Busy, busy, busy
A couple of weeks back we were brainstorming about other ways we could make use of the code infrastructure we'd put together for Dirigible. We had loads of stuff for running functional tests, determining dependencies between spreadsheet cells, executing untrusted user code safely on our servers, and so on. Any of those could potentially make an interesting product, so we put together some basic landing pages, one for each idea, and put a bit of money into Google AdWords to see if any of them got any interest.
One of them took off immediately, and even started getting traction on Twitter: PythonAnywhere, an online Python IDE and web application environment -- basically, Dirigible without the spreadsheet grid. This fits in with what we suspected -- lots of people were interested in Dirigible, but it wasn't the spreadsheet side of it that excited them, it was the easy Python grid computing.
What's been particularly cool with this idea is not only that most of it is done and "just" needs breaking out of Dirigible and putting into a new product, but that people are keen to engage with us about it. When people signed up on our landing page, we sent them an email with a few questions -- "What would you use it for? Which features excite you? What would you pay for it? Any suggestions for other features?" About 25% of people have replied, with lots of great feedback, and we've changed our plans (and altered the relative priorities of features) based on their input. All very Lean Startup...
Anyway, all good clean fun. If you'd like a look at it when it goes into beta, you can sign up on the site, or just leave a comment below.
How to bet on the bubble?
(Note: this is merely the ramblings of a startup founder and should not be treated investment advice of any kind whatsoever. Caveat lector.)
Apparently, we're in another tech bubble. I was wondering the other day how Color Labs were going to spend the $41 million they recently raised, and the only things I could think of were marketing and website hosting -- the former because the free press they got out of that ludicrous investment will die down, the latter because it sounds like they've built the app with a client-server model, so they'll need lots of storage and bandwidth to manage it.
As I write this, Color.com has the IP address 50.17.223.168, which ARIN tells us is in the Amazon EC2 subnet. So I guess we know where a chunk of that $41m is going.
So, one startup is using Amazon. At work, we're using it for our programmable cloud spreadsheet, Dirigible, too. But are all the cool kids using it?
The best way I could think of to check that out was to work out what Y Combinator-funded companies are using. They don't publish a list of their portfolio companies anywhere I can see, but there's an unofficial list here. So, taking the companies started since January 2010, 80 in total, I made this sheet to work out where they were all hosted.
Highlights:
- About 26% of the companies founded in January 2010 use AWS.
- About 63% of the companies founded in June 2010 use AWS.
- About 71% of the companies founded in January 2011 use AWS.
There's a pretty obvious trend there, but it's not clear what it means. Perhaps the startups kick off using AWS, then switch to other hosting providers once they've got traction. Perhaps many of the startups from January 2010 are now bust, and the hosting provider shown is the one for the holding page that now sits on their domain. Or perhaps it's something else entirely; I guess the best way to track would be to revisit the sheet periodically and look for changes.
However, one thing is very clear -- new YC startups right now are overwhelmingly choosing AWS. Back in the days of the last dot-com bubble, people often said that it was best to invest in suppliers to startups rather than the startups themselves -- better, in a gold rush, to sell shovels to gold miners than to start prospecting oneself. Back then, that would have meant buying Sun Microsystems stock, which, hard though it might be to believe these days, would have been a great investment -- inasmuch as any investment could be in a bubble. Certainly better than investing in a single startup, because even back then, most failed. (Obviously once you have money to spread your bets across a range of startups, things change. But I don't, and nor do most other people.)
So, is now a good time to buy Amazon stock? Well, if I could invest in AWS alone I would. But as far as I can make out from Amazon's last SEC 10-K filing, a maximum of 3% of their revenues came from AWS in 2010 (AWS comes under "other" sales, which totalled $953m, and total sales were $34bn) . It's hard to unpick what the associated costs where, as unfortunately they don't seem to split it out from their general technology spend. But their gross profit ($7bn) is seven times the best-case AWS revenues, so it doesn't sound like it's a major component.
So, ultimately, investing in Amazon is probably more a bet on their other businesses. They're pretty good at commoditising their complements, so may be a good pick. But they're not a bet on startup growth.
On the other hand, they're clearly blowing away the competition, at least as far as the sample set of companies are concerned. So investing in other cloud hosting providers like Rackspace sounds like a really bad way to bet on the bubble. And at least that's one useful (if tentative) conclusion.
Some old JavaScript
I was digging around in my archives and discovered some old JavaScript demos I wrote back in 1999 — long enough ago that I thought of them as "DHTML pages". It turns out that they only needed a few minor tweaks to make them work on modern browsers; the bulk of that was removing the browser-sniffing code, and then in each case where I was deciding what to do based on whether the browser was Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4 (!), deleting one or the other case. Looks like it was about 50/50 as to which browser won.
Anyway, without much further ado, I bring you the holding page for my old personal/political blog, before it went live (and you can really see how this would have pulled the readers in), and a page in the style of 1980s/early 90s Amiga demos. The latter is particularly worthy of note because when I originally posted it, I made sure it only appeared in 640x480 windows — because anything larger would make even fast machines grind to a halt, all those years ago back in 1999. The tagline really made sense, back then.
Excuse me, I just need to go into a corner and feel old...
[UPDATE] I kept track of the changes required to convert 1999-vintage DHTML to modern JavaScript in a Git repo, if anyone's interested in doing a similar conversion then let me know in the comments and I'll put together something.
London Financial User Group Meeting: 17 January
The next meeting of the LFPUG will be on 17 January, from 19:00 – 21:00 — location TBD. Two talks are scheduled:
- Developing and Deploying Python applications on GPU Cloud Platforms, Suleiman Shehu, CEO of Azinta Systems
- Black-box model validation with Python, Patrick Henaff
Both sound interesting, the first in particular! There's still time to propose a lightning talk, too — I think the best way is to send the organiser, Didrik Pinte, an email. If you're on LinkedIn, there's also more information in the LFPUG group there.
And the same to you too, Google!
While we're on the subject of rude words... I hope that Google aren't showing this kind of CAPTCHA to french people...
Long S is long
A bunch of people have been posting interesting searches on Google Labs' Books Ngram viewer. I heard about it from this tweet by @njrabit, but the tantalising link (don't follow if you don't like swearing) at the bottom of this blog post by S. Weasel, showed up something interesting. Why is it that of four swearwords, the one starting with 'F' is incredibly popular from 1750 to 1820, then drops out of fashion for 140 years -- only appearing again in the 1960s?
Fun with the Audio Data API
The latest beta version of Firefox 4 has an API for reading and writing audio data -- right down to the sample level, right from JavaScript. JavaScript is, of course, totally the wrong language to write DSP-style code in, so that's what I decided to do :-)
If you fancy downloading FF4 beta and trying out some of the demos, here they are. There are lots of (much better) demos by other people here.
And if you try out the musical temperament example and have any thoughts on which chords sounded nicest, leave a comment below!
(Update: the Mozilla Audio API no longer works, as far as I can tell -- a different Web Audio API wound up becoming the standard -- maybe I'll port the examples over to that!)
A Dirigible screencast
I'd forgotten how much fun -- but how much work! -- it is to put together a short introductory screencast for a product. Three days of my own work plus countless suggestions and improvements from Glenn, Harry and Jonathan, and here we have the result (click to view):
A big announcement from Resolver
So, I've let various hints drop over the last few months, but we did the official annoucement today: a new product from Resolver, called Dirigible (thanks to Wikipedia's "Random page" link :-). It's been in private beta for a few weeks, and we decided it was time to get the news out there about it. As to what it is... our tagline is that it is "a spreadsheet-like tool for Python grid computing". That's kind of fuzzy (and probably needs a bit of work), but what I do want to make clear is what it's not: it is not just a web-based version of Resolver One, our desktop Python spreadsheet.
Instead, it's something much more developer-focused, built from the ground up -- sharing code with Resolver One, of course, but not trying to duplicate it. To quote the official annoucement:
We took the things from Resolver One that made software developers say "wow" -- like Python-based formulae, objects in the grid, and the ability to treat a spreadsheet as a function and call it from another sheet. Then we worked out what we could make better by coding just those things as a web application backed by traditional Python -- not IronPython -- on a grid of Linux servers.
You can read more about Dirigible and how it relates to Resolver One on the company blog, or there's a more concise version on the product's own web page. If you'd like to try it out, there's a signup form on the main Dirigible page; we're keeping beta user numbers small for now, but building up as we gain confidence that we've not done anything totally stupid with regard to security or scalabity...
I think everyone at Resolver's done a great job in putting it all together -- of course, being able to share code with Resolver One helped a lot :-) And I'm sure that Dirigible's going to be a great addition to the company's product line.
"Your Support Request has been submitted to the Support Request"
I've been trying to cancel Resolver's Yahoo! Search Marketing account over the last day or so; it's not generating enough traffic to be worthwhile. The cancellation process is a little buggy.