From the amazon web services blog:

You are invited to join the Amazon SimpleDB team on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 9am PST for the first session of our new Developers’ Forum. During these once monthly webinars, developers will hear from the technical experts behind SimpleDB, and have the opportunity to engage in live Q&A.

Interested developers may register by emailing simpledb-developer-forum@amazon.com. Please include name & AWS account ID. In addition, developers are encouraged to pre-submit any questions they may have, to allow for a more thorough response during the live webinar. For those struggling with the development of a new application, sample code and a description of the intended application may also be submitted for review and discussion.

The team is looking forward to speaking with developers on the 20th.

It should be interesting, no matter if you’re azure or aws. I don’t get it why you need an amazon aws account id to participate though.

“Cloud” buzzword started appearing in more and more job description. So it is time to update our resume with “cloud” related keywords (this will help). Anyways, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is actively looking for a CTO.

SALARY RANGE: 117,787.00 - 177,000.00 USD per year
OPEN PERIOD:  Friday, December 26, 2008 to Thursday, January 15, 2009
POSITION INFORMATION: Full-Time  Permanent
DUTY LOCATIONS:   1 vacancy - Washington DC Metro Area, DC
WHO MAY BE CONSIDERED:   Applications will be accepted from all groups of qualified individuals.

Between other duties we find

Leads a team of technologists across DOD, DHS, and the Intelligence Community and be fluent in cloud computing, Web 2.0 and social networking applications.

I’m not sure what “fluent in cloud computing” fluent in Web 2.0 or even fluent in social network applications means, maybe Michael Arrington will clarify it for us, he seems fluent in Web 2.0 …

Panda is an open source solution for video uploading, encoding and streaming, running completely within Amazon’s Web Services using customized EC2 instances, S3 and SimpleDB. It has support for the encoding profiles which FFmpeg supports. They include FLV for flash and H264 for iPhone.

The service is easy to integrate with your application. The EC2 instance will provide a simple REST (both YAML and XML formats support) API for listing, creating, editing and deleting videos. When a new video is created on your site the actual file upload takes place in a popup or iframe. Doing so means that the large video file is uploaded directly to your Panda EC2 instance so you don’t have to handle it within your application. The server also is configured to support an upload progress bar so user’s can see the video upload in progress. It cannot get any easier than this.

The range of encoding support does not depend on Panda, but rather depends on ffmpeg and Libavcodec(open source encoder/decoder tools and libraries Panda use underneath) encoding capability. Wikipedia page has a list of implemented video codecs. For Panda AMI setup, see this and this google group thread. Continue reading…

After more than two “azure” months, with lots of new stuff to learn, a whole new alphabet soup to digest and a dozen or so Microsoft evangelists trying to navigate us through the plethora of “cloud services” that seem to pop up every day from Microsoft’s software making machine, I believe something is not right with either the way the information is presented to the public or with the overall Microsoft strategy. Let me explain.

First of all, everybody is using nowadays “cloud” to describe anything that runs on the web. Cloud is the new buzzword, and Microsoft jumping on the bandwagon doesn’t make things any better. Before Windows Azure release, it was simple to explain “the cloud” to any CEO - we had Amazon with storage and computing power, we had Google with their app engine and some other smaller “cloud computing” offerings. Everything else was SaaS - Software as a Service. After Windows Azure release, looks like everything Microsoft releases is a “cloud service” - Exchange, Sharepoint, Office, Live Services etc. - just adding to the confusion about what “cloud computing” actually is. I believe Microsoft should have come up with a different buzzword to describe their Software as a Service/Software + Services offerings, one word, not many. Continue reading…

Simone Brunozzi presents in Amazon’s blog, the architecture adopted by Soocial.com - a “one address book solution to contact management” company. They’re running 100% on Amazon services. Besides Amazon technologies like EC2, they’re using: Nginx, HAProxy, memcache, SyncML, AMQP, PostgreSQL, pgpool-II, ActiveRecord, Ruby on Rails, Elastic IP, EBS.

Interesting read overall. Here’s the blog entry.

rPath has a really good introductory video to Cloud Computing. Even a CEO will understand what cloud computing is after watching this video. Oh, and I almost forgot that Al Gore invented the internet …

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBd14rjcs0[/youtube]

Yesterday, Dec 21st  NPR’s “All things considered” Andrea Seabrook had a talk with security and technology experts about one of the mundane but hugely important decisions that must be made by the Obama transition team - how the White House computers should run. Looks like Google and Microsoft are already pushing the White House to use the new “cloud computing”. One of the conclusions was “the internet IS cloud computing”. Oh well …

Kevin Jackson, a security expert, talks a little bit about security in the cloud, saying that cloud computing can be actually safer, in many cases, than non-cloud environment.

Vint Cerf, the father of the internet, currently working for Google, has also had a word to say, he’s mentioning the collaborative advantage of using cloud computing. Continue reading…

From Palo Alto Software, creators of Business Plan Pro and Marketing Plan Pro, here’s the first software as a service initiative: Email Center Pro. Simply put, Email Center Pro is a a collaborative email solution for the small business market.

Email Center Pro makes it easy to manage customer email sent to your info@, sales@, or help@ addresses. It saves you time, increases your customer satisfaction, and lowers your operating costs. How? Mainly, the service allows you to manage all of your email queues from one location and efficiently route emails from one mailbox to another. You can easily assign any email to your staff for a prompt response.

Email Center Pro Overview

It sounds like a simple service, and it really is. Like any service should be. It is easy to use and feature reach: you can add internal notes to any email conversation, you can tag incoming or outgoing mail to categorize messages for fast and easy retrieval. You can search your emails(duh!) but most importantly you can save a search, so future emails will be already categorized by your search.

One of the most useful feature we found to be the alerts. You can get alerts about almost anything at any time. Also, The UI is well done, really usable. Continue reading…

Sriram Krishnan is working hard on the Erlang bindings for Windows Azure. Hopefully we’ll have them next week. Keep an eye on the github repo. I like the fact that Microsoft is providing implementations for other platforms, remember Sriram made available python client wrapper for windows azure storage. Keep it up Microsoft, and don’t forget to keep us in the loop …

Amazon SimpleDB gets easier and easier to use. And more powerful. It is now easy to write simple SQL like statements for your table (domain). Of course, there are changes and additions to the language in order to accomodate SimpleDB’s unique multi-valued attribute model.

Here’s what you can do:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = 'John' OR name LIKE 'Mark%'
SELECT * FROM users WHERE name NOT LIKE '%John%'

Attribute values must be quoted with a single or double quote. If a quote appears within the attribute value, it must be escaped with the same quote symbol (e.g., ‘You ain’’t no Picasso’).

Quoting attribute and domain names is optional if the name only contains letters, numbers, underscores (_), or dollar symbols ($) and does not start with a number. However, attribute and domain names that contain any other characters, such as spaces, must be quoted with escaped quotes (e.g., ‘Invisible’ Pink’ Unicorn’ Sightings’). 

SELECT `Invisible`` Pink`` Unicorn`` Sightings` from `My Domain` WHERE location = 'O''Brien, TX' AND `timestamp-1` > '' ORDER BY `timestamp-1`

Other examples of usage:
Continue reading…