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• BusinessWeek: The 25 Most Influential People on the Web

  BusinessWeek released its report on the 25 most influential people on the Web today as determined by the magazine’s staff.

  tags: getanewbrowser, businessweek, web

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October 29th will be a special day here in the midwest as the Highlight Midwest Conference debuts. This FREE event will highlight some of the greatest entrepreneurial, new media, and web gurus from some of the finest cities in all the land - Des Moines, Omaha, and Kansas City (aka the next Silicon Valley, err Silicon Prairie :-) )

This day long event in our “flyover states” will be segmented in two parts. The first part of the day will be “focused highlights” which include demos and presentations from of the great companies that you’ve never heard of (but definitely need to). The second part of the day is a formal reception at the Kauffman Center featuring reps from each of these great cities to explain what the web means to their cities and how it is creating change.

If you are in the midwest and are into the web, social media, or are an entrepreneur YOU NEED TO COME.

Want more info?
Twitter @highlightmw
FriendFeed Room
Rob Jensen - Highlight Midwest: Oct 29 in Kansas City
Jeff Slobotski - Highlight Midwest - October 29th

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• googlechartsharp - Google Code
  (tags: api googlecharts .net)
• Big Huge Thesaurus: Synonyms, antonyms, and rhymes (oh my!)
  (tags: api thesaurus)

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I think I’m sold. Sorry iPhone - you had your chance but your pimp AT&T turned me away at the counter. Sorry! Now just waiting for the HTC Touch Pro to come to Sprint so I can drop AT&T :-) (No offense T-Mobile)

Complete Synchronization with all things Google

T-Mobile G1 feature walkthrough

Quick Hands On Demo

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Yesterday I wrote about Amazon’s entrance into the Content Delivery Network (CDN) space with their newest web service offering. CDN’s are not a new technology and this is actually a crowded market - one that Amazon hopes to enter and commoditize.

What is a Content Delivery Network?
In layman’s terms a CDN provides the ability to deliver content in a scalable, highly available, and cost-efficient way. If you want a more technical explanation (who does?) here’s what Wikipedia has to offer:

Modern CDN’s can dynamically distribute assets to strategically placed redundant core, fallback and edge servers. Modern CDN’s can have automatic server availability sensing with instant user redirection. A CDN can offer 100% availability, even with large power, network or hardware outages.

Modern CDN technologies give more control of asset delivery and network load. They can optimize capacity per customer, provide views of realtime load and statistics, reveal which assets are popular, show active regions and report exact viewing details to the customers. - via Wikipedia

As I mentioned, Amazon is entering a crowded market with the likes of Akamai, Limelight, and CDNetworks. Luckily they have a good start with their Simple Storage Service (S3) - which will provide the backbone of their new CDN.

How does a content delivery network work?
Here is a simple example…

What does this mean for you?
Ahh the big question… I can just see Doug asking - “All this tech crap is cool but how will this help me?” Well, since you asked I’ll tell you how we use a CDN at 48Web. We don’t use anything fancy at this point - just Amazon S3. Simply enough - we use it to host *stuff* so we don’t have to worry about our websites going down due to the increased load - which helps us scale. We learned this lesson when we launched Iowa Flood (our citizen journalism experiment). Within hours of launching we were getting hit with thousands of requests every few minutes. Needless to say our shared hosting environment for our “experiment” couldn’t handle it. In order to offload most of the strain we moved all the multimedia content to Amazon S3. Our thoughts were “let them worry about handling this load” while we concentrate on our user’s experience.

We also use this in our product development. In order to take the strains off our server we host our images, icons, javascripts, css, etc on S3. This takes the load off our servers and lets it scale much easier. At that point all we need to worry about is how efficient our connectivity is to our database - as we let the CDN take care of all our “assets”. We’re developers - not System Administrators. A CDN gives us a worry free distribution model that is VERY cheap.

How much does this stuff cost?
Current CDN solutions are very expensive but I have a feeling that Amazon is going to completely undercut the CDN market by offering their standard “pay for only what you use” approach which is great. It helps small companies (like us) scale based on demand. Our monthly bill for Amazon S3 is often under $5/mo. I am hoping their CDN can offer similar prices.

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As usual if you have any questions about CDN’s, leave a comment. If you want to know how your company can leverage this awesome technology, feel free to Ask Andy.

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