Apple Does Hardware In Asia

Image via WikipediaHardware is harder to work on remotely than software. And it is not even remote. With all the communication possibilities of today, I think people can overemphasize the importance of geography. I enjoy a party as much as the next person, but if you think about it, the whole premise behind social networking - hello Facebook, hello Twitter - is that it is the relationship, not the physical proximity.

And so my tech team is in Kathmandu. It is 50 strong. It has been a profitable software shop five years in a row. But it is only now venturing out on its first tech startup. There are other software things you can do to make money, you know? The team has had global clients this entire time.

I became friends with the team leader before I came to America. This is not outsourcing any more than Nepal and India are foreign countries. They are not, not to me. Why can't I tap into my social capital?

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GroupOn's Legacy: Cute Email?
Kiva Is In Nepal
The Kiva Story

That 10X Return Thing

Image via WikipediaWhen VCs invest in your startup, they want a 10X return. So if they invest a million, they want you to turn that into 10 million dollars.

Why? Because they are greedy bastards? Maybe.

It's a numbers game. Say nine out of all 10 startups fail. That is pretty close to the actual numbers, by the way. So money was lost on nine out of 10 deals. One million turned into zero dollars. That stunt is still a lot of hard work on the part of many people, believe it or not.

But one makes it, and gives a 10X return. So 10 million dollars were invested in 10 different startups. Nine of them went down. One turned that one million into 10 million. That is a break even situation. The VCs started with 10 million dollars, they ended up with 10 million dollars. Where's the game?

Hip Hop Basics: Journey Of Action

Cathy Erway: My Kind Of Chef

(Via Journey Of Action)

Journey of Action - Latin America Kick-Off Party!
Monday, April 25, 2011 from 7:30 PM - 10:00 PM (ET)
New York, NY

Purpose HQ
224 Centre Street
6th Floor
New York, NY 10013

Canal St 4/6/J/Z/N/Q

April Fool?
Journey Of Action: Connecting The Dots: Social Activism: Social Media
Journey Of Action

Brandt Brauer Frick (2)

Brandt Brauer Frick

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.

Jessica Wilson Hearts Mahatma Gandhi

New York Times: 100,000 PayWall Payers

Image by Laughing Squid via FlickrThe New York Times did not get me, but looks like it got 100,000 people and counting. When they erected the paywall I think they had an inkling as to this number. But the numbers are still not adding up for me.

Let's crunch. 100,000 people paying $20 each is two million. Is that per year? Per month? If it is per year, the paywall is a fail whale. If it is per month, the paywall might still be a fail whale, although a smaller one. 20 million can't keep the New York Times afloat.