Amazon's new S3 Storage Service

Amazon just launched a new service, S3 - Simple Storage Service. It is a web service that allows you to store as much data as you like, with file sizes up to 5GB, and you just pay for the storage you use and the data transferred. Rates are very reasonable, too -- $0.15/GB/month of storage, and $0.20/GB in data transferred.

This is pretty interesting. It gives developers the ability to create applications requiring significant storage space without having to make a huge upfront investment in equipment and expertise. Want to write your own Flickr? Go for it. Granted, it's risky relying on a third party for a core part of your business, but you only need them until you get your million users and can get enough funding to build your own storage backend.

Google is apparently working on their own storage backend, Google Drive. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Nothing but good news for aspiring entrepreneurs, though.

via TechCrunch

Multi-Touch Touch Screen

One of the most exciting new technologies I've seen in a long time: a multi-touch touch screen. The video says it all.

Your next ISP: Google

John C. Dvorak has a good piece at pcmag.com about speculations that Google is going to be creating their own network (see the "Google is the Internet" scenario from the article linked in my previous post). I certainly hope they do, as telcos have been dragging their feet on broadband for a long time, and acting like the Mafia whenever someone encroaches on "their" territory.

More articles on the subject:

• 
  Rumours mount over Google's internet plan
  


• 
  Google to Telcos: Who Needs You?
  

Imagining the Google Future

Great article from Business 2.0 describing four future scenarios for Google:

Imagining the Google Future

RIP IM Smarter

My imsmarter proxy stopped working last week, and I just got around to going to their site to see what was up. Looks like they've shut down. A bit of a pity; I thought it was a useful service. I use IM on four different machines and it made finding something from a past conversation a lot easier. Actually, though, what I used most often was its reminder feature. I could send it an IM saying "Remind me in 2 hours to check the car" and it would do just that, saving me many parking tickets. I imagine there are other services like that out there; I should check around. Actually, that would be a pretty trival thing to implement myself. Hmmm.

Your Dwindling Privacy

Your phone records are for sale
"The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts."

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

Although this raises some serious privacy concerns, what I found more interesting about this article was how relatively easy it is now to take data from all kinds of publicly available sources and use them to produce something like a map showing the locations of all the readers (or in this case, desire-ers) of a particular book.

(Both of these links via Bruce Schneier's Blog.)



Technorati Tags: privacy, security

Business Blogging

Chris Anderson of Wired / The Long Tail has started a wiki page to track public blogs by Fortune 500 companies. The list isn't terribly long yet, but I'm sure it will be growing, both as more people discover existing company blogs and as more companies jump on the bandwagon.

Speaking of which, we've jumped on the bandwagon ourselves at Triporama. The Triporama Blog isn't yet linked in from the main site (it will be soon), but Wendell has already posted a great piece about the origins of Triporama.

Happy New Year!