Kobe Bryant

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.

9400 Workers In Six Years? Facebook Is Not Seeing Right

Image via CrunchBaseFacebook Location

Mercury News: Facebook's plans For Menlo Park HQ: 9,400 Workers In Next 6 Years: The fast-growing social networking company, which currently employs about 1,400 people in Palo Alto, expects to reach full capacity at the Sun campus and nearby buildings on Constitution Drive by 2017. ...... Menlo Park is inviting the public to suggest what environmental impacts should be studied. The deadline for comments is May 26.

You read about Facebook's new location, and you end up appreciating New York City so much more. You appreciate the subway, you appreciate the endless number and variety of bars and cafes in the city. You appreciate the whole damn package deal. NYC is the place to be. The banks imploded, and all of a sudden the tech sector in the city was flush with talent. By now there is even flush money.

Subscription Business Models For Mindfood

Image via CrunchBaseMindfood described as books, movies and music. Better than subscription is ad supported, but subscription is also pretty good. You pay a monthly fee and you get to access all books, movies and music ever created, being created. The movie people don't get this. They are like, oh no, we have to punish you by a few weeks if you are not going to show up at the theater.

The music people get it a little. They are like, if you are going to get the music for free anyways, we are going to make you pay for live concerts. And the movie people are like, we can't get Brad Pitt show up at every movie theater. That's the whole point, that he can't be everywhere. Al Pacino does some Broadway stuff. But that is one location.