Category Archives: Business

Amazon S3

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I really didn’t pay it that much attention, or think about its full potential, at the time it was released. But Amazon’s Simple Storage Servic (hence the “S3”) is really pretty neat. In a nutshell, it’s file hosting on Amazon’s proven network infrastructure. (When have you ever seen Amazon offline?) They provide HTTP and BitTorrent access to files.

Their charges do add up — it might cost a few hundred dollars a month to move a terabyte of data and store 80GB of content. But then again, the reliability (and scalability!) is probably much greater than what I can handle, and it’s apparently much cheaper than it would be to host it with a ‘real’ CDN service.

Sadly, I can’t think of a good use for this service. I suppose the average person really doesn’t need to hire a company to provide mirrors of their files for download. (It would make an awesome mirror for Linux/BSD distributions, but I think the typical mirror is someone with a lot of spare bandwidth and an extra server, not someone paying hundreds a month to mirror files for other people… I wonder if there’s a market for a ‘premium’ mirror service? I doubt it, since the existing ones seem to work fine?)

Business Geek

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Tonight I ate at a small restaurant in Amherst, and had the most delicious bottle of root beer ever. Called Virgil’s, it’s kind of hard to put my finger on what makes it so good. As I read the bottle for clues, I noticed that they were publicly traded. I thought this was strange, given that I’ve never even heard of them.

But indeed, they’re REED on the NASDAQ. And they closed out 2006 with a -21% profit margin and a -124% return on average equity. The “past” quarter (ended September ’07–newer results aren’t in) was exceptionally bad, with an almost -40% margin. But as I dug deeper, I realized that this wasn’t such a bad thing. They retired (paid) $1.6 million of debt, after a capital infusion of several millions (“paid-in capital”). They still had an outstanding $8.24 million deficit, but it’s maybe a good sign.

I’d still have reservations, though: the past quarter saw $3.88 million revenues, generated with $5.4 million of operating expense. They’ve got to find a way to either cut these costs, or grow revenues. (Or, preferably, do both!) Recent announcements suggest that Reed has found some new distributors and supermarkets to carry their chain, which may be what they need to come into the black.

And after all of this, I realized something: I set out to see if I could buy their soda online. And I ended up scrutinizing the company’s financials.

Fundraising

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For whatever reason, we’ve been getting a lot of calls asking us to donate money to various causes all of a sudden. My mom did some research and unearthed some interesting information. Most of the calls come from “paid fundraising” companies. They take a percentage of what you donate–usually around 40%, it seems. We had the same person call us today on behalf of two separate charities. Both from the same company.

Should you find yourself in the same position, don’t fall for the irritating, “Can the {starving children, disabled veterans, cute kittens, abused children} count on you for support?” line. Respond by asking where they’re calling from, if it’s a paid fundraiser, and how much they get. If you’re feeling charitable when they call, thank them, and tell them you’ll make a donation directly to the charity.

You could make an argument that it’s simple economics, and that there’s even “good” being done–most charities don’t cold-call people, so they may be bringing in incremental donations. But, in my mind, it’s extremely sleazy to not fully disclose your own fiduciary interests when taking donations.

Datacenter Fiend

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No matter what I do, I keep finding myself thinking about webhosting.

Netcraft does a monthly survey of hosts with the top uptime, and mentioned that DataPipe is usually on top. I’ve found that, at least for what I do, any “real” data center has just about 100% uptime. I have never not been able to reach my server. You’re either with a notoriously bad host (for example, when Web Host “Plus” bought out Dinix, they took the servers offline for a few days with no notice… that’s noticeable downtime), or you’re with a reputable host where downtime just doesn’t really happen.

So 0.00% downtime, as opposed to 0.01%, isn’t a huge deal for me. (That doesn’t mean it’s not impressive.) But what impressed me about DataPipe is that I clicked their link and their webpage just appeared. No loading in the slightest. I browsed their site, and there was never any waiting. I might as well have had the page cached on my computer, except I know it’s not cached anywhere.

Their data center is in New Jersey, but they clearly have excellent peering. I’m getting 20ms pings. They don’t (directly, at least) offer dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, or shared hosting.

One of my big concerns is that I wonder about long-term viability. The market’s full of hosts. A lot of them are “kiddie hosts,” inexperienced people just reselling space often with poor quality. That’s room for competition. But the problem is that there are hosts selling the moon: 200 GB of disk space and 3 terabytes of bandwidth for $5 a month? That’s ludicrous: that’s more than I get with my dedicated server! They can get away with it because no one uses that much, but it concerns more “honest” hosts–you’d have to charge ten times as much if everyone actually used it! But for hosts that offer, say, 1GB of space and 10 GB of transfer–a ‘realistic’ amount–they’re left vulnerable to people thinking they’re getting a better deal.

I realized the other day that, while a lot of people offer VPS (virtual private server: several people share a server, but software ‘partitions’ give each of them their own server software-wise, with root access and separation from other users), I’m really not aware of any good ones. It’s also hard to find any that offer significant amounts of disk space, or any that are particularly cheap.

An Uncontrollable Urge

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A few years ago Andy and I ran a hosting company. It never got that far, but it was fun, and also a learning experience.  Today I’m finding that I can’t get the idea of starting it again out of my head. The problem is that, this time, I’d want to start it big.

There are a bunch of technologies that I find downright exciting:

  • Old racks full of blade servers are hitting the used market. And by “old” I mean dual 2-3 GHz Xeons, a gig or two of RAM, and hard drives that still rival what hosts are renting in dedicated servers. I’d probably want to put in new drives, but the machines are cheap and they’re plentiful.
  • Boston has a number of good data centers, and all the big Tier 1 providers are here. That there seem to be no well-known hosting companies out here is frankly kind of surprising. You have no idea how badly I want to pick up a couple racks in a colocation facility, and pull in a couple 100 Mbps lines.
  • cPanel looks like it’s matured a lot since I last used it, and it has some good third-party stuff such as script installers. It looks like it remains the number one choice in virtual hosting.
  • Xen is downright exciting. It permits splitting a physical host into multiple virtual machines. With the advent of chips with hardware virtualization support from both AMD and Intel, it now runs with very little overhead. It used to require extensive modifications to the “guest” OS, so that only modified versions of Linux worked. With newer processors, though, you’re able to run machines without them having to know they’re in a virtual machine, opening up options. You can run Windows now. The virtual dedicated server / virtual private server market is growing. (Xen also supports moving hosts between physical servers, which has a lot of nice applications, too!)
  • OpenBSD’s firewall, pf, continues to intrigue me for its power. I just found PFW, a really spiffy web GUI for managing pf. Not only does it do basic firewall stuff, but it’s got support for prioritization of traffic / QoS, and for load balancing. I’m probably just scratching the surface.
  • I’ve spent years honing my admin skills and improving server performance. Improved performance on a shared server, of course, means more clients per server, or more money.

I’m wholly convinced I should start a Boston hosting company. I just need $100,000 capital or so. (Santa, do you read my blog? Do you fund businesses? I’ll give you partial equity.)

Why I’d Go Nikon

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Andrew’s biased me. I’m a Canon fan. I own a Canon body, and now, two Canon-mount lenses. And this brings in switching costs: the lenses would be useless to me if I had a Canon. And, while I think it’s mostly irrational, I’ve come to love everything about Canon cameras and see any difference as a flaw in Nikons.

But I’m still excited about the Nikon D3. And it turns out that I’m far from the only one. The D3 has a ton of people anticipating its release. And even at 5 grand, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re sold out at first. I don’t have that much to spend on a camera, but if I were a serious photographer, I’d have pre-ordered mine already.  Why?

  • Higher ISOs mean you can get shots that you otherwise couldn’t. Or that you can buy cheaper (and lighter) lenses and still get good shots. Everything in photography is a trade-off: to increase shutter speed, you need to either raise the ISO (which raises grain), or use a wider aperture (which usually hits hard limits: your lens is only so good, and you pay through the nose for faster ones). Increases in usable ISO, though, come “free”–if you can suddenly take clean shots at ISO6400, as you apparently can with the D3, you can get shots that, frankly, were impossible on other cameras.
  • Higher ISOs can mean increased savings. To get really good shots when I can’t shoot above ISO1600 (or ISO800 if I want clean shots), I pretty much have to buy a faster lens. Pros have tens of thousands in high-end lenses for just this reason. They can get the shots I can’t. Suddenly, at ISO6400, I’d be on par with them.
  • A lot of cameras are using “cropped” sensors… The sensor is smaller than 35mm film, so only the center of the image coming through the lens falls on the sensor, effectively cropping the image. This is beneficial if you’re using telephoto lenses, as it’s essentially a “bonus” zoom. (A 200mm lens on my camera is equivalent to a 320mm lens on a full-frame camera.) But for people who shoot at the wide end, it’s a major pain. The crop gave rise to things like Sigma’s 10-20mm lens, which is ridiculously wide. The reason is that, on a 1.6x crop sensor, it’s 16mm equivalent at the wide end: right on par with existing lenses. A lot of lenses are being built just for these cropped sensors, which permits them to be lighter and cheaper. But people still prefer the full-frame sensors, so now there are two types of lenses floating out there. Nikon nailed it here: their camera will work with both. If you mount a lens for ‘cropped’ cameras, it’ll only use part of the sensor. If you mount a full-frame lens, it uses the whole frame.
  • They built a longer-life shutter. Bravo. (Actually, Canon did too…)
  • They improved the LCD to over 900,000 pixels. One thing that drives me nuts on the 10D is that the image is tiny and low-resolution. You have to spend time zooming in to see if it came out alright. And when you’re shooting live action, this means missing a ton of shots. So you shoot blindly, and then realize that the whole thing came out unusable.
  • They have a built-in guide, so you don’t have to carry the manual around. Again, brilliant! The menu also looks a little bit less like it was made in 1982.
  • When I talk about high ISOs, 6400 is just their ‘normal’ upper. As with most cameras, you can enable “Expanded ISO” mode, which gives you some more settings, with the catch that they’re somewhat noisy. But you can shoot at ISO25,600. This is just obscene, and I’m fairly certain that, until Nikon came out with this, no one had ever even thought about a camera being this fast.
  • They kept up a high shutter speed… Between 9 and 11 frames per second, in fact.

Something tells me that the folks at Canon are scrambling to develop a sensor this good.. I hope they are. Because I hate those stupid circular viewfinders on Nikon cameras.

Aside: I really hope the folks at Canon are also scrambling to develop a camera that ditches the shutter… I’m still at a loss to explain why it’s even in a digital camera.

Aside: Maybe they can steal my ideas and include a useful integrated WiFi chip… Or a built-in intervalometer. That’d be trivial to implement?

Lost in Translation

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Check out this radio‘s description. It’s got excess value and pettiness! And a phrase-lock-loop. And “LCD aphellotropic lights of showing screen,facile operation in dark” has got to mean “backlit screen.” (Facile is Spanish for “easy,” no your mom jokes.) Oh, and you can’t forget the Auto-charger rabbet. And it comes with a chargeable battery.

Anyone else confused? (Bonus points: I tried to copy-and-paste a quote, and it carried over the HTML tags, which included at one point….?!)

When Life Gives You Lemons

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There’s a pile of snow outside.

In other news, Georgia is still having a drought.

Business idea of the day? Charge New Englanders for snow disposal. For about the cost of plowing, I’ll take the snow for you. You don’t have to worry about snowbanks.

I’ll then fill trains with it and ship it to Georgia and others in need of water, who will buy it from me.