Relax, Think, Imagine, Make it possible

Lava lamp or aquarium? Your best randomizer

I believe that one of the things that helps human brain to expand and to think more creatively is to observe a random movement. In reality we are not very used to observe these events. Our mind usually expects what’s going to happen in the next few seconds unless something unexpected occurs. But it rarely occurs. However for those who want to bring randomness well into their life I have two suggestions: A lava lamp or an aquarium.

Both of them are very relaxing for the brain and once you observe them you realize that anything can change in the very next second. You can’t predict the movement of the fish nor how the next bubble in the lava lamp will be shaped. And if you want to test the theory, here is a software that takes a photo of your random object and converts it into a number; the Lavarnd.

I have a lava lamp at home and an aquarium in the office. Both offer pretty much the same result though the aquarium includes some interactivity as well, which in fact reduces slightly the randomness factor:)

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Amazon ec2 Europe

Amazon just updated their feature guide to include information related to the launch of European ec2 regions. This is something highly anticipated by many companies in Europe.

We will be deploying both Magnet commerce and Zuni greek social network on the cloud during the following days.

Some more useful information can be found at Rightscale’s blog.

Update: The post on Amazon’s web services blog can be found here.

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Wii jogging

Here is another application that combines real world with computers. Wii jogging is an application for Wii that allows you to go for jogging at Tokyo using Google Streetview. You are jogging at the actual roads of Tokyo, in the middle of the roads (you don’t have to be afraid of being hit by a car:)).

Why such an application is so important?

If you think about the future, such an application can create a social network of people walking out (virtually) on the streets. That means a virtual world. And even if lively.com failed, it’s not hard to imagine that a virtual world can be built over Google Streetview (and Google Earth in general), with people walking everywhere, driving cars, interacting with each other and even placing advertisements. So the virtual world will be a representation of the real world enhanced with virtual objects like people, add on images, files, etc. This is so powerful because people are familiar with the real world, not virtual ones. Having the exact same environment of the the real world on the computer and the ability to interact with others there, will create new opportunities in several areas including travel, real estate, education and many other industries.

Posted in Software | 2 Comments »

Athens Startup Weekend

It’s really hard to start writing such a blog post on 1:45 AM Saturday night, but the time is perfect for the thoughts I would like to share.

Since Friday I participate in the Athens Startup Weekend event. I am on a team with Stefanos Vasdekis and Dimitris Theodorakis. Stefanos is my best friend for 23 years and business partner for the last 10 years. We have done several successful (and unsuccessful) startups in the past together. Dimitris is still an undergraduate student at the National Technical University of Athens and definitely has the startup spirit. While we do believe that we are working on a great idea during the weekend, our main reason for participating in the event was to share our passion for making ideas a reality with others.

During the event, there are a lot of people asking us how we made it to have a website and a working product within 1.5 days. What’s even more amazing is that we see many people having great ideas but no development team to create them. Everyone is seeking for developers!! And that is where I want to share a story:

Back in 2001 we had an idea of creating a software that would allow merchants create their own shops. An ecommerce software. We had little idea of how development was done and we agreed that we won’t become developers since there are other priorities to take care as well. We managed to create a product called “Siteowners ecommerce software”. We even got the first few customers using it. However the era of SaaS was to come and we believed that we should re-create our software as a web based software as a service application. And we did it. The product is called Magnet Commerce, it’s running and many customers depend on us to run their stores. During that time though, we experienced exactly what most of the people experience today: Developers shortage:)! I can feel the frustration and desperation when you have a great idea and you can’t do it because you have no developers.

I still remember the day back in 2005 when we were drinking coffee at Starbucks and decided to start writing code to expand our software. Even when we decided to do so, we really though that it was the worst idea we ever had. But it proved to be one of the best. Don’t misunderstand the message. We did not ever become developers. We learned how to develop and we currently develop less than 10% of our time (even 5% I would say). The more we learn about development the better we succeed in finding and guiding people from India, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, etc. to develop for us and the less we develop ourselves. In the last year, we have developed (from scratch) a greek social network called Zuni.gr which now has 50K members, 5 facebook applications which are being used by 450.000 people, expanded our Magnet commerce and also did some experimental projects. And I can guarantee that the development was only 10% of our time and we really work almost 24 hours a day (we love it:)).

While we would always welcome a full time developer in our team, we were never forced NOT to build an idea because we had no developers. There is no such excuse. If you believe in your idea a lot, you can learn to develop in a very short amount of time; days I would say. And once you get the overall idea, learn how to outsource your development and your idea will expand. Then you will get angel investors and maybe VCs and build a very strong team of many people. But first make sure that you and the rest of your startup team can do everything without any external help!

Time for some sleep:) 2:20 and the event continues at 9:00:)

Posted in Entrepreneurship | 6 Comments »

Hungry or angry? Dog eats car:)

I was really trying to figure out how to name the new category that this post should fall into. I believe I found a good name: “Hard to believe”. The slide show below shows how I found my car after having it parked on a road in an area called Vrilisia, at the suburbs of Athens. At first I thought that a person destroyed it. But it really didn’t make any sense. If a person wanted to damage a car he wouldn’t be hitting the bumper rather than trying to break windows, scratch the doors, etc. And then after viewing the car for long time, it was pretty obvious that an animal did this! Bites on the bumper (I found very small pieces of the bumper on the road), scratches from nails, and some marks at the areas were metal existed (could bite it!). The final confirmation came from BMW since they have seen this happening many times in the past and from a forum were I posted this and got a great number of responses of people who had the same experience. Bon Appétit!

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Tutorial: Running a php/mySQL server on EC2 with EBS

Last week I did a presentation on Amazon Web Services meet up in Greece. During the presentation I showed how you can start an AMI of fedora 8 base, install apache, php and mySQL and make them all store their data on an EBS volume. This attracted a lot of attention and participants asked me to post this as an online tutorial. This tutorial requires basic knowledge of AWS like running an EC2 instance, creating an EBS volume and assigning an elastic IP to the instance. During the presentation I used ElasticFox which is a firefox plugin that allows you to perform several operations on Amazon through a graphical user interface. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development | 12 Comments »

Microsoft launches Azure, a cloud computing platform

Cloud computing is one of the hottest industries right now. There are several companies already offering services like Amazon, Rackspace, Joyent, Slicehost, Gogrid and Aptana.

Today Microsoft launched Azure, a cloud for applications designed for Microsoft Products. Azure is available for free at this time through the CTP program. Pricing will be revealed once the program is available for commercial use.

Considering that Microsoft will be launching a cloud operating system in the future I consider this move very important.

Posted in Development | 2 Comments »

Great news for EC2!

Today is a big day for EC2. Many great things happened:

* Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
* There’s now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
* Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
* Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.

I played around with ElasticFox and launched a few Windows instances. The instances work very well and there are AMIs that have built-in support for IIS, ASP.NET and MS SQL. Of course you can customize your own AMI and deploy any software you like.

In case you wonder what the computer properties look like in windows when you run an extra large instance, here is a screenshot for you:)

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Amazon web services meet up

During the last open coffee event in Athens, Jason really inspired us with his speech. His most valuable advice for us was to team up and create new start ups. He mentioned a few tools that can be used to have a web company up and running with almost zero cost. One of these tools is Amazon EC2 which Jason suggested as a good subject for a meet up in Greece. I am taking a step forward and announcing a general Amazon Web Services (AWS) meet up.

AWS include some of the very best services to launch and scale a start up. During the meet up we will be discussing about:

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2):

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.

SimpleDB:

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

Simple Storage Service (S3):

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

DevPay:

Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use online billing and account management service that makes it easy for businesses to sell applications that are built in, or run on top of, Amazon Web Services. It is designed to make running applications in the cloud and on demand easier for developers.

Third party tools to be discussed:

Rightscale:

RightScale enables companies to create Web solutions running on cloud computing providers such as Amazon EC2 that are scalable, reliable, easy to manage, and affordable.

Ylastic:

Ylastic is a unique application that is built on top of EC2, S3, SDB, SQS and FPS, and provides an intuitive and powerful user interface for managing the main Amazon Web Services – S3, EC2, SQS and SDB, along with monitoring, alerts, reporting, and other goodies. It enables you to spend your precious time focusing on bringing your ideas to life rather than dealing with the daily nitty gritty of the environment. Don’t waste your bandwidth by building your own UI, monitoring and administration tools. Leverage Ylastic and use the saved time to build value added applications.

Jollat:

Jollat is an easy-to-use GUI to manage S3 and EC2 services. It provides access to the full functionality of the services, but everything is integrated into a simple interface. Versions are available for the Mac, Windows and Linux.

Bucket Explorer:

A User Interface for Amazon S3. Helps you to transfer files to and from s3. Allows managing ACL, creating signed URLs, managing bucket logging and allows access to shared buckets and files.

Since the meet up will be discussion oriented, it is suggested that you first study the general overview of these services. We will focus on how these tools can be used efficiently, show a hands-on tutorial for starting an EC2 instance and also present some useful third party tools.

The event in take place at Eleytheroudakis Bookstore (cafe, 6th floor), Panepistimiou 17, 7pm on 29th October.

Larger view

Posted in Development | 5 Comments »

Google launches banner ad builder

Google has just released a product that allows adwords advertisers to build their own banner ads. This really reminds me old days with sites offering banner bulding services and banner templates. Not very different but the visual results look quite good. Let’s see how effective these ads are. Obviously Google is targeting very small companies with this product who currently spend little or do not spend at all in internet advertising. It will take some time to bring them in but I believe this move will also help Google competitors since a whole new market is going to be built.

You can read more about the ad builder here.

Posted in Websites | 1 Comment »