Scale Fail?

April 18, 2011 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment

A colleague shared this one with me and it cracked me up, so I couldn’t resist posting it. I have a foot in both worlds. My day job involves systems with millions of clients and zero tolerance for downtime. Our venture does Web 2.0ish stuff using Rails. You hear a lot about MVC (minimum viable product) these days, and for kiwiluv products, which are as yet unproven, we adhere to that philosophy. Yes, I know full well that we’ll have to pump some more work into it to get it to scale, but the point is to see if you get traction in order to figure out if that next wave of investment is worth it.

On the other hand, if you have a system where you know full well it’s got to handle gazillions of users with no downtime, it’s irresponsible not to sharpen your pencils and use a little piece of your brain to make sure the wheels aren’t going to come flying off.

Either that or find a nice landing page with a cute “Fail Whale”esque picture for people to joke about when your servers fly apart at the seams.

By the way, if you’re concerned about this kind of thing you should be reading the High Scalability blog. There’s good stuff there so check it out.

Filed under Development Methodologies, Software Architecture and Design, Web Applications · Tagged with Fail, scalability

Karen @ Web 2.0 Expo

April 12, 2011 by karen@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment

I recently attended Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It was filled with interesting topics and speakers. The focus of this year’s Expo seems to be Social Marketing and the importance of UX. This was my first Web 2.0 Expo and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. In the end, I would say I’m glad I attended.

I just landed in SF on the day the expo began from my trip to Beijing for another venture we are pursuing, so Monday sessions were brutal.

I was specifically interested in social marketing so I attended sessions such as Effective Facebook Ads and Applications (Dennis Yu, Justin Kistner), Superchanging Your brand on Facebook (Dennis Yu), New Innovations in Social Media & Digital Marketing (Lauren Cooney), Social Media & Integrated Marketing Programs (Sandra Fathi), and Setting Your Social Media Strategy (Erica Kuhl), and The Hidden Secrets of Social Media & Viral Advertising (Jonah Peretti).

During “Setting Your Social Media Strategy” by Erica Kuhl from Salesforce.com, she talked about the importance of recognizing broad change in Internet usage as virtually every prospect and customer is engaged in social media these days. Customers learn about new products through social channels, trust their network and other customers to provide honest feedback, expect brands to listen and engage them on social channels, and expect you to have a complete picture of your interacts across channels. Her Top Ten Tips for Social Media Strategy were:

Start by Listening: Twitter Audit
Understand Your Audience
Decide Where You Want to Focus
Define Your goals
Start Small, But Start Strong
Define Roles & Responsibilities
Join the Conversation
Define Your Organizational Model
Recognize Your top Contributors
Map Social Media to Your Business

Other social marketing sessions were more targeted for more mainstream media, such as Facebook and Twitter, offering detail tools and tips to increase your presence through these sites.

When most of the speakers were focused on talking about Facebook and Twitter during social media sessions, Lauren Cooney from Juniper Networks talked about New Innovations in Social Media, indicating that Digital Marketing is “more than just Facebook & Twitter”. She talked about Content Curation as a new buzzword (even though it’s not new). She talked about paper.li and flipboard an example of aggregator with nice user interface. For Social Media Management, she talked about Social Flow, which has offerings such as best time & content for a tweet or Facebook Post, metrics & reporting, real-time intelligence, great dashboard analytics. Hootsuite also provides inexpensive measurement and analytics, easy to use & scalable, multifaceted (pluggable). As one launches a social marketing campaign, these provide some additional options to explore.

The highlights were of course keynote speeches. There were many interesting speeches and some okay ones. I especially enjoyed Adam Goldstein (Hipmunk), Susan Gregg Koger (ModCloth.com), Jessica Mah (inDinero.com), and Jonah Peretti (Buzzfeed)’s presentation.

Here the video to one of the key note speakers Jonah Peretti that I enjoyed.

Filed under Business, Technology · Tagged with web20, web20expo

The Commodore 64 Returns in 8 Bits of Glory

April 10, 2011 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment

Suspiciously close to April 1, I heard that CommodoreUSA was bringing back the Commodore 64. I dismissed it as poor April Fool’s timing. Then I found this little gem in my Tron Legacy box. Hmmm…that’s pretty elaborate for an April Fools joke.

Sure enough, a little more digging turned up this on huffpo. It looks like those maniacs are really bringing back this fine machine. Sadly, as a child I couldn’t afford a Commodore 64. I had to settle for its mentally challenged cousin, the VIC-20. Now’s my chance to erase that emotional scar.