austinpreneur

Tesla colors and options locked in!

Well its official - I've locked in the options for Tesla Roadster #83. Those who know me well will find it no surprise that I selected Very Orange for the exterior color with black and orange leather seats inside. Other than that, there wasn't too much decide besides the various "Signature 100" badges and plaques within the car. I opted for the interior plaque and door sills but skipped on the exterior badge. I like the outside to be as clean as possible with as few decals as possible. I took the "Cayenne Turbo S" badge off the back of my Porsche because I thought it was just too flashy.

Deliverability.com makes it into marketing.alltop.com

I'm proud to announce that Deliverability.com has been selected as one of the top marketing blogs for Alltop.com.

Deliverability.com is the best blog that covers email deliverability and email marketing. It has regular contributors from all of the top email marketing companies and the prime source of news, rumors and commentary from the industry insiders.

Keep your head in the clouds

I'm a big fan of cloud computing, in particular Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com. Anywhere that I can outsource the actual hosting and management of computer systems I usually do.

With OtherInbox, we've been pretty religious about it. The only computers we own are the laptops and desktops that people work on.

• We host our email and shared calendars on Google Apps
  
• We use Google Docs as our wiki and for shared word processing and spreadsheets
  
• We host our website and blog at TypePad
  
• We host our version control software at CVSDude
  
• We send our outbound email through DNSExit
  
• We host our DNS with DynDNS
  
• We send out customer surveys with SurveyMonkey
  
• We test our software on many different platforms using CrossBrowserTesting.com
  

But probably most critical to our cloud strategy is hosting our production web servers and database servers on Amazon EC2 platform and using their S3 platform for backups and serving up static web files. We also use the SQS service to coordinate all our servers.

So what is all this talk about cloud computing? How can you take advantage of it in your current web application? What's the same and what's different?

From what I've seen, there are three major steps in moving from a traditional dedicated server architecture to one that takes full advantage of the unique benefits of the cloud.

1. Replace dedicated servers with cloud-based virtual servers
   
2. Move bottleneck code into modular work queues
   
3. Move database or persistent storage to an incremental solution

In upcoming posts I'll discuss each of those three steps in more detail.

Once you get to step three, you have a highly redundant architecture that scales incrementally. You only pay for what you use, so if you are busy in the afternoons but slow at night you can turn on twice as many servers at peak time without having to pay for keeping them standing by idle the rest of the day. If you suddenly get a lot of publicity and see rapid growth, extra capacity is sitting there waiting for you to use it and the architecture is ready to scale automatically. An the whole thing is probably CHEAPER than having dedicated servers!

Channel Intelligence patents the Wish List

On Dec 28, 2001, Channel Intelligence filed a patent covering the "invention provides a method for configuring a database system to store information regarding a plurality of items." Translation? They patented the idea of storing a list of items in a database on the Internet. Huh?

Apparently, they have now decided to sue some ecommerce sites for having "wish lists" on their site. So they invented the wish list?

Forgetting for a second that Amazon was doing it long before everyone, those of us at Trilogy during the dotcom bubble will remember that IveBeenGood.com was offering wish list functionality in October 1999, more than 2 years before the Channel Intelligence patent was filed.

You can see the actual patent here. It's pretty ridiculous.

2 free VIP tickets to Steve Almaraz Boxing Match at Austin Music Hall on Saturday, July 26

ONE NIGHT, ONE TITLE - STEVE ALMARAZ

Saturday, July 26
Doors/Bar @ 7 pm | Event @ 7:30 pm
Austin Music Hall

Tower Club VIP Tickets include:

• Free Valet Parking
  
• Reserved seating in Tower Club VIP section
  
• Drink service in your seats
  
• Tower Club VIP Bar
  
• Tower Club VIP Bathrooms
  
• Tower Club VIP Balcony
  

Note that these seats have VIP service but are located up high above the ring, not ringside.

2 tickets available.
Email tickets2008@austinpreneur.com if you'd like themSorry the tickets have been claimed. Have fun Jim!

FundingSleuth.com sends email alerts when companies raise money

First Round Capital released a cool new tool for entrepreneurs and investors called FundingSleuth.com. It lets you enter in companies to watch and automatically sends an email alert if that company files a sale of securities with the SEC.

If you work for a funded company, you should sign up and watch your employer. If you are an entrepreneur, you should watch your own company so that you know when your fundraising becomes public information. If you're an investor, you should watch your portfolio so that you know about other fundraising. If you're just really interested in a particular startup, you might want to monitor their fundraising.

Thanks for this cool, free tool!

Great introductory video about Twitter

A few weeks ago I came across this entertaining, three minute introduction to Twitter, created by Common Craft. It does a great job explaining the benefits of Twitter and also uses this funky, low-tech production technique with a video camera and paper cutouts that is innovative and fun to watch.

If you have heard about Twitter but haven't started tweeting yet, I highly recommend you take a look!

Unfortunately, they aren't taking on any custom projects right now. If you know of anyone who is capable of producing a video like that please let me know because I want to make an introductory video for OtherInbox.

Noise canceling cell phone

Did you ever notice that people on cell phones talk really loud but people on landlines often whisper into the phone? I've heard that the reason is because you can actually hear your own voice in the speaker on a landline but you can't on a cell phone, and without that feedback we make our voices louder. Another theory I've heard is that when people can't hear the other party well, they instinctively talk louder.

Regardless of why it happens, it definitely happens. And if you're not the one on the phone, its really annoying. I was riding a train in Boston a few months ago and even though I was sitting at one end of the train car I could hear a woman gabbing away on her cell phone at the other end of the train car and it was so annoying that I moved to a different train car. And these are big train cars! Can you imagine how bad its going to be when you can use a cell phone on a plane?

One approach is to try and get people to talk without making any sound but I think that's unlikely to catch on (I saw this demo of a band you where on your neck that senses the impulses of speech without you actually having to make noise - can't find the link to it right now).

What we need is some sort of noise canceling cell phone that would pick up your voice for transmission but would cancel it out from spreading to those around you. That cell phone would sell faster than iPhones... 3G is great but imagine the privacy of being able to talk without everyone around you listening? This would be viral in that you have an incentive to get everyone else to use it (so they don't bother you!).

Will somebody please invent this? Bose maybe?

Come learn Ruby on Rails on August 2nd

If you've been hearing about Ruby on Rails and wondering what all the fuss is about, come spend a Saturday learning Ruby on Rails with a group of experienced Rails developers as your guide. The program will outline the major pieces of Rails and dellve into the practial aspects of building web applications with the framework. Hands-on work on your own laptop will be encouraged during the work session.

Major topics will include:

• Some Ruby Basics
  
• Broad Rails Overview
  
• Building a Rails Application From the Ground Up
  
• Active Record Models and Database Migrations
  
• Views, Controllers, and Helpers: A Guided Tour
  
• Application Deployment with Capistrano 2
  
• App Lab

We'll be hosting the event on August 2nd from 10am to 5pm at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices. Space is limited so reserve your spot today!

Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday July 22nd

On Tuesday, July 22nd we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

Lightning Talks!
For our first segment this month, we are going to open up the floor for lightning talks, so please start thinking about what you would like to share now. We'll allow for 5 minutes or so per speaker, but no more than 10, and we'll fit in as many as we can. Good ideas for a talk might be a tool or technique you've learned recently, a new Rails project you've developed, a brief tutorial on a process or library you've found helpful. Etc! Should be fun.

Merb: The "Came for Rails, Stayed for Ruby" Framework
Merb is the pocket rocket framework that's creating buzz in the Rails community. Merb is fast. Merb is modular. Merb is efficient. And Merb might be the best choice for your next project. And it might not.

This presentation will provide an overview of the philosophy behind Merb, the 0.9 rewrite, where Merb is headed, and how it can compliment Rails. We will quickly dive into checking out Merb's internals, a few Merb plugins, and how you can get involved in the Merb project. Merb is a great example of a ruby project done right, and we'll highlight a few features that Merb knocks out of the park while helping your determine if merb is right for you.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. Since April 2008, they have been using Merb + DataMapper on new client applications.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Venture-backed IPO recession?

This BusinessWeek video clip points out that there were only 5 venture-backed IPO's in the first quarter of 2008 and ZERO venture-backed IPO's in the second quarter. The VC's blame Sarbanes-Oxley, picky entrepreneurs and globalization as the cause and suggest that we make a concerted effort to save venture capital by raising awareness and easing some expensive accounting requirements.

Hat tip to Barry Thornton

Posting from TypePad iPhone app

I'm testing out the new TypePad iPhone application. This is a picture of the cookies I baked last night, taken and uploaded with my iPhone.

I'll be at the Barton Creek Apple store tomorrow at 7am if anyone wants to join me!

(I had to come back after posting this and reformat it from my computer to make the image smaller and remove some whitespace)