integration with existing Amazon
EC2 features like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic-Load Balancing,
and Elastic IPs.
IBM WebSphere is also supported on
EC2, and hosts a lineup of enterprise computing tools including the WebSphere Server, Portal
Server, DB2, Tivoli Monitoring, and Data Quality products. IBM mentions that one of the targets
is getting developers to use this model for getting development or proof-of-concepts projects up
and running quickly.
The patterns for firing up a new instance are defined as AMI (Amazon Managed Instances) so the
software has been appropriately targeted the infrastructure instance it will run within. IBM and
Amazon have set up Have extra licenses, or want to retire legacy hardware? IBM has an agreement
with Amazon to allow you to migrate your licenses to EC2.
The EC2 MapReduce is a service that targets large data
streams and optimizing processing of these data sets. It leverages the Hadoop Map Reduce project and provides as an example of
breaking the computer entirely into services.
The Map Reduce service doesn't just host an application stack, but is automatically configured
using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This is an example of an open-source
implementation project (though Apache) optimizing in such a way that it fits on the EC2 stack as
a core feature, and it has become a peer to the WebSphere or .Net patterns.
Storage
The storage offerings include S3, Elastic Block Storage, and Input/Output.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) has been out there
several years serving web based applications as their simple cloud away from home. Customers of
it have famously stood up their entire data solution for images and other key storage tasks based
on Amazon's S3 service. It's popular, well known, and evolving to include additional features
that enforce data level integrity like databases.
Elastic Block Storage is another storage service offered
by Amazon. Instead of being a simple, writable data service in the cloud like S3, it is focused
on EC2 instances that need storage as part of their footprint. An EBS can be built alongside the
EC2 instance that is 1GB to 1TB in size and can be mounted from that service. This is designed
for applications that expect raw physical storage locally addressed by the server.
Network
Amazon offers Elastic Load Balancing. Considering Amazon's
power as an elastic compute provider, this is a critical piece of the puzzle. Here, load can be
configured to continually monitor and self heal across a set of hosts, moving the resources
towards optimal performance.
The company also offers Virtual Private Cloud, which
enables an enterprise to segment access to a portion of Amazon's cloud with access control and
security enforcements (such as subnet, encrypted VPN).
People
An amazing thing about all of these services coming from Amazon, is that Amazon is a consumer
facing company with an amazing relationship with consumers.
Amazon has the ability to learn about us. We share our ideology (books we buy), lifestyle
(products we consume), and financial position (credit cards we use). The company has also
implemented an important part of identifying consumers by going deeper with services and
verifying identity.
The company implements a two-factor signup process that goes the extra step in granting
authorization to a user to change compute resources.
This second factor gives Amazon some assurance that the person really is that person, because in
addition to getting the credit card and password (which are network resources), it also calls out
to your phone to verify that the person logging in to the network has the phone (physical
resource) at the same time.
Here is step one: Signup
Here is step two: Verify PIN on your mobile phone:
And, step three, proceed (you are now free to spin up resources):
When combining these two things together, Amazon is in a position to easily bring its current
customer base to a two-factor security solution, and providing a service that meets government
level controls. And, with two factor credentials it's less likely that there will be automated
bots being deployed in Amazon's cloud by scripts or hackers.
Amazon is in the unique position to view the next generation computing fabric from the consumer
sales process. Amazon may be the only company in a position to see how it all pieces together,
even perhaps a longer view of the future supply chain than its new book competitor, Apple.
In addition to consumers and developers, Amazon also has the power of people as resources, with
the Mechanical Turk marketplace.
Need a simple task completed and queued for the Internet (of people) to execute on? Get started
with one of these sample scripts and draw legions to your command.
We find it compelling that Amazon has connected consumers, verified individuals, and tasks to be
executed on. These pieces are perhaps foundations for a broad appetite for connecting workers
with resources and optimizing along with way.
Banking with Amazon - or - Selling Time Instead of Licenses
The time value of money is the
value of money figuring in a given amount of interest earned over a given amount of time.
When signing up for the AWS features as a new user, we found ourselves asking looking at pricing
options that reminded us of bank products. Earn more by committing to 1, 2, or 3 years. Are the
Amazon Web Services an economy, and the individual services themselves currency?
First, let's look at Microsoft and its revenue. A server is sold, Microsoft gets a piece by the
sell of the OS. Part of this business model is very predictable (company gets x% of all PC
shipments. And part of it is a bit lumpy. Where consumers have choices, they may choose to
exercise them. For example, choosing Google Docs as an alternate to Microsoft Office, or
bypassing an entire OS update, such as Vista. These choices represent risk to Microsoft in its
revenue position.
Amazon, is increasingly using something more predictable to sell it's services, time. And the
nice thing about time, is that it's always ticking. So, instead of waiting for an entire "new
PC", or "OS update", Amazon's implementation of selling resources is triggered to contracts. And,
if this works, the consumer of the risk chooses the service longevity and the risk is reduced for
Amazon.
To put this in financial terms, the time value of money states. "The method also allows the
valuation of a likely stream of income in the future, in such a way that the annual incomes are
discounted and then added together, thus providing a lump-sum "present value" of the entire
income stream."
What this means, is that Amazon is going to understand value for its AWS users over the entire
life of their contract and can start to model interaction patterns against future events. For
example, if Amazon knows you have a 3 year contract for EC2, but you're 50% more likely to renew
it if it also has SimpleDB services, it can trigger events and discounts based on these service
connections. Here we see the EC2 reserved instance pricing chart. There is heavy discounting for
committing to a term.
From what we see, Amazon will be successful in gaining new efficiencies in pricing of computing
resources, like it did with books. We expect the company to successfuly squeeze out hard costs
that exist in the middle.
We feel that Amazon is the quiet cloud company that you can "go long" with in terms of it's
future value. Like the market itself, Amazon is a prime innovator in sharing the future into the
terms of the present.
Will cloud computing re-factor how we look at the technology stack for good, and will "payment"
be in the middle? If so, is time the business model?
I’ll make it quick so I can go back to watching TV:
Announcing my first attempt at a generic Django Developer
Kit, a CentOS (powered by rPath’s
conary) based software appliance with all you’d need to run a Django project.
Django Developer Kit Appliance
The current images are built on the development stage, which means it includes the very latest
Django 1.2 code line straight from the subversion
repository. Currently, the following packages make up the base appliance:
django
django-ajax-selects
django-authority
django-cache-memcached
django-contact-form
django-db-postgres
django-filter
django-notification
django-pagination
django-piston
django-profile
django-sorting
django-tagging
django-threadedcomments
file
gettext
httpd
less
mod_python
mod_ssl
mod_wsgi
mx
openssh-clients
openssh-server
openssl
PIL
postgresql-server
psycopg2
python-ctypes
python-markdown
python-memcached
python-urlgrabber
PyYAML
scgi
sendmail
south
sqlite
sudo
tar
vim-enhanced
I’m still working out the kinks and have decided to not include openssl by
default until I have a generic way of generating a certificate for the appliance. I will also be
adding tools such as git, mercurial, etc so that people can use
the appliance as a testing lab/environment for their own projects.
Once you’ve either installed the appliance or launched on EC2 or
ESX, make sure to visit your appliance’s htts://IP:8003
address to configure the administrative interface (log in as admin with
password as your password). Then click the Updates plugin to
get updates as I will be making changes between now and the time I publish this post.
Verizon seems to have posted a PDF listing some of the improvements in the yet-to-be-released
Motorola DROID 2.1 update. The update has a version number of AP: ESE53/BP: C_01.3E.03P
and goes on to list a litany of improvements and added feature:
Enhancements
Pinch-to-zoom is now available when using the browser, Gallery, and Google Maps.
New Weather and News application plus widget.
The Weather and News app pulls the information you want from the
Web and brings it to your fingertips. You get weekly and hourly
weather forecasts based on your location, and news headlines.
New support for voice-to-text entry.
Whenever a text-entry box appears, simply tap the microphone icon on the virtual keyboard
and speak.
New Gallery application with 3D layout. View and share photos taken with your phone and
images from your online Picasa Web albums.
Live Wallpapers offer richer animated, interactive backgrounds on the
home screen. Access them with a long press anywhere on the home screen. Tap Wallpapers, then
Live Wallpapers.
Improvements
Free Yahoo!Â@ Mail is now supported—simply sign in with your Yahoo!
email address and password.
Google Maps update
Personalized suggestions and synchronized starring with
desktop maps.google.com.
Starred items are stored and synced automatically between Google
Maps on your device and maps.google.com on your computer, making it easy to search for
places you’ve searched for before.
New night mode in Google Maps Navigation automatically changes the screen at night for
easier viewing.
Improved pattern-lock functionality.
Improved handset audio when disconnecting a wired headset.
Email accounts no longer need to be re-entered after an over-the-air update.
Opera's latest mobile browsers are all grown up
and ready to leave beta! Opera Mini 5 is good to go on your BlackBerry or other Java-ready phone,
and Opera Mobile 10 is out for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. Opera Mini for Android and WinMo
are still in beta, and there's no sign of that rumored Opera Mini for iPhone yet. However, these
latest stable versions of Opera's pocket-sized browser represent a nice jump forward from their
predecessors, Opera Mini 4.2 and Opera Mobile 9.6.
If you've been playing with the beta versions of these browsers, there won't be many surprises for
you in terms of features. Opera Link, the bookmark syncing feature, has been re-introduced, and
there are some noticeable performance and UI tweaks in Opera Mobile. If you're upgrading from Mini
4.2 to Mini 5, though, prepare to be blown away. Mini 5 is a lot faster, and it introduces tabs, a
password manager, and Opera's famous Speed Dial homepage.
Pour les besoins du boulot, je me suis récemment plongé dans les différents
logiciels de gestion de projets. J'en avais sorti quelques uns du lot en fonction de
critères qui nous sont propres, à savoir : Redmine, DotProject, Collabtive,
...
Une seconde, puis une troisième sélection ont laissé en lice Redmine et
DotProject.
DotProject - en dehors de son interface pour le moins vieillotte - avait semblé
répondre à nos attentes, mais voilà : la dernière version
stable n'est pas compatible PHP 5.3, et la branche 2.0 du logiciel ne semble plus évoluer
au profit de la future version 3 qui sera basée sur Zend Framework. Cette
ré-écriture n'en est qu'à son tout début. Pas très engageant
que tout cela...
Redmine de son côté semble bénéficier d'un développement
très régulier, et d'une communauté relativement importante et vivante. Un
hic : c'est du ruby-on-rails ; et je ne connais pas le moins du monde
cette technologie.
Autre «Â souci » à prendre en considération, le
serveur sur lequel devra tourner cette application est sous CentOS et non sous
Fedora ; je vais y revenir sous peu...
Donc, je me lance, je récupère une version 0.8 de Redmine que j'essaie d'installer
sur mon PC du boulot, en Fedora 12. Pas trop de problèmes à noter, j'ai
balbutié un peu et me suis complètement cassé les dents lorsque j'ai voulu
brancher apache sur l'installation...
Entre temps, je découvre qu'une demande de revue a été faite sur le Bugzilla pour
redmine ! Youpi En y
regardant de plus près, la page des pré-requis de
Redmine m'apprend que la version de Rails de Fedora 12 n'est pas suffisante
(2.3.4)Â ; de même que la version de Rack (1.0.0). Je vérifie sous Fedora
13, on a un Rails en 2.3.5 et un Rack en 1.1.0. Ça devrait aller.
Oui, mais... ça devrait La version
de Rack requise est la version 1.0.1, strictement. Ni la version 1.0.0, ni la version 1.1.0 ne
fonctionnent ! En local et à des fins de tests, il est toujours possible
d'installer la bonne version du composant avec la commande :
$ gem install rack -v 1.0.1
Il est bien entendu hors de question que je lance une telle commande avec un utilisateur
privilégié, la bonne version de rack reste donc installée sur un compte
utilisateur local ; du coup, l'intégration dans apache ne fonctionne pas (ben
oui, la version système de rack n'est pas la bonne, suivez un peu ). Un petit
coup d'oeil sur ma CentOS m'apprend que de ce côté je ne dispose pas non plus de la
bonne version de Ruby, etc. Y'a plus qu'à ; comme dirait l'autre.
Dans un premier temps, je crée un utilisateur dédié à ce
service :
# useradd -r -m redmine
Ensuite, je récupère la dernière version du trunk de Redmine
(récupérer cette version n'est pas une obligation, bien loin de
là ; mais l'intégration il y a quelques jours de la notion de
sous-tâches directement dans Redmine m'intéressait au plus haut point :-p ).
$ svn co http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk ./redmine
Voyons à installer les versions de Ruby et consorts dont nous avons besoin. J'ai
re-compilé un certain nombre de paquets sur mon dépôt personnel EL5 (en
version 64bits uniquement) à cet effet :
ruby
rubygems
rubygem-actionmailer
rubygem-actionpack
rubygem-activerecord
rubygem-activeresource
rubygem-activesupport
rubygem-fcgi
rubygem-mocha
rubygem-rack
rubygem-rails
rubygem-sqlite3-ruby
ruby-mysql
ruby-RMagick
ImageMagick-6.5.8.10
Pour bénéficier de ces versions, vous pouvez soit les récupérer sur
mon dépôt à l'adresse http://rpms.ulysses.fr/el5/x86_64/Â ; soit
installer mon dépôt :
Pour ensuite installer les programmes (ruby-RMagick n'est requis que pour l'export PNG des
diagrammes de Gantt. Vous pouvez l'omettre si cette fonctionnalité ne vous est pas utile
)Â :
/! ATTENTION /! Ce dépôt personnel est intrusif et remplace des paquets de
base de CentOS. Ne l'activez pas par défaut, ou alors à vos risques et
périls.
Nous voilà parés ; tous les composants logiciels sont présents,
nous pouvons procéder à l'installation. Dans un premier temps, créons notre
base MySQL (PostgreSQL est également supporté, référez-vous à
la documentation de Redmine pour connaître la procédure à
suivre)Â :
$ mysql -u root -p mysql> create database redmine character set utf8; mysql> create user
'redmine'@'localhost' identified by 'my_password'; mysql> grant all privileges on redmine.* to
'redmine'@'localhost'; mysql> flush privileges;
Depuis le dossier où vous avez stocké votre Redmine (/var/www/redmine dans mon
cas), copiez le fichier config/database.yml.example vers config/database.yml puis
éditez-le de la sorte :
Les variables sont bien entendu à renseigner en fonction des choix que vous avez faits.
Notez l'ajout de l'entrée socket sans laquelle je m'étais heurté
à de jolies erreurs (il semblerait que ce soit un bogue d'un des composants ruby).
Redmine permet l'utilisation de diverses instances (production, développement, ...). Vous
devrez donc dupliquer les informations relatives à la base dans les différentes
instances que vous souhaitez utiliser. Une fois de plus, référez-vous à la
documentation de Redmine pour en savoir plus à ce sujet.
Puisque j'ai utilisé une version SVN ultérieure à la révision
3055 ; j'ai eu à lancer la commande :
$ rake generate_session_store
Initialisons ensuite la base de données, et profitons-en pour y placer quelques
données par défaut :
$ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate (in /var/www/redmine) == Setup: migrating
========================================================== -- create_table("attachments",
{:force=>true}) -> 0.0812s [...] $ RAILS_ENV=production rake redmine:load_default_data (in
/var/www/redmine) Select language: bg, bs, ca, cs, da, de, el, en, es, eu, fi, fr, gl, he, hr, hu,
id, it, ja, ko, lt, nl, no, pl, pt, pt-BR, ro, ru, sk, sl, sr, sv, th, tr, uk, vi, zh, zh-TW [en]
fr ==================================== Default configuration data loaded.
Fort bien ! Nous avons désormais une installation de Redmine fonctionnelle
Certains répertoires doivent être accessibles en écriture, mais le checkout
svn ayant été fait avec l'utilisateur redmine qui se chargera de lancer le
serveur de tests, nous n'avons pas à nous en préoccuper... Lançons donc ce
fameux serveur :
$ ruby script/server webrick -e production => Booting WEBrick => Rails 2.3.5 application
starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000 => Call with -d to detach => Ctrl-C to shutdown server
[2010-03-16 20:15:58] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2010-03-16 20:15:58] INFO ruby 1.8.6 (2010-01-11)
[x86_64-linux] [2010-03-16 20:15:58] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=14469 port=3000
Et voilà ; en vous connectant à http://monhote:3000 vous
accéderez à votre instance Redmine. admin est le login et le mot de passe
par défaut. Vous aurez peut-être à ouvrir le port 3000 pour la durée
de ce test, ne l'oubliez pas
Vient ensuite la mise en ligne de l'application... À des fins de tests, je me suis
risqué à essayer une technique très peu orthodoxe depuis apache... Mais qui
n'a pas fonctionné comme escompté. Voici le fichier de configuration que j'avais
utilisé (en substance)Â :
Un peu barbare, certes, mais c'était pour tester «Â rapidement ».
Cette configuration a d'ailleurs fonctionné... Sur certains postes Sur d'autres,
j'avais la page de login correcte ; et une fois loggué ; plus de
CSS ni de JS. Pas top donc. J'ai décidé de pousser le test plus loin, et d'utiliser
le mod_fcgid pour accéder à cette application. Il faudra pour ce faire
installer les composants qui vont bien :
N'oubliez pas de spécifier ensuite quelle instance de Redmine devra être
démarrée (production, development, ...). Pour ce faire, éditez le fichier
config/environment.rb puis décommentez (et éditez au besoin) la ligne :
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'
Pour vérifier que ça ne va pas vous claquer de suite entre les doigts, essayez
simplement de lancer le dispatch.fcgi en ligne de commande (vous pouvez ignorer sereinement les
erreurs sur les accès aux fichiers de log pour l'heure)Â :
$ /var/www/redmine/public/dispatch.fcgi
Enfin, une fois que tout est OK, relancez votre serveur apache :
# service httpd restart
Et admirez le résultat
Il m'est arrivé, en fonction des configurations, que ça ne fonctionne pas comme
escompté... Dans ce cas, l'une des premières choses à faire, est de
commenter les ifModule (et leur contenu, évidemment) pour les mod_cgimod_fastcgi ; ça ma «Â sauvé la
vie »
An anonymous reader writes "ElcomSoft accelerates the recovery of Wi-Fi passwords and
password-protected iPhone and iPod backups by using ATI video cards. The support of ATI Radeon 5000
series video accelerators allows ElcomSoft to perform password recovery up to 20 times faster
compared to Intel top of the line quad-core CPUs, and up to two times faster compared to
enterprise-level NVIDIA Tesla solutions. Benchmarks performed by ElcomSoft demonstrate that ATI
Radeon HD5970 accelerated password recovery works up to 20 times faster than Core i7-960, Intel's
current top of the line CPU unit."
Résultat du test : Succès.Freebox trouvé (212.27.38.253) en 47 ms.
------------------
Connexion Freeplayer
--------------------
Résultat du test : Succès.
Je ne sais pas quoi faire avec cette erreur, fptest me dit que j'ai mal renseigné mon
login/password mais j'ai bien vérifié et c'est bon.
Idem pour les CGV, j'ai accépté les dernieres en date de janvier 2010.
De plus par rapport aux autres rapport que j'ai observé ici, je trouve que j'ai beaucoup de
ligne lors de la detection de la Freebox, c'est normal ?
"Today, Opera Software released the final versions of the world's most popular mobile Web
browsers, Opera Mini 5 and Opera Mobile 10. Now, nearly any mobile phone can support an
Opera-driven Web experience, complete with unmatched speed, style and cost savings. Simply go to
m.opera.com/ to download it directly to your phone today. Today's release puts the finishing
touches on the Opera mobile-browsing duo. The focus is on delivering the best Internet experience
on nearly any mobile phone, along with a unified look and feel and innovative favorite features,
such as Speed Dial, password manager and tabbed browsing."
Opera Mini 5 for Windows Mobile is actually still in beta, though Opera Mobile 10 has indeed lost
its beta tag and is now available as an official release. Head on over to Opera and grab it. It's free and widely seen
as a better alternative to Internet Explorer.
A website that sorts everyday the most relevant information to you.
Vote for the news and Matoumba will learn your tastes and the information that you like the most.
It is all FREE!
Find here the history of the stories you found interesting.
Show this to people who share the same interests as you,
and if they use Matoumba, their own votes will fine recommandations to you.
Back in early February, while aboard a red-eye to New York, 
This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a
unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion,
please see the details 
Name: 
Billet original de 
This is the third entry in our exploratory series "
Now let's look at the AWS services to see if can it do the same for computing.
We'll analyze the services Amazon offers and how they work together, specifically in four areas:
computing, storage, networking, and people.
We signed up (again, as a new user,) for EC2 to refresh ourselves
with its offerings and to remind ourselves what it means to be utility-based.
The EC2 MapReduce is a service that targets large data
streams and optimizing processing of these data sets. It leverages the 
The storage offerings include S3, Elastic Block Storage, and Input/Output.
Amazon offers 
En y
regardant de plus près, la page des 
La version
de Rack requise est la version 1.0.1, strictement. Ni la version 1.0.0, ni la version 1.1.0 ne
fonctionnent ! En local et à des fins de tests, il est toujours possible
d'installer la bonne version du composant avec la commande :
). Un petit
coup d'oeil sur ma CentOS m'apprend que de ce côté je ne dispose pas non plus de la
bonne version de Ruby, etc. Y'a plus qu'à ; comme dirait l'autre.
)Â :
Sur d'autres,
j'avais la page de login correcte ; et une fois loggué ; plus de
CSS ni de JS. Pas top donc. J'ai décidé de pousser le test plus loin, et d'utiliser
le mod_fcgid pour accéder à cette application. Il faudra pour ce faire
installer les composants qui vont bien :
Billet original de 
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
