Fred’s Notes

Great article about FON on New York Times. It also has some good insides about the company, business model and inevitably Martin Varsavsky (Mr Jazztel, Ya.com) profile & lifestyle. FON wants to build a wireless internet infrastructure on top of a grassroots broadband movement and sell internet access for nomadic users. I’m skeptical about FON’s business model since the beginning. A community of wifi owners who sells wifi access to strangers? They have 800k+ registered members (Foneros) all over the world but scale doesn’t matter here. Where are the wifi hotspots? In the hotel, near the cafe, the store, the airport or in the suburb, Joe Moe’s house? Location is primary for selling wifi access. And scarcity. Because you’ll only pay for internet when there is no other option. The hotels knows this and that’s why you have the high prices. And that’s why 3G sells. A guy sharing his broadband with a FON hotspot near the hotel will reach the rooms? I doubt it, even with an antenna (ok, maybe some rooms). I’m curious to know what percentage of members that are actually sharing their broadband. And you can’t ask for fair money if you don’t have a way to deliver a stable access quality over the wifi connection. Even if that is only for 1 hour. Maybe I’m not seeing all picture here and they are trying to make money with 3rd party agreements with ISP’s and even Apple (smells like iPhone). Even so. They’re paying a high price for dreaming with Ubiquitous Wifi and equipment subsidization (about 500k cash burned every month, it used to be 1 million). Ouch.

A tribute to the YouTube generation.

Very good article on Twitter as a scalability case study. It’s all about the architecture. Not the language.

Some time ago, Broadband over powerline (BPL) was considered a promising technology, a third pipe (after cable and DSL) for the home, competing with the established players and that made big headlines on the news. Well, it seems that every trial and pilot projects in Europe & US have failed miserably (in Portugal I remember that Oni run some trial tests in Lisbon (Laranjeiras) about 4 or 5 years ago). I guess you can’t win the laws of physics (too much interference and lack of reliability with a decent budget). So, what would be the third pipe? FTTH? Wimax? (cough, cough)

Coming this year, Amazon EC2 will have persistent storage. Today the ‘disk’ per instance is ephemeral. If the instance gets a reboot or is shuted down, you lost all the information you had on that disk. So, you couldn’t use things like relational databases on EC2 without using some sort of S3 hack and play with MySQL replication plus the geographical feature of EC2. Basically you make incremental backups of the database to S3 every 10m, run a full backup once per day and launch another MySQL instance on a separate datacenter for mirroring. Now, you’ll have the possibility to buy a volume from 1G to 1T, mount it on your EC2 instance and there you go. Oh, btw, you have snapshots, too. Quoting Jeff Barr: 

In the same way that your running EC2 instances, your Elastic IP addresses, your S3 buckets and your SQS queues can be thought of as items contained within the scope of your AWS account, our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you’d like). Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; you can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.You will also be able to perform “snapshot” backups of your volumes to Amazon S3. You can use these snapshots to create new volumes or to roll back your stored data to an earlier point in time.    

For now, a few lucky bastards are on the beta tests. They expect to open it to a wider audience later this year. World domination for Amazon? How can you compete in vm hosting business or cloud computing? Let’s have a look a the pricing numbers. Can’t wait.

Todas as línguas do mundo, pronunciadas. Meet Forvo. Grande idéia. How do you pronounce Gwyneth Paltrow? And Matthew McConaughey?

Well, that’s what Loic is saying about Internet startups. If you’re not US or UK based, you’ll fail. And he’s french. If that’s true, Skype was a miracle.

As I predicted (duh), Yahoo said no to the $31 per share offer from Microsoft. If the board is just trying to get some time, move up the price or just playing the Insane Story, time will tell. So, will YHOO go up with the ongoing speculation of a higher offer? Or it will fall like Niagara?

Well, it’s time to sell Yahoo! stock. Before Yahoo! says no to Microsoft.

Holly molly, this is unbelievable. Stay away from the web whois.

Via Pedro.

Hulu is a new VoD (Video on Demand) service banked by NBC and News Corporation with the sole purpose of competing with YouTube. Yeah, right. Competing with Youtube? At least Google will not have to worry about competition outside US. Just signed up today for a beta account and guess what, I can’t see none of all the decent series I like. Not even the A-Team! What a useless crap. You know NBC, the reason Youtube and Bittorrent got so popular is because the Internet and TCP/IP don’t have a flag and a region set like DVD. It’s the Internet. Everybody is connected. The world is connected. Why a guy in Sweden or in Thailand can’t watch your series or even buy them? I’m not a pro-piracy guy, I understand that you’re running a business, the episodes costs a lot of money but you’re not understanding the new digital media paradigm and the internet as a new channel of distribution. If you don’t get this, well, Google and Apple do. “Watch your favorites. Anytime. Anywhere”. You must be kidding me. So long, Hulu.

iTunes store not available at your country? Don’t like the hassle of Bittorrent? Want to buy DiVX/DVD, VCD and iPod movies DRM-free? Don’t worry, try ZML.com, they’re selling downloadable movies starting from $1.99. And if you have a problem giving your Visa card to a russian site, for a little more you can pay by SMS and you don’t even have to give your e-mail to them. The download speed is kind of slow from my home dsl but from my co-located servers it’s a snap. Globalization is not that good for MPAA, I presume.