If You Could Take Your Data Center With You

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TechCrunch: Facebook To Build Its Second Data Center To The Tune Of $450 Million: Apple is building a $1 billion facility that’s expected to be finished this year. Google and IBM also have data centers in the state.

During the first dot com boom, people bought servers. And then Amazon web services killed the idea. You don't need to buy servers, we got them, they said, a ton of them. But now companies like Facebook that are not in the data center business end up with these huge, humongous huge data centers.

Checking In, Tweeting, Spotting, Updating

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TechCrunch: Begun, The Sticker Wars Have: Right now, many people (probably most people) have no idea what a check-in is. When Gap launched its free jeans deal, people were actually visiting the company’s Facebook Page to write “checking in“, rather than using the Places function on Facebook’s mobile application.

That would be like someone sent you an email that was 140 characters or less, say over Gmail, and claimed they just sent you a tweet. Emails with such discipline would be nice to read, but are they tweets?

TechStars' Geographical Advantage Over Y Combinator

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TechCrunch: TechStars Launches Ten New Startups In Seattle: six of the first twenty companies to go through the program have been acquired by larger companies, and about 70% of its companies have been funded and/or are now profitable.

Y Combinator is in the Valley. Y Combinator has done something remarkable. I think Y Combinator is the reason we have a new species in town: the super angel. But Y Combinator is in the Valley. Being in the Valley, in the Valley alone is a disadvantage. People don't buy servers anymore. They have Amazon web services. Times have changed. Some of the best programmers I know are self taught people. All the material you need to teach yourself programming is available online for free. And so the idea that you have to be in the Valley to be part of the action, well, that is passe.

Ping On Twitter Is A Few Tech StartUp Ideas

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TechCrunch: iTunes Ping Actually Goes Social With Full Twitter Integration; Careful, It Will Auto-Tweet: not only will each tweet contain a link back to the song or album on iTunes, but these links will work in New Twitter’s right-side pane. You’ll be able to listen to iTunes previews right from there — a huge feature that should lead to a lot of music buying, especially when the 90-second previews kick-in.

90 seconds is a lot of music. We live in the era of good enough. Perhaps Apple is lucky the Facebook Connect thing did not quite pan out for them. This is a better deal. And now everybody and their cousin will be tweeting everything they have in their private domains.

A Boxee Browser

Image via CrunchBaseA few days back I wrote about how I was not too excited about the idea of a social browser. It did not feel like a big shift. You can share stuff from your Chrome browser with a few add ons.

But then I was at the Boxee Box launch party last night - and they got a swell product - but then I kept thinking, what Boxee needs to be is a browser on your laptop, not a box that takes you to a big screen.