Archive for the ‘Cloud Computing’ Category
Show Phanfare Slideshows on your Living Room TV
I am excited to announce the availability of the Phanfare Media Server for Phanfare 2.0, a small program that runs on your PC to publish your Phanfare photos within your home network. The new Playstation III supports UPnP viewing of your photos, as does the Xbox 360. There is also a digital picture frame on the market from Digital Spectrum that supports the protocol. TVs will also support the protocol directly within the next 12 months. Here is a demonstration of a Playstation III playing Phanfare photos in the office. We installed the media server on a PC on the office network and then browsed to our photos on a TV connected to a Playstation III.
We wrote the media server program using the Phanfare API. The UPnP protocol is similar to the Bonjour protocol that Apple uses to allow iTunes to share music and Apple TV to show content. If there is someone out there who knows how Bonjour works and wants to write a version of our media server for the Mac, please let us know.
The new media server joins a growing list of ways to access your photos and videos whenever and wherever you want. We call this “inputs and outputs.”
- Screensavers for the Mac and PC that can turn any computer into a digital picture frame. You login with your Phanfare 2.0 credentials and choose your content, or content of friends and family.
- The Phanfare facebook app that can show your Phanfare photos and videos to your facebook friends.
- John’s background switcher will refresh your windows wallpaper periodically with a Phanfare image.
- The Phanfare Aperture plugin will allow you directly export photos from Apple’s Aperture program to Phanfare.
- The Eye-fi wifi SD memory card will wirelessly upload photos from your digital camera to your Phanfare account.
Many of these programs were written by the Phanfare community. If you write something useful with the Phanfare API, let us know. If we like it we will promote it for you and provide you with a free lifetime Phanfare account.
At Phanfare, we want to enable you to access your photos and videos from any device you want, whenever you want. We will never hold your content hostage.
Google App Engine vs. Amazon Web Services
We use Amazon’s S3 storage service here at Phanfare and love it. I especially like that while we are leveraging Amazon’s cost position and development budget, we could probably swap out the service for a competitive service or our own service if we really had to.
Google’s new App Engine offering, which gives you a vertically integrated development environment to create a web application in Python, has pros and cons relative to the Amazon Web Services approach of giving you more industry standard pieces like Linux instances (EC2), key-value stores (SimpleDB) and web-service-based filesystems (S3). (If you are not familiar with the offerings, Gartner has a nice summary)
Amazon’s offering is a lower level offering, closer to the hardware. It will take you longer to get started with Amazon Web Services and require more work to build systems but the resulting systems will be more extensible (and my guess, higher performing). For example, if I need to convert video using an obscure codec, I can probably install the appropriate code on an EC2 linux instance, but there may not be a suitable Python module for Google’s App Engine.
You can build Google’s App Engine on top of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 offerings, but you would have a tough time building Amazon’s web services using Google App Engine. To make the point, the folks at AppDrop are running the open source App Engine SDK on an Amazon EC2 instance.
There is a place for both the Amazon and Google approaches. If you want to create a new web app that requires very little third party open source software, Google App Engine will get you running faster, especially if you are proficient in Python and have no pre-existing code. The Google App solution might just wind up being your early prototype, but will let you get to market faster. If you are extending an existing service, have a lot of code, or want to split between in-house and cloud-based infrastructure, as we do at Phanfare (we use only S3), then Amazon is the natural choice.
Personally, Amazon’s approach is more attractive as we look to build Phanfare. Amazon is creating virtual instances of industry-standard services that everyone is building. I know that if we create services that run on an Amazon standard Linux EC2 instance that we can move it off of Amazon fairly easily. I also like that Amazon has broken down the problem of building scalable systems into different services pieces that do one thing very well. Large monolithic systems can get overly complex and unreliable.
Google has developed an environment that nobody is using today. If Google decides that Google App Engine is not strategic for them and discontinues it, it could be catastrophic for me. Sure I can take the SDK and run it myself like they did at Appdrop, but that won’t guarantee any level of reliability. By contrast, I am pretty sure that Linux is not going away. If we had to find another host for our Linux-based system, it would be easy.
Selling Music in the World of Free
Although Apple is having good success selling music online, there has long been serious concern within the industry that with DRM disappearing the business of selling music is going the way of the dodo bird as online sales are not keeping up with the declining physical sales. Fred Wilson eagerly awaits the day when all music is free via advertiser-supported streams.
DRM is going away. That is clear enough. So where does that leave the music industry? I believe there is an opportunity to provide a service that people will pay for to buy songs. Rather than buying a song and simply getting a single copy, buying a song should make it available to you for perpetuity from any network-connected device you want at higher and higher resolution as time goes on.
Apple is in the best position to provide a service like this. Here is how it would work. You would buy a song on iTunes from Apple while logged in using your Apple ID. Apple would sync that song without DRM into iTunes. You can do what you want with it. But Apple would also make it so that you can login from any iPod and get to your full purchased library.
Essentially, the songs you “own” would be part of a hosted library that you could access from any device. When you enter a car, you could login to the car audio system and get access to your full library (it would be cached on the hard drive in your car stereo). When at a friend’s house, you could login at their computer (or stereo) to iTunes with your credentials and get access to your songs. Through smart synching and caching, it would appear that your music is available everywhere you want it.
This is a type of service I want to buy a song from. It sells the convenience of a hosted environment. Whether the songs are DRMed or not does not matter (they likely won’t be). Because even if I export a song and give it to a friend, he has only 10% of the experience unless he is also an “owner” of record with Apple.
What is required to fulfill this vision:
- The provider has to be strong enough to get the licensing deals that would allow this type of sale of music to consumers.
- The provider has to be able to get the service and synching incorporated in the iPod, the default music player for most people.
- The provider needs to able to get the service incorporated in other consumer electronic devices like car stereos and home audio systems, to allow true universal access.
- Consumers need to believe that the provider behind the sale is not going away.
Few companies satisfy all these criteria. Apple is one of them. Amazon gets pretty close.
By layering service on top of the music, piracy becomes a non-issue. You might be able to copy the music from a friend, but you can’t steal the service. Of course, there might be some sharing of login credentials, but this is much more easily addressed by monitoring simultaneous usage.
This type of music service would finally make owned music a hosted experience like most other consumer apps, while still providing commercial free music, which many people want. It simultaneously solves the music backup problem as well. I don’t need to backup my music because any iPod I own will automatically have my music, synched wirelessly over the network (we can all dream). And I won’t need a computer to enjoy an iPod, which is welcome because computers are a disaster (we need a good consumer appliance).
Because this service would guarantee that music would be provided at higher quality as time goes on, I might even buy the songs that I already own free and clear from old CDs.
How about the pricing? Could you provide a song for $0.99 and offer to restore it for the person indefinitely into the future? I think you probably could. After all, the music is not streamed, just synched, and you do have the attention of the consumer and can probably sell some advertising at appropriate points in the process (for example, when waiting for your device to synchronize or in the music store).
Would everyone buy songs this way? I think ad-supported music might be bigger, but there is a market out there for a premium version. Like buying a CD versus listening to the radio, this service would provide a better experience for the music you really care about.
Good Consumer Apps Don't Expose the Filesystem
Consumer apps are moving to the cloud. No news there, we all know it. One unifying characteristic of well designed cloud-based applications is that they don’t expose the file system to the user. Do you think about the file system on Gmail? What about when you are using Google Docs?
The computer filesystem is an engineering concept, designed by the geeks who created computers. It has nearly no useful purpose in mainstream computing.
Apps that expose the filesystem are uniformly focused on the wrong level of the problem if they are being pitched at consumers. The best example would be the consumer backup services out there like box.net and Mozy. These are fine services for small businesses. But as a consumer, forget about it. Use a hosted service in the cloud that solves the underlying problem.
Don’t backup your email, use Gmail. Don’t Backup your photos and videos. Use Phanfare to manage them. What if you want to create a spreadsheet? Use google docs. What about backing up your tax forms form TurboTax? Just use the web version! Any service that promises to sync your hard drive to the cloud is a waste of time. But wait you say. How do I backup all my personal files that I create with MS office? You have lots of files you create with MS Office? You are not mainstream. You probably look more like a small business, in which case, soak in the file system.
Consumer devices can be divided along similar lines. The Blackberry and iPhone are both great consumer devices and neither one shows you the file system. The Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation both have available web browsers, but no user-visible file system to corrupt. On the other hand, the standard Windows PC shows you the file system and PCs are notoriously difficult for consumers to keep running and manage. Macs are really only slightly better.
We will eventually see a great consumer appliance that allows you to access the internet, run a web browser and do everything you want to do while providing no access to the underlying file system. This embedded device will probably run some form of Unix under the covers but that will be transparent to the consumer. A good bet is that the first such device will be a multi-touch tablet computer from Apple.
An Engineer 