Steve Jobs

I ordered the book. That was months ago. If you know what I mean. And waited, and waited, and waited. Finally I went online to Amazon.com and filed a complaint. I never received the book, I said. I was immediately refunded. I used that money to immediately reorder. This time I was closely tracking the delivery. One notice said, delivery attempted. Two days later the notice said, delivered. Delivered? I never received the book. I went to the post office. They gave me a print out. See? Delivered. They said. I talked to pretty much everyone in the building, including the landlord. No book, nowhere to be found. I figured either the post office lied to me, not very likely, or there is a Steve Jobs fan in the building. Or the delivery man himself is a Steve Jobs fan. I went online to Amazon. This time there was no refund. The book was delivered, they said. I did not get the book, I said.

Oh well, I thought.

Today I bought the book from this sidewalk bookseller. The cover price said 35 dollars. I haggled. I looked interested, then I walked away. The guy came after me. He said 30. I said 25. He said okay. I don't have the cash, I said. I need to get money from the bank. How long, he asked. Five minutes, I said. Then I reached into my pocket. I had 21 dollars. This is all I have, I said. You can have this right away and I will take the book. He thought for a split second. He looked at me. He took the money, and gave me the book. I could not believe it. I had just brought the price down by 14 dollars. When will you be back, he asked. When will you be back with the four dollars? Five minutes, I said. And I walked over to the ATM at the bank on the same block. On my way back I bought a mango lassi for two dollars. So I had a 10 dollar bill, a five dollar bill and three one dollar bills. 20 minus two is 18. I gave him three dollars. I was trying to get one dollar ahead. He took it. Then he grabbed my mango lassi. Can I have it, he asked. Sure, I said. He made it look like he gave me the book for 24 dollars when we had already brought the price down to 25 from 35. Mango lassi does not count for payment, it counts as hospitality.

I don't know if he got one dollar ahead, or I did. But I finally have the book now. This sidewalk bookseller just beat Amazon in delivery - instant - price - really low - and there is no way Amazon can match the experience.

Tip: try haggling.

"Where you from?" I asked as I walked away.

"Bangladesh!"

Steve Jobs And NeXT
Steve Jobs — 1955-2011
Steve Jobs Stayed A Pirate
My Disagreements With Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs: 1997
Rest In Peace, Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs' Departure
An Ode To Steve jobs
Steve Jobs: iPad 2 Announcement
Steve Jobs At A City Council Meeting
How Steve Jobs Gets Things Done
Steve Jobs Should Never Have Been Fired
Steve Jobs: Android Rant
Sculley: Scum

My Dream: A Netflix For Books

Image via Wikipedia

The Next Web: Amazon reportedly in talks to launch a Netflix for books: charging a fixed monthly fee for access to a library of books. Amazon will reportedly offer book publishers a substantial fee for their involvement in the program. ..... With Amazon’s Kindle platform and intimate relationships with every premium publisher on the planet, this is a unique new space only the likes of Amazon and Apple are likely to be able to cater to. ..... my bet is on Amazon to dominate thanks to its first mover advantage and a name synonymous with books. Let’s face it, iBooks hasn’t had quite the impact we would have expected to see from a digital giant like Apple. I’d argue this is because of its lacking selection of books

Your Local Library On Kindle
A Netflix For Books Needed (October 2009)

AllThingsD: Amazon in Talks to Launch Digital-Book Library: Several publishing executives said they aren’t enthusiastic about the idea because they believe it could lower the value of books and because it could strain their relationships with other retailers that sell their books

CNet: Amazon eyes Netflix-style service for e-books: publishers are wary and the latest titles may be excluded--just like with Netflix's streaming service.

Business Insider: Amazon Is Trying To Launch A Netflix Style eBook Subscription Service: the subscription service could take some time to launch since Amazon is busy trying to woo publishers and get them on board.

Mark Pincus Is Really Something

(Article first published as Mark Pincus is Really Something on Technorati.)

Image by Joi via FlickrMark Pincus stands out. He really does. He does not fit the stereotype. The guy is responsible for one of the fastest growing companies in history, but his past is littered with all sorts of entrepreneurial failures. To the seasoned eye, those failures were the stepping stones to his grand success, but only in December 2009 he was being pilloried by some small name journalist to whom Pincus pleaded on the air: "We go way back."

He did not drop out of college. He was not 19 or 23 when he started Zynga. He is not 20s young. He is not the most photogenic entrepreneur out there. His public appearances tend to be littered with all sorts of horror stories of him having had to deal with venture capitalists and other creatures of the tech ocean. John Doerr's firm rejected him several times, and Zynga has been better for John Doerr than Google has. Now why would John Doerr do that? I think there is a cultural bias against people who are not the most photogenic.

Jeff Bezos: Still Innovating

Image via CrunchBaseJeff Bezos was not having the greatest of time when the dot com collapse happened in 2000. The guy still had a lot of money in the bank, but the press was full of critics who said Bezos has never made a dime for his investors, it was only a matter of time before his money runs out also. Bezos proves the bozos wrong. Not only that, Amazon grew like crazy through the Great Recession. And somewhere along the way he gave the world the cloud: Amazon Web Services. He suggested servers were like electricity. Don't buy your own little generator.

The dude is a visionary, sure.

San Francisco Chronicle: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D: Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture...... Look inside a current textbook on software architecture, and you’ll find few patterns that we don’t apply at Amazon. We use high-performance transactions systems, complex rendering and object caching, workflow and queuing systems, business intelligence and data analytics, machine learning and pattern recognition, neural networks and probabilistic decision making, and a wide variety of other techniques ..... our architects and engineers have had to advance research in directions that no academic had yet taken ...... Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. ...... Our e-commerce platform is composed of a federation of hundreds of software services that work in concert to deliver functionality ranging from recommendations to order fulfillment to inventory tracking. ...... to construct a product detail page for a customer visiting Amazon.com, our software calls on between 200 and 300 services to present a highly personalized experience for that customer .... our key data services store many petabytes of data and handle millions of requests per second ...... The storage systems we’ve pioneered demonstrate extreme scalability while maintaining tight control over performance, availability, and cost. To achieve their ultra-scale properties these systems take a novel approach to data update management: by relaxing the synchronization requirements of updates that need to be disseminated to large numbers of replicas, these systems are able to survive under the harshest performance and availability conditions. These implementations are based on the concept of eventual consistency. The advances in data management developed by Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS)...... our Simple Storage Service, Elastic Block Store, and SimpleDB all derive their basic architecture from unique Amazon technologies ..... product data ingestion and categorization, demand forecasting, inventory allocation, and fraud detection ....... advanced machine learning techniques provide more accurate classification and can self-heal to adapt to changing conditions .... The diversity of products demands that we employ modern regression techniques like trained random forests of decision trees to flexibly incorporate thousands of product attributes at rank time...... Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do. ...... Whispersync, our Kindle service designed to ensure that everywhere you go, no matter what devices you have with you, you can access your reading library and all of your highlights, notes, and bookmarks, all in sync across your Kindle devices and mobile apps. The technical challenge is making this a reality for millions of Kindle owners, with hundreds of millions of books, and hundreds of device types, living in over 100 countries around the world—at 24x7 reliability. At the heart of Whispersync is an eventually consistent replicated data store, with application defined conflict resolution that must and can deal with device isolation lasting weeks or longer.... We live in an era of extraordinary increases in available bandwidth, disk space, and processing power, all of which continue to get cheap fast..... we have unshakeable conviction that the long-term interests of shareowners are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers...... As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. Our approach remains the same, and it’s still Day 1.

The Cloud Outage

O'Reilly Community: The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment: if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model....... two dueling architectural models of cloud computing applications: "design for failure" and traditional. ..... The Amazon model is the "design for failure" model. Under the "design for failure" model, combinations of your software and management tools take responsibility for application availability. The actual infrastructure availability is entirely irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has a massive, data-center-wide outage. ...... The advantage of the "design for failure" model is that the application developer has total control of their availability with only their data model and volume imposing geographical limitations. The downside of the "design for failure" model is that you must "design for failure" up front. ...... Physical redundancy encompasses all traditional "n+1" concepts: redundant hardware, data center redundancy, the ability to do vMotion or equivalents, and the ability to replicate an entire network topology in the face of massive infrastructural failure. ...... If you had redundancy across availability zones, you would have survived every outage suffered to date in the Amazon cloud. ...... If you had regional redundancy in place, you would have come through the recent outage without any problems except maybe an increased workload for your surviving virtual resources. ...... Cloud redundancy enables you to survive the complete loss of a cloud provider. ....... Being home to the world’s reserve currency confers great advantages on the U.S. economy. Because of it, our government, companies and households can borrow money more easily and cheaply. And because all that demand for dollars artificially raises its value, we can import goods at a cheaper price than other countries. ...... Applications built with "design for failure" in mind ..... will achieve uptimes you can't dream of with other architectures and survive extreme failures in the cloud infrastructure. ...... no humans, no 2am calls, and no outage! ..... Netflix, an AWS customer that kept on going because they had proper "design for failure" .. ? Try doing that in your private IT infrastructure with the complete loss of a data center.

I should have, but I did not expect this to happen. Servers are known to go down. Heck, PCs crash. The browser freezes. The cloud went down. In a big way. What's next? Datacenters? I think it did happen once. One Google datacenter went down. Correct me if I am not remembering it right. What if Facebook's datacenter in Oregon went down for an hour?

So the cloud went down. And there has been much talk. The Amazon Web Services is pretty much the cloud that most of us are privy to. And you thought Jeff Bezos was in the business of selling books.

The cloud should not go down. The cloud can not go down. It is like when there is a power cut the generator turns on on its own immediately, and so although there was a power cut, you did not feel it. The cloud needs that mechanism. Otherwise it is not a proper cloud. The cloud is not like the rest of us. The cloud is not supposed to go down.

Tony Tsieh Could Have Been Richard Branson

New York Times: Why Is This Man Smiling?: In his book, Mr. Hsieh implies that the company’s investors forced him to make the Amazon deal

I have not read Tony's book, and this is the first time I am seeing somewhere he is hinting the sale was forced upon him, but I guessed that on my own a long time ago, and I strongly disapproved of it.

Zappos deserved an IPO. Zappos deserved an airline. The forced sale was an act of racism. Don't act surprised. I have made that statement before.

No, it was not about money. Those VCs would have made more money if Zappos had gone IPO.

Zappos Being Sold

Image via WikipediaI am going to dig up on this and blog about it more later. But I have been circling Zappos, and my hunch is selling Zappos to Amazon was a very, very bad idea. Zappos was IPO material. I am going to learn the details. And comment more later.

Zappos

(Source: Business Insider)

$400 Million, $140 Billion And 2020

Image via CrunchBase

Wall Street Journal: A New Digital Battlefield: The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010

I expect these two numbers to have changed places by 2020. Everything is going online. TV is not going to be a separate medium for too long. The internet will eat up and digest the TV. But we are going to have to move to universal 100 MB plus broadband for that to happen.

Wall Street Journal: Web Start-Up Values Soar:In an echo of the 1990s dot-com boom, some investors also are giving lofty valuations to Web firms that have no revenue and that barely have a product out..... Quora ...... Blippy ...... Foursquare .... last year, when Twitter Inc. was valued at $1 billion during a round of funding, up from $95 million in mid-2008 when it raised a previous round of funding .... Many investors won't recoup their investments ...... SecondMarket, which operates an exchange where investors can trade the stocks of closely held start-ups ...... "There's a big disconnect between the public market and the private market" ..... Deal-of-the-day site Groupon Inc., for instance, was founded in 2008 and quickly brought in consumers eager to tap its discounts. By April when it received a $135 million investment from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies Ltd. and venture firm Battery Ventures, Groupon was valued at about $1.35 billion.

Blockbuster Nears Bankruptcy:a milestone in consumers' shift away from brick-and-mortar video stores to films delivered by mail and the Internet

Netflix, Studio Reach Streaming Deal
A New Digital Battlefield:TV shows are emerging as a new front in the war over digital media between Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., amid their ongoing battles over electronic books and online music..... Several executives said those rentals could be a step toward a world where people see less advertising or stop paying for cable subscriptions—two principal sources of revenue...... Apple accounts for 57% of transactions in Internet video-on-demand movies, on a number-of-sales basis, and 53% of the TV shows market ...... The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010

Related articles by Zemanta

• A New Digital Battlefield (online.wsj.com)
• Angie's List Attracts $22.5 Million in Investments (prweb.com)
• Groupon Close to Half a Billion Dollars in Sales (gigaom.com)
• Internet users in BRICI countries set to double by 2015 (nextbigfuture.com)
• Is Groupon a Good Deal for Small Business? (myventurepad.com)
• Groupon grabs spotlight with national offers (reuters.com)
• Groupon Receives $135 Million From DST and Battery Ventures (eon.businesswire.com)
• Not Your Grandma's Coupon: Groupon Takes Manhattan ... and Every Other City (abcnews.go.com)
• Groupon Goes International, Buys Japanese and Russian Clones (mashable.com)
• IT and Nigeria's 2020 Goals (Part Two) (vanguardngr.com)

Passwords For Security

Image by Zebra Pares via Flickr

New York Times: A Strong Password Isn’t the Strongest Security: MAKE your password strong, with a unique jumble of letters, numbers and punctuation marks. But memorize it — never write it down. And, oh yes, change it every few months. These instructions are supposed to protect us. But they don’t....... Keylogging software, which is deposited on a PC by a virus, records all keystrokes — including the strongest passwords you can concoct — and then sends it surreptitiously to a remote location. ..... antivirus software could detect and block many kinds of keyloggers, but “there’s no guarantee that it gets everything.” ..... sites that allowed relatively weak passwords were busy commercial destinations, including PayPal, Amazon.com and Fidelity Investments. The sites that insisted on very complex passwords were mostly government and university sites. ..... “If an account is locked for 24 hours after three unsuccessful attempts,” they write, “a six-digit PIN can withstand 100 years of sustained attack.” .....“Eat your broccoli; a strong password is good for security.”

What are your options? You can still go for a strong password. You can still change them periodically. You can still get anti virus software. You can hope it is illegal for someone to try and get your password, but this is a big world. The nation state is an ant to the cyber criminals who mostly work remotely.

What is your prayer then? That you are personally too insignificant to be snooped upon? That there are too many people like you out there?

Password theft is like identity theft. Can you imagine the inconvenience of someone having stolen your password and then changed it? Your contacts are not going to think your password got stolen. They are going to think you are being rude in not responding to their emails.

Maybe you can inform your 10 or 20 key contacts. But it would not be possible to inform them all.

For the short term, my bet is on good anti virus software. Keep it renewed. Most people do. And I am glad. Bill Gates once promised to incorporate anti virus software right into Windows. And he went ahead and retired.

It is a relentless fight between good and evil. But common sense is a good armor for the most part. And, yes, there are too many people like you out there. It is a numbers game. It is statistical. You are for the most part safe. Just keep to common sense. Keep a strong password. And keep your anti virus software renewed.

Safety online is kind of like safety offline. There are some common sense ground rules to follow. Even so you might fall a victim. It is a numbers game. If you do, know what to do.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Digital Domain: A Strong Password Isn't the Strongest Security (nytimes.com)
• Kirstie Allsopp's Twitter account hacked by iPad spammers (sophos.com)
• Someone stole your email password? (metalev.org)
• Password wrangling - Create a better password (justanasterisk.com)
• Best Spyware Scanner Warning ? Scan and Remove Paladin anti virus ... (antiaging-faq.com)
• Q.&A.: Beefing Up Your Password Strength (gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Is Your Password Allowing Hackers In? (theotakuologist.com)
• What is a Keylogger? (brighthub.com)
• Debate Around Password Security Overlooks Universal Logins (readwriteweb.com)

Amazon's Amazing Cloud

Image via Wikipedia

GigaOm: How Big is Amazon’s Cloud Computing Business? Find Out in 2010, AWS will generated about $500 million in revenues and will grow this to $750 million by 2011. By 2014, it would bring in close to $2.54 billion in revenues. ..... the total market for AWS type services .. will eventually grow to $15-to-$20 billion in 2014 ...... the total global cloud market in 2010 will be $22 billion and $55 billion in 2014..... Amazon was smart to bet early and bet big on the cloud computing opportunity

Larry Ellison on the Charlie Rose show in the late 1990s in an aside derided Amazon as being in the business of "selling books." But Amazon through its amazing cloud service has gone on to revolutionize computing in ways Jeff Bezos never imagined when he started out. He started out wanting to sell books. Amazon built its infrastructures for its own use, but upon building realized it had too much excess capacity. What to do? Necessity is the mother of invention, like the cliche goes.

There are so many big, wonderful dot coms in existence today that owe their existence to Amazon. Jeff Bezos took the electricity out of the equation. You don't need to have your own personal generator. You simply plug in.

Software as utility, hardware as utility: these were once revolutionary concepts.

We need some major revolutions in the ISP business so all humanity can come online. That is very important to the future of computing.

You Can Create An Android App Too, Anyone Can

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Big is Amazon's Cloud Computing Business? Find Out (gigaom.com)
• Amazon: Eli Lilly Still A Customer (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Seattle's Growing Advantage in The Cloud (xconomy.com)
• Amazon Says Stories About Eli Lilly Are False (diversity.net.nz)
• Approach to Infrastructure Architecture is Different When in the Amazon Cloud (kinlane.com)
• Why Most Cloud Contracts Shouldn't Be Negotiable (gigaom.com)
• Amazon Calls Stories About Eli Lilly Are False (cloudave.com)
• Thinking of moving to the cloud? Send in the lawyers first (infoworld.com)
• Amazon: Enterprises Should Adjust Expectations for Cloud (pcworld.com)
• Report: Amazon's cloud business to reach $500 million in 2010 (techflash.com)

Droid Does

Mashable story: TIME Names Gadget of the Year: Droid

Verizon Droid competes with the iPhone and Amazon's Kindle faces competition in the Barnes Noble product. For now the newcomers seem to have the buzz. Mashable thinks iPhone is the superior phone. TechCrunch thinks it is Droid. My bias is for Droid. I have a feeling the iPhone is the Mac and the Droid is the PC, poised for a wider adoption. We will see. 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Amazon Kindle rival planned... (stustake.com)
• Two Publishers Delay E-Books (online.wsj.com)
• Kindle For PC App In Beta (ubergizmo.com)
• Android This Week: Two Droids Hit Big Red; Carrier Channels Debut (gigaom.com)
• Amazon Highlights: Jeff Bezos Interview, an E-Commerce Competitor, and Nook Reviews (xconomy.com)
• Google gPhone expected in 2010, reports say (infoworld.com)
• Google-branded phone coming early next year? (engadget.com)
• The iPhone Nano Rumor Strikes Again: Coming To Verizon In 2010? (gizmodo.com.au)
• Apple could work with Verizon next (ubergizmo.com)