Month: February 2008

Sophia: daddy, when i’m 10 I’ll be an adult and all grown up
me: really?
Sophia: yeah, when you are ‘double digits’ that means you are an adult
me: but i like that you are my little girl
Sophia: I can be grown up and your little girl.
me: you are so right.

(I was thinking of fred’s post about his girls when i wrote this down) 

The top story on Techmeme at the movement is about the iPhone SDK and speculation that it may not ship in February.

My guess is that it will either ship later in the week or early March so I’m not terribly worried about this.

I do have high hopes for the SDK and what will be possible when it’s in the hands of the community of developers.

My wish list for native apps:

-wireless calender sync with MS Exchange server.
-local search across iphone calender & address book
-dial phone numbers directly from calender
-video camera
-task manager that syncs with some desktop or web service. ideally exchange but I’ll even take iCal
-wireless gcal sync 

I continue to have a love/hate relationship with my iphone. I used it exclusively on vacation because my Verizon Blackberry Pearl doesn’t work outside of the US. I forwarded all of my Spark email to my gmail account. I discovered that Gmail on the iphone is about a billion times better than dealing with Exchange email. It’s faster and more reliable.

But I struggled with iPhone.

My wish list would make me love it again.

Our little boy James is two years old today.

It’s hard to believe that all of this was just 2 years ago.

Amazing.  

Google is making a push into the online medical records space. Unlike enterprise software companies that have been at this for decades now, Google is targeting consumers – not hospitals. Smart.

The natural reaction will be privacy and security concerns. I’m concerned about that too.

But patient directed care is overdue and this is a big step. It’s crazy that your medical records aren’t in your possession and you don’t have access to them all the time.  I want to see what the doctor wrote down about my last visit or my visit 5 years ago or my child’s exam.

Somehow we all got over the security & privacy matters when it comes to personal finance but healthcare got away. Can you imagine if personal financial information was managed like medical records?

I don’t know if Google is going to be the winner here or another big company or if it will take an emerging young company the focus and will to figure out the right combination of technology and user experience.

But this is a good sign and I’m quite excited about it.

I’m catching up on all of my favorite blogs right now while I’m still on vacation.

I’m really enjoying great posts about cloud computing from Fred and Alex.  

When it comes to basic web infrastructure, startups have a variety of build vs buy decisions. Bandwidth is always a buy decision so that’s not really a choice. 

But there are various choices when it comes to storage and computing. Build vs buy. Hardware is cheap but that’s only part of the true cost.

Amazon Web Services has been a great choice for many startups. Most of the ones I’ve seen up close use S3 and some are using EC2 to get started.

I agree that going with a big company like Amazon is a smart choice for this stuff especially in the beginning as user demand is unclear and the costs are low at first. And it’s easy to get up & running. And we are seeing alternatives coming online like Rackspace new computing service from Mosso. I’m guessing that Microsoft and Akamia will have similar services sometime in 2008. Maybe IBM will follow as well?

But at some point a startup goes to the next phase of it’s growth and at then they have to make another build vs buy choice. Cloud computing scales but at what price or cost?

The AWS Success Stories page lists early stage companies. I’d love to see a blog post or white paper that describes the costs of AWS or Mosso as a web service goes from 500k active users to 1M active users to 5M active users (and up) along with various assumptions on storage and computing requirements.