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What Amazon EC2 needs to do, smaller instances better & better marketingJune 30 2009

Y’all know I love Amazon EC2. I think it’s a brilliant service that represents a good portion of the future of computing. It already offers many benefits over traditional hosting services and is really only getting started – many more benefits to come. It’s simply easier to build features and services on top of something virtual than it is to do so when you’re renting out specific bits of hardware.

I’ll tell you though, they’re missing a big boat by making their smallest instance cost $72/month. I started thinking about this since I’ve been working with Slicehost who’s cheapest tier is $20/month. That’s nothing, it’s an easy sell – when you’re in development mode it’s super cheap with a simple, simple upgrade path to a pretty beefy server. I love that.

I firmly believe that AWS could capture a pretty significant segment of the developer market by offering a “tiny” instance or perhaps a “developer/hobbyist” instance that would hover around the $20/month running full time. Because really, turning on and off an instance is beat and not always reasonable during a development phase. Ideally, this would be a tiny instance with enough resources to handle a couple people hitting it before keeling over. 512MB ram and a smaller processor (which would be a different model than they’ve been using so far, sure, bu

Breakfast Links: Wild Hamsters, Standing room only flights & China v Gold FarmingJune 30 2009

So France is in trouble with the EU for allowing the “greater hamster of Alsace”, the only wild hamster left in the world’s population to dwindle to about 250. Wild Hamsters! For shame, France! You have to admit that for a hamster, the greater hamster of Alsace is a pretty grandiose name. I hope that France doesn’t screw it up for everyone and gets these bad boys back on their feet. France – I’m watching you.

So China has a lot of people. These people, apparently, take a lot of flights. Further it seems that there must not be enough flights because a Chinese airline is looking to buy some jets that don’t have seats and are standing room only! Aside from the fact that that totally sucks, what about safety? I mean, the seat belt and the seat back are like the only 2 things that actually mean anything amongst the rest of the sham that is airplane safety procedures. They’re going to sit on like a stool with a seatbelt? Need to see some pictures of this. Any potential safety issues aside, would you take a standing flight somewhere if it was 20% cheaper than a sitting one? Short haul? Long haul?

And China again – this time it looks like they’ve banned gold farming, or actually,

iPhone 3G(S) Case Review: Fosmon & ClearCal v Power Support Air JacketJune 26 2009

So I had my iPhone 3G for 6 months, I walked out of the store having purchased the Power Support Air Jacket which came with two screen covers a regular and an anti-glare, I threw on the anti-glare. I was pretty unsatisfied with that case (although I did love the screen cover) that I decided I needed a new case for my 3GS, searching around Amazon, I decided to spend a whopping $2.35 on this Fosmon case from Young Micro – it looked like a slightly cheaper version of the old Cozip case which I had and loved for my original iPhone.

So, here’s my problem with that stupid Air Jacket. First up, it costs $35 and it’s one of these super thin cases that offers primarily scratch protection and probably a little drop protection depending on where it lands. It’s a one piece deal and for $35 I figured it must be awesome. It is not. Within one month you could already see the black coating wearing off significantly along the edges revealing an ugly clear plastic case underneath. It is only coated on the outside, so as soon as it rubs off you see straight through it. And after 6 months I’d say about 50% of the coating has rubbed off, it looks terrible. It showed significantly more wear than my ori

RIP Michael JacksonJune 26 2009

We rocked with you for too few years.

:(

The netbook backlash continues?June 25 2009

My one longtime reader knows that I’m not a believer in the more than short term success of the netbook as a mainstream consumer product. Despite ever more companies diving into the netbook market, with even telco’s getting in on the fun I think they’re in for a surprise as the market heads into decline.

A couple days back NPD published a study showing that only 58% of people where very satisfied with their purchase. Compare and contrast with the iPhone’s satisfaction report card. The dissatisfaction stems from the fact that many buyers assumed it would offer the same functionality as a regular computer and were distressed by it’s underpower CPU, tiny keyboard and tiny monitor.

This is exactly my point. Not that netbooks suck or that there’s no place in the world for them, but that they are a niche product. They will have a small group of users for whom they are the right product. It simply is not a mass market item – I’d guess that more than the underpowered CPU, the tiny screen and the tiny keyboard make them unsuitable for mainstream use.

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