Jul 28, 2009
Microsoft has recently unveiled its pricing for Windows Azure. In short, Microsoft did exactly align with the pricing offered by Amazon. CPU costs CPU costs 0.12/h,meaning that a single instance running 24/24 for a month costs 86.4 which is fairly expensive compared to classical hosting provider where you can get more for basically half the price.
But well, this situation was expected as Microsoft probably does not want to start a price war with his business partners still selling dedicated Windows Server hosting.
Jun 20, 2009
My small company is getting visibility momentum. After managing to get copied by the Chinese Government itself, Lokad is now listed on the blog of S. Somagar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft.
I am not exactly sure how S. Somagar ended-up on Lokad, but I don’t think that he personally spend time to carefully review each one of the 15.000 bizspark companies. Thus, I guess I have to thank Julien Codorniou for that :-) .
May 19, 2009
The FIFO (First In First Out) is a very well known concept in computer science. In one of my previous post, I used the word FIPFO to refer to First In Probably First Out to refer to the cloud equivalent of the FIFO.
Indeed, the basic idea behind that term is that you can’t scale much pure FIFOs due to synchronization constraints. Yet, if you just loosen a little bit the semantic, that is to say, FIPFO, then you have an infinitely scalable data structure.
May 4, 2009
Apparently, my company website has been copied by an official branch of the Chinese government. Although, Ghandi has said that Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, I am not sure how I should handle such a blatant ripoff of Lokad’s copyrights.
Key interesting facts:
plenty of “left-over” on the Chinese website from the original one. imaginative ways of recycling irrelevant illustrations. it’s a .gov.cn website, that is to say an official Department of the Government of China.
Apr 21, 2009
In my previous post if been detailing 9 steps to make sure your startup exists. Inspired by an initial idea of Chris Exline, I decided to make a small survey of the startups admitted at the Incubator of Telecom ParisTech in 2007 and 2008 (startups are hosted 18 months by the incubator, and then kicked-out, that’s the rule).
To figure out how well the startups of the incubator were doing, I came up with a simple score the startup websites.
Apr 18, 2009
My uISV isn’t even remotely an audience based business - we are on a narrow B2B segment - but since the very beginning, I have invested a lot of efforts to get a decent online presence. So far, every effort that I have pushed to strengthen the online presence was very significantly rewarded. Every week or so, excellent news just pop out of nowhere:
A consulting group wants to add the product to its portfolio.
Apr 6, 2009
In a previous post, I have discussed why I believed that cloud computing was going to be a big player arena, and not a friendly place for the little guys.
Recently, many people told about such and such small company that was supposed to deliver cloud computing too, and that their service would match the ones offered by big players.
Basically, the discussion goes like this:
Hey, we too are able to instantiate virtual machines on-demand.
Apr 2, 2009
I have been a long time consumer of freelance marketplaces. Yet, all the freelance websites that I have experienced so far left me a feeling of half-backed design. Guru, oDesk, eLance, rentacoder, just to name a few of them.
The heart of the problem lies in the doomed attempts at supporting any type of freelance jobs with a unique web application.
In contrast, voices.com has a unique focus on voice talents.
Mar 23, 2009
A few months ago at Lokad, we started working on 8-core machines. Multi-core machines need adequate algorithmic design to leverage their processing power; and such a design can be more or less complicated depending of the algorithm that you are trying to parallelize.
In our case, there were many situations where the parallelization was quite straightforward: large loops, all iterations being independents. At that time, PLinq, the parallelization library from Microsoft wasn’t still available as a final product (it will be shipped with Visual Studio 2010).
Nov 11, 2008
My own personal definition of cloud computing is a hosting provider that delivers automated and near real time arbitrary large allocation of computing resources such as CPU, memory, storage and bandwidth.
For companies such as Lokad, I believe that cloud computing will shape many aspects of the software business in the next decade.
Obviously, all cloud computing providers have limits on the amount of resources that one can get allocated, but I want to emphasize that, for the end-user, the cloud is expected to be so large that the limitation is rather the cost of resource allocation, as opposed to hitting technical obstacles such as the need to perform a two-weeks upgrade from one hosting solution to another.
