AWS re: Invent Day 1 Highlights & Announcements

AWS re: Invent Day 1 Highlights & Announcements

Greetings from Las Vegas, host city for AWS re: Invent!

AWS Senior Vice President Andy Jassy kicked off AWS re: Invent with a rousing 90 minute keynote presentation in front of 6,000 attendees, with another 13,000 watching the live stream. Andy’s talk covered a lot of ground! Starting with the history and growth of AWS over the last 6.5 years, he talked about important AWS use cases including web site hosting, gaming, social media, high performance computing (HPC), media distribution and streaming, disaster recovery, and more. He noted that AWS has hundreds of thousands of customers in 190 countries. This includes over 300 government agencies and 1500 educational institutions. Andy also used this opportunity to reveal some updated statistics on the growth of AWS – over 1.3 trillion objects in Amazon S3 (accessed at a rate of over 835,000 requests per second) and 3.7 million Hadoop clusters launched on Elastic MapReduce in the past two years.

During the keynote we also announced Amazon Redshift, our new data warehouse product and an Amazon S3 price reduction, drawing applause from the live audience and a similarly appreciative reaction online.

Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Redshift offers you fast query performance when analyzing virtually any size data set using the same SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications you use today. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes of data and scaling to a petabyte or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

Amazon Redshift is designed for developers or businesses that require the full features and capabilities of a relational data warehouse. It is certified by Jaspersoft and MicroStrategy, with additional business intelligence tools coming soon.

To learn more and sign up for an invitation to the limited preview, please visit the Amazon Redshift detail page.

Amazon S3 price reduction
In addition, AWS also announced our 24th price reduction since 2006 with yet another reduction on our Amazon S3 service. We’ve reduced the Amazon S3 standard storage and Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) prices in all nine of our regions. With this price change, all Amazon S3 standard storage and RRS customers will see a reduction in their storage costs. We are reducing standard storage prices 24-27% in the US Standard region, with similar price reductions across all other regions. We are reducing our 0-1TB storage tier in the US Standard region to $0.095/GB, a 24% price reduction. We are making similar reductions across all of our storage tiers for storage up to 5000TBs. The new lower prices for all regions can be found on the Amazon S3 pricing changes announcement page. New prices are effective December 1st and will be applied to your bill for all storage on or after this date. We are happy to pass along these savings to you as we continue to scale, innovate and drive down our costs.

AWS Marketplace supports Windows software
Lastly, the AWS Marketplace now supports software built on Microsoft Windows Server. Customers can quickly discover and deploy Windows software titles to the AWS Cloud, including well known business intelligence, database, and hosting solutions from software vendors like MicroStrategy,Quest Software, and Parallels. You can now 1-click deploy software on Amazon EC2 instances running Windows Server, including 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012 editions of Windows Server, paying only for what you use and scaling your software up or down as needed.

If you are a Windows ISV or software reseller you can list your software in AWS Marketplace and make your solutions available to hundreds of thousands of active AWS customers around the world. AWS Marketplace handles all billing, collections, and disbursements, with software revenue deposited directly into the software vendor’s or reseller’s account.

View all Windows software titles in the AWS Marketplace.

Join us Thursday morning at 8:30am for our second keynote address with Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.com. He’ll share with you his thoughts on building apps for the 21st century and will have guests from Pinterest and Animoto. Then, in the afternoon, we’ll have a special fireside chat at 1:30pm with Werner Vogels and Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO Amazon.com.

Watch the keynotes on Thursday here or if you missed the Day 1 keynote you can check it out here.

Sincerely,
Amazon Web Services

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Welcome to Google AdWords Insights Review

Welcome to Google AdWords Insights Review

> Welcome to Google
> AdWords Insights Review.
>
> By the end of 2012, more people will connect to the Internet through their mobile device than their laptop or desktop.* Learn how you can make the most of the mobile opportunity for your clients.
>
> Help your clients understand “The Meaning of Mobile”
>
> Create mobile-only campaigns for better performance
>
> Discover mobile consumer behavior with Our Mobile Planet
>
> This detailed study explains why the mobile space is so powerful. Learn how to engage your clients’ customers in more emotionally resonant and impactful ways.
>
> Mobile-only campaigns help drive an 11.5% average increase in mobile clickthrough rates compared to campaigns that combine mobile and desktop ads.
>
> In the U.S., 78% of smartphone owners use their devices in-store. Visit the Our Mobile Planet website to learn more about mobile opportunities around the world.
>
> What’s new where you’re at?
>
> Google Engage All-Stars Summit
> Our 2nd biannual Google Engage All-Stars Competition came to a wrap this November with the All-Stars Summit. One hundred winners, from the US, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Peru, were flown out for the two-day event in Mountain View, California. The jam-packed agenda featured talks by Google executives, a keynote by Daniel Pink, and interactive sneak-peaks into product demos. Congratulations again to all the winners!
>
> Develop your online services with Google Engage.
>
> Join Google Engage and learn about ways Google can help your clients. Follow us on Google+ to connect with agencies just like yours.
>
> Sincerely,
> The AdWords Team

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Insightly Customer Survey – Chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card

Insightly Customer Survey – Chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card

Over the past few months we’ve received general feedback and feature requests from many of you. We love hearing from our customers because all feedback helps us improve. To this end, we have created a short survey to collect feedback from as many as you as possible.

With the holidays approaching we know everyone is very busy. To show our appreciation, upon completion of the survey, you will be entered into a drawing to win one of 5 $100 Amazon Gift Certificates. The 5 winners will be notified by email (so please give us your email at the end of the survey). The survey closes December 6, 2012 (midnight Pacific Time, US). All replies are confidential.

Insightly Customer Survey – Chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card

Thanks and Happy Holidays,

Insightly Customer Survey – Chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card

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GoDaddy’s DNS Servers Fail Again

On November 27, 2012 it appears that GoDaddy is again having DNS Failures and not-found errors for their DNS. It is similar to a few months ago when their DNS network went down due to an infrastructure error and they had around 12 – 24 hours of downtime while their engineers tried to resolve the issue.

It seems to be happening again. Your website will be down. E-mail will be undeliverable.

Last time Godaddy issued an apology and a credit on your account.

GoDaddy’s DNS Servers Fail Again

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USPS: How to Compliment an Employee of the Postal Service

Wondering how contact the United States Postal Service (USPS) to compliment an employee who helped you? Look no further!

Today I had a wonderful employee help me and it took me about 10 minutes to find the online contact / complement form for the USPS, so I wanted to save you the time. They do have an online form, and even a section for compliments:

USPS: How to Compliment an Employee of the Postal Service

So go ahead an send a thank you, kudos, compliment, or praise for a mailman, mailwoman, employee, or other member of the USPS who helped you, here’s the link:

CLICK HERE TO COMPLIMENT AN EMPLOYEE

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Introducing the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ Tablet

Amazon has introduced a new product – the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ Tablet

Introducing the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ Tablet

Features for the new tablet include:

– Stunning 8.9″ HD display, exclusive Dolby audio, and fastest Wi-Fi
– 1920×1200 HD display with polarizing filter and anti-glare technology
– High performance 1.5Ghz dual-core processor
– Dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi for 40% faster downloads
– Over 22 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, books, audiobooks, etc
– Integrated support for Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!
– Front-facing HD camera for taking photos or making video calls
– Free unlimited cloud storage for all your Amazon content
– Kindle FreeTime – a free, personalized tablet experience just for kids
– Prime Instant Video
– Kindle Owners’ Lending Library

Introducing the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ Tablet

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First Impressions of Laravel

First Impressions of LaravelAfter having done substantial work with PHP, including using many MVC frameworks such as ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, FuelPHP, and Zend I have to say that Laravel is surprisingly refreshing.

The creators have put a real emphasis on eloquent code, and code that is high-level / highly readable (as english). I like the static methods and helpers that the framework provides. The MySQL integration is nice, too, with both an easy query building helper, as well as an eloquent ORM. (The only thing I really don’t agree with is renaming “limit” to “take” – it’s not intuitive as it is not related to the underlying technology – leave it as `limit` please!)

The `artisan` command line tool is also nice to help manage migrations.

Laravel also has some pretty good built-in functionality, offering some authentication, validation, and csrf checking. The routes and controllers are also easy to set up for use with a RESTFUL model.

Finally, I like that it is focused on the strengths of PHP. With some other frameworks (fuelPHP) I felt that they were powerful but were trying a little to hard to be Ruby / Ruby on Rails.

All-in-all I am enjoying using it and I hope that it continues to be developed and gains traction in the PHP community.

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pianobar – dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libgnutls.26.dylib

pianobar – dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libgnutls.26.dylibIf you’re using `pianobar` on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion) you might have updated Xcode or homebrew and ended up with a broken pianobar, something along the lines of:

$ pianobar
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libgnutls.26.dylib
Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/pianobar
Reason: image not found

This isn’t actually a problem with `libgnutls.26.dylib` but more of an issue that you need to update pianobar.

The first thing I tried was running these two commands:

brew update

( That updates the list of available libraries for homebrew )

brew upgrade

( That actually upgraes homebrew and the available libraries )

It’s possiblel that your pianobar will work now, but if not there are a few more things you can try.

If you installed Piano Bar with homebrew you can try:

brew uninstall pianobar

(remove pianobar)

brew install pianobar

(reinstall pianobar)

If you did not use homebrew to install pianobar you can download pianobar from the repo on github and then build it using xcode via the command line:

make clean && make CFLAGS=”-O2 -DNDEBUG -W64″

I actually have a complete tutorial How to install Pianobar on Mac OS X that you can check out, too.

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jQuery.getCSS

jQuery has a nice `jQuery.getScript` function that allows you to easily add `

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Google Uses Chrome to their Market Webapps

In case you have any plugins installed, or haven’t use a fresh and up-to-date version of Google Chrome lately (running the Canary build myself), you might not have noticed that the default “new tab” page / homepage has now changed to show some of the core google suite products:

  • Chrome Webstore (this is not new)
  • Google Docs
  • Google Drive (seems to be a duplicate but maybe the brand is still transitioning)
  • Gmail (easy access more so than marketing)
  • Youtube
  • Google Search
Previously Google Chrome had focused on things like your recently closed pages, and the Chrome Store. It’s interesting to see more of their own products pop-up here. Their client base for people trying these things since they are presented with them has got to be growing. This is similar to the new start menu in Windows 8 – but with both we’ll have to see if people just get used to using the things they are familiar with and “see right through” the other things, or if they are tempted to explore. That’s UX / UI for you.

Google Uses Chrome to Market Webapps

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