Categories
blogging Business DocSearls marketing social media socialmedia VRM

Doc is Mad as Hell, and He’s not going to take it anymore

Wow, Doc Searls is fired up about the potential Google phone, based on the Business Week story. Bweek talks about targeted ads popping up on your mobile as you go through the world, but based on your preferences and actual behaviors.

Doc’s take: He wants to tell advertisers what he wants, not be made into a profile:

Tools on my phone that let me tell sellers what I want, and on my terms
– and not just on theirs. Whether that’s a latte two exits up the
highway, next restaurant that serves seared ahi, or where I can buy an
original metal slinky…
I want to be able to notify the market of my shopping or buying
intentions without revealing who I am, unless it’s on mutually
agreed-upon terms….Quick, who wants their cell phone to be a “mini marketing machine”?

There’s more to read, and this is a great discussion about what Doc and others have been calling VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management – “the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.”

Worth checking out.

Categories
meetings web2.0

Today’s meeting – Amazon Web Services “Startup Project”

I’m at Cooper Union, learning about the Amazon Web Services efforts. My old friend Mike Culver, one of the AWS evangelists, is on stage talking about it. Below are notes – in draft, with errors and typos. Just sharing what I’m learning, in real time.

Amazon – AWS was past the “experiment” stage 4 years ago. This is an ongoing business they believe will generate cash.
They’re running a contest these days. which will provide a winner a whole bunch of amazon web services credit, plus consulting/advice, and a potential investment.

AWS helps with the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” in implementing a startup’s tech plan – hosting, ops, load balancing, etc – basically the “web scale computing” of a business.

Virtualization is one of the best ways to scale infrastructure.

AFPS – Amazon Flex Payment service. Flexibility – you control which end pays fees, other scripting for behaviors, multiple payment services. Support for micro-payments. Can charge existing Amazon customers using their on-file info.

Buxfer.com – can setup expense tracking and payments, or IOUs.

Simple Storage Service – a distributed object store in the cloud. Put objects (files, but w/o the file system semantics) into data center- replicates across multiple data centers, multiple servers. Serious help with software downloads (Second Life).
G.ho.st State – storing the state of someone’s web desktop.
Hanzo:Web – social web archiving – saving the web as an archive via S3 and EC2 as their web site and crawling.

EC2 – Elastic Compute Cloud – Full root access to a blank linux server. 3 Flavors of Amazon machine images. Public AMIs- templates to get running immediately. Private AMIs – customized ones. Paid one – set a price for yours and let others purchase it and use it.

Example of a Pentagon project- wanted 30k of Hardware for a prototype – did it on EC2 for $5.

Simple Queue Services – a distributed queue in the cloud – used for storing messages, or work flow. Example – can send off a credit card transaction, and queue waits for it, while your app continues to perform.

Simple App – uploads files to S3, acted upon by EC2, items held in queue if they’re not able to be acted on yet. If the EC2 is falling behind the queue, spins up more instances of EC2 and handles it.

Mechanical Turk – XML requests in a queue to be performed by people. Examples – Steve Fosset search, Mobile Phone application testing.

THe commercial side:
Standard licensing terms, etc.

First Client Presentation – Phanfare – hosted family images, video etc.
They’d like a reliability SLA not just a availability SLA,need phone support, Windows virtual machine support, peering relationships for hosting companies.

Max of Mogulus – a very cool video app – UGS to large video companies, live, 24×7 TV station. All built on Amazon.
They use AWS as an ECN (content network).

Cruxy.com – digital marketplace, video transcoding, providing music into Second Life, player in 2nd life that streams media and music via S3.
MUX:Video Transcoding – Any-to-any video transcoding. There’s an end-user version or an API based version for non-commercial use- but there’s a commercial model for hosted transcoding like a Video Transcode cloud using a Paid AMI (amazon image).

Announcing a new marketplace for foo/lib – a technical knowledge marketplace, announcing this now, today, at this event. They can now spin up different marketplaces with different niches, using EC2, and Flexible payment services.

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Categories
Uncategorized

Who Was I, September 11, 2001?

Written on 9/11/2003, but still relevant. Sorry about the formatting.

Categories
Uncategorized

September 11, 2007 – We remember them

American Flag over America’s Camp

The flag, flying over America’s Camp, 2007.

Phoenix created by the children of America’s camp

The Phoenix created by the Children of America’s Camp, now at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Lenox, MA.

Update: A poem often read at America’s Camp by Danny Metzger:

We Remember Them

In the rising of the sun and its going down,
We Remember Them.

In the bowing of the wind and in the chill of winter,
We Remember Them.

In the opening of the buds and in the rebirth of spring.
We Remember Them.

In the blueness of the skies and in the warmth of summer,
We Remember Them.

In the rustling of the leaves and in the beauty of autumn.
We Remember Them.

In the beginning of the year and when it ends,
We Remember Them.

When we are weary and in need of strength,
We Remember Them.

When we are lost and sick of heart,
We Remember Them.

When we have joys and special celebrations we yearn to share,
We Remember Them.

Sp long as we live, they too shall live, for they are part of us.
We Remember Them.

~From the Jewish Book Of Prayer~

Categories
blogging social media socialmedia

Blogs Teaching Blogging

I haven’t had much time to update my own blog, but I have been collecting advice from others about how to effectively blog, for some training I’ll be doing for a client.

Much of my research is documented here http://del.icio.us/howardgr/blogging so everyone can benefit from what I’ve found. Let me know which ones are the most helpful.

Finally, a shout out to Deborah Schultz, who has been incredibly generous with some of her own materials. Deborah, in addition to being a great friend, is a fantastic social media consultant you should hire (if I’m not available :-).