Archive for October, 2009
There’s a new Amazon acronym to learn. RDS stands for Relational Database Service and it is the newest addition to Amazon’s suite of web services. Unlike previous data services from Amazon such as SimpleDB, RDS is relational (our profiles for the SimpleDB API and new RDS API). In fact, it’s a MySQL 5.1 instance but the main difference is that it is hosted on a virtual server instance in Amazon’s data center. And it can expand and contract as needed, programmatically. Like the Amazon APIs before it, RDS was built to provide developers access to Amazon’s infrastructure, with pay-as-you-go pricing based on your usage.
Amazon’s announcement post explains a bit more:
Using RDS APIs or the command-line tools, you can access the full capabilities of a complete, self-contained MySQL 5.1 database instance in a matter of minutes. You can scale the processing power and storage space as needed with a single API call and you can initiate fully consistent database snapshots at any time.
The service is currently in beta. Each account will be limited to 20 databases during that period, but each can store up to one terabyte of data. That’s a lot of tweets and status messages.
There are fees, of course. Storage costs 10 cents per GB per month, based on the total amount allocated. Hourly usage is charged based on the size of the database instance and ranges from 11 cents per hour up to $3.10 per hour for 68 GB of RAM, a hefty database. There is also a 10 cent fee for every million I/O requests.
Om Malik says Amazon is wooing corporate customers:
Relational databases are hard to maintain, and doing so eats up a lot of corporations’ time. Nor do they scale easily, which means that Amazon may have built a compelling product for enterprise customers seeking to move to the cloud.
Indeed, savings on servers could be not nearly as important as saving employee time. Or, unfortunately, companies could look to save an employee or two if some database administration becomes automated.
Look for this service to also be popular with small, data-centric startups. Much as Amazon S3 (our Amazon S3 API profile) has been used by many–from no-names to Twitter–for storing profile images and other files in the cloud, RDS could be the next step in sequence.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
With Apple having followed through on its promise to dump the ZFS file system, and Oracle still preparing to take over Sun any time now, we should consider the future of the technology, and perhaps the OpenSolaris operating system it rides on.
OpenSolaris was Sun’s attempt to secure a future for what had been its proprietary Unix. It has some advantages over Linux, on which its advocates will gladly bend your ear over a couple of beers.
But there’s a curious thing about technical advantages in the age of open source. They don’t matter as much as they once did. After all, if open source can compete with proprietary products that have decades’ head start and armies of programmers behind them, how big is an open source program’s technical details?
Open source has taught some hard lessons.
It’s pretty clear that the programming of a few little features don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy software world. Oracle has its Unbreakable Linux program in which it has invested heavily. Does it really make sense for Oracle to keep carrying OpenSolaris, or is it time for Larry Ellison to tell it, “Here’s looking at you, kid” and just walk away?
Best movie ever? You decide at Amazon.com.
Filed under: Audio, Beta, Search, Web
Online video site Blinkx is branching out into music with the launch of Blinkx Music Beta, a search engine for online music videos. The front page is simple enough. You’re greeted with a search box, a list of top artists, and the ability to click a letter to see results starting with A through Z. You can search for artists, albums, or songs.
Unfortunately, the search index is pretty sparse. There are a number of songs, artists, and albums that return no results. And the search engine’s not that intelligent. While a search for Coldplay returns a fair number of results, searching for Cold Play or Caldplay results in a “no results matching your query” message. So you’d better not include a typo or not know the proper phrasing of your favorite band name. Heck, on a whim, I tried searching for Hootie and the Blowfish and got zero results, which normally wouldn’t upset me in the least. But Hootie & The Blowfish actually did return results.
Blinkx doesn’t host the videos on its own site. Instead, when you click on a song you’ll be taken to the page where the video rests, whether it be on YouTube, Last.fm, or another site. A Blinkx toolbar hangs out at the top of the screen to take you back to where you started or let you begin another search.
A fairly large number of videos I did find were cellphone recordings shot at concerts rather than professional music videos.
That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: the Blinkxbox online video service keeps getting better. I got an email today letting me know that Blinkx had added a number of BBC TV shows which are now available to watch for free including episodes from the first two seasons of the original (William Hartnell) Doctor Who as well as episodes of The Young Ones, Hustle, and The League of Gentlemen.
[via VentureBeat]
Blinkx launches a mediocre music search engine originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics:
YouTube – Music video – Download Squad – Search – Web search engine
Go to Source
Intuit has announced the release of several new resources for developers to integrate desktop applications with web-based applications. The new Intuit App Center allows QuickBooks users to access third party web applications developed with the Intuit Partner Platform. This move effectively bridges Intuit’s suite of desktop accounting software with applications that run in the cloud.
Access to QuickBooks data on a user’s desktop is made possible via a new Intuit Partner
Platform Data Services API (our a href=”http://www.programmableweb.com/api/intuit-data-service”>Intuit Data Services API Profile), which provides access to several types of accounting items, including jobs, accounts, transactions, invoices, and much more.
As some of you may remember, we previously reported on a relatively new open source community sponsored by Intuit at code.intuit.com, which is aimed at encouraging developers to work with the Partner Platform (over 500 developers are now registered). The addition of a new data-centric API provides an additional avenue for developers to work with this platform. Some additional features available for developers working with the Intuit platform include billing entitlements that allow for variable pricing based on features and Google Analytics reporting for tracking app usage.
According to Intuit, there are approximately 25 million users within companies that use QuickBooks, so there is a fairly large user base that could potentially use a third party application developed with the new platform and distributed on the new App Center. Several new applications developed with the new platform can be viewed at workplace.intuit.com.
Ubuntu held a teleconference this afternoon to celebrate the Thursday launch of its new desktop and server edition, karmic koala.
The new desktop is built around “Ubuntu One,”a collection of backup, note and contact synchronization and file-sharing services integrated into the operating system, offering 2 Gigabytes of free storage and more by subscription.
The Firefox 3.5 browser and improved audio support are also part of the offering. GNOME 2.28 is the shipping desktop interface.
On the server side the situation is more cloudy, but in a good way with the addition of full support for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, from Eucalyptus Systems, that lets you create your own mini-cloud based on open source. The clouds feature host and guest virtualization under KVM and guest virtualization under Xen.
Most new features were previewed in April.
A complete online tour of the new desktop is already online. A list of supported netbooks is available, but the company is suggesting you pack a thumb drive with its Ubuntu Netbook Remix when you go to the store, just to make sure. Should make Friday at Fry’s fun.
There has been plenty of talk about ways to modify and hack your copy of Windows 7, but what if you’re looking for more ways to make it drool-worthy? Style7 is a little app that helps make it a little easier to make custom themes for Windows. The way it works is pretty simple (or is it?) and is done with a “simple” configuration file.
When you create a theme, it starts off using the default Aero and you work your way through it from there. You’ll need to download Style 7, as well as a UxTheme patch to allow this mod to work. Personally, if I’m going to go through all this trouble, I’m just going to Google “Cool Windows 7 themes” or something. For those of you a little more daring, ehh, give it a try!
Create Windows 7 themes with Style 7 originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics:
Windows 7 – Download Squad – Microsoft Windows – Windows Aero – Google
Go to Source
Open source scored a victory at the White House this week with the government’s choice to switch to Drupal for whitehouse.gov.
The U.S. government’s technology team announced that it had selected the open source content management system to make http://www.whitehouse.gov more transparent to consumers and developers.
This will allow programmers to view, inspect and fix the web site’s code, government officials said. The news was reported over the weekend by the Associated Press.
Open Source for America has been pushing Obama’s government to embrace more open choice software as a way to reduce costs and drive open standards for more transparency. Last week, ConsortiumInfo’s Andy Updegrove wrote a blog urging Obama to choose more FOSS.
Filed under: Fun, Games, Kids, Time-Wasters
Fatty Bum Bum is a surreal adventure game from Dutch game developers Hanazuki. You don’t actually play as Fatty Bum Bum, who is a large, friendly-looking, hungry character – sort of reminds me of a big Katamari. Instead, you’re a kid who’s floating through space, trying to collect food to deliver to Fatty Bum Bum, to make him grow as enormous as possible.
The game has three levels, and your food-grabbing abilities get stronger in each one. You start out by using your hands, then graduate to a spaceship with a grabber claw, and finally end up with a chomping crocodile costume. The game is side-scrolling, so you have to slow down as much as possible for maximum goodies. Once a piece of food scrolls off the screen, you lose it for good.
Fatty Bum Bum is a solid kids’ game. It’s not particularly challenging, although beating the current online high scores looks pretty impossible. Instead, the appeal is in the visuals. Grabbing food can set off fun, colorful animations where you character does a cool stunt or turns into some unexpected animal or object. In terms of gameplay, this slows down the clock (each level is time-limited) and helps you grab more stuff.
[Pro Tip: You can download the game for Mac or PC, and it runs a lot faster on the desktop than in-browser.]
Fatty Bum Bum – delicious Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics:
Download Squad – Game – Video game – Side-scrolling video game – Gameplay
Go to Source
Raindrop is a Mozilla Labs project that could simplify the e-mail experience by increasing your inbox’s signal-to-noise ratio, along with the contextual information about a message. Raindrop’s mission is to “make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on twitter, a friend’s blog or as part of a social networking site.”
Lately we’re seeing a lot more talk about API monetization. Last week we covered TweetPhoto’s efforts at encouraging developers to use the TweetPhoto API through a transactional payment model (one penny or so for each photo uploaded via the API). Last month we covered Bandsintown, which provides affiliate earnings via use of its Bandsintown API. And more recently Touchnote announced an affiliate payment model (with a whopping 30% royalty) for developers working with its image API.
It seems that companies are starting to incentivize developers with more concrete rewards in order to expand the reach of their services and products. And it seems that this is a worthwhile endeavor for companies that opt to do so, as it can motivate developers to take action to build mashups and apps with APIs that may not necessarily yield revenue through some of the more traditional means of monetization, such as banner ads and generic affiliate links.
Indeed, incentivized developers can greatly influence the success of a company’s bottom line, as highlighted in Fred Wilson’s recent post: Business Model Jujutsu. In his post, the New York City VC relates the story of TACODA, a company that shifted gears an realized increased revenues when it began to pay its initial customers via royalties on sales of the customers’ inventory. Wilson relates the shift to Indeed’s shift with its API, as summarized by this recent tweet for a comment made by Indeed’s CEO:
We tried charging for our API without much success. Then we paid developers to use it and it took off.
As Wilson notes, this is a jujutsu move on the market that can yield great rewards:
In the case of Indeed, they initially offered online publishers the ability to pay for a real time search API of online jobs. Not many took them up on that offer. But when they injected their sponsored jobs into the API and offered to share the revenue with publishers, the demand was huge.
Wilson’s short and sweet post is a reminder of the power and value of a developer community willing to create viable apps and mashups in return for a small slice of the pie. The comments on the post are worth reading as well, as they shed light on some additional factors and other examples of revenue-sharing APIs that have not been that successful.
Although the value of an API to developers depends on the nature and context of its use, it would appear that companies that go this route gain more via this type of mutually beneficial approach. That’s not to say that all APIs should pay or share revenue with developers, but it’s food for thought about the nature of paying or charging developers to work with an API.