Unype featured on the Ning blog!
Thanks to Courtenay Stewart from Ning who worked with us, Unype is featured on the Ning blog!
Unype on Android
With the latest announcements of T-Mobile releasing the HTC Dream phone running Android on October 13th, we deemed it appropriate to show a preview of Unype on Android:
Why are we rewriting web applications for smart phones?
Javascript is getting very fast through some optimizations. I mean, as fast as C, which is the fastest you can get for a non-assembly language. Firefox 3.1 will ship with this optimized javascript engine: TraceMonkey.
(Graph courtesy of Brendan Eich.)
Paul Graham’s prophesy that web-based applications though slow now, will win at the end when javascript runs at the speed of C, may be coming true
Meanwhile hordes of developers are busy porting their web applications (written in Javascript) into Objective-C (iPhone) and Java (Android).
Why? Because you cannot access the native APIs on these platforms from javascript.
But then all we need is a way to call the native methods on the iPhone and Android from Javascript. And this is already happening at the grassroots level for iPhone as PhoneGap. And the new Mobile Safari DOM model has events for touch/gesture manipulation from javascript. But of course Mobile Safari javascript engine is very slow today, so handling gestures using javascript only works on the emulator. So we are working on our iPhone and Android applications as we speak 
But I expect this ‘porting web-applications to native smart phones’ to be a transitory phase. Eventually, to use Facebook, you will just go to facebook.com on your smart phone and will not have to install some application from some ’store’.
Eric Redlinger joins Unype and Unype on the iPhone
We are extremely excited to have my friend Eric Redlinger join Unype, bringing along his deep research and development expertise on mobile devices, especially the iPhone.
We are also excited to present Eric’s immediate contribution: initial screenshots of an early version of Unype on the iPhone:
Eric’s previous projects include work on the popular multiuser media-synthesis platform KeyWorx project and several innovative iPhone applications: DropCopy, a wireless file transfer utility that has already been downloaded over 300,000 times in just 4 months and the shape-shifting MrMr, an amazing iPhone app that can morph its GUI on the fly according to instructions sent from a server.
We are excited to innovate on the iPhone to bring new kinds of user-focused experiences to the device.
What’s the next competitive advantage for tech companies?
Starting a tech company used to be hard. You needed lots of developers, lots of resources, lots of money and more money.
Then web APIs made it easier to start companies. ProgrammableWeb has at last count 861 APIs available for use, and 3257 mashups created using these. Now instead of creating your own map application for your rock concert website, you can use one of 88 mapping APIs available and slap your concert listings on top of that.
In the meantime, there was still one big hurdle for startups: deploying and maintaining a backend that could scale if the startup actually indeed succeeded. Not all startups hit millions of users but still, every startup had to be ready for the onslaught or they could kiss their exits goodbye. This required buying/leasing servers, architecting, rearchitecting and then maintaining clusters of servers, replacing burnt hard drives, backing up, adding more hardware as more customers showed up and keeping an army of sysadmins fed and appropriately caffeinated during the process.
Google and Amazon’s big advantage was their infrastructure. Especially Google’s big competitive advantage was their MapReduce/BigTable-based seemingly-infinitely-scalable infrastructure that could support huge amounts of traffic and data, running on low-cost hardware.
Amazon opened the flood gates to offering this big competitive advantage to any company in the world by becoming the book store that sold cocaine out the back door. As Larry Dignan said “Books will be just a front to sell storage and cloud computing”.
Not a day goes by now without an announcement from another industry giant (Intel, HP, Yahoo, IBM, Verizon, AT&T) offering scalable compute clouds. Dell even tried to trademark the term ‘cloud computing’.
Now that cloud computing is going through what web APIs has gone through, it will be interesting to see if the competitive advantage for startups will be purely innovation now that all startups will be able to scale their service without a huge amount of investment and resources.
Cloud Computing Panel - July 29th 2008
Tonight’s Cloud Computing panel that I put together was held at the offices of Meetup Inc. (thanks to Jonah Keegan) and had great speakers and a great audience.
Our speakers were (from the left):
Mike Nolet - AppNexus
Jamal Mazhar - Kaavo
Hans Zaunere - New York PHP
Hank Williams - KloudShare (stealth - see Hank’s excellent blog)
Geir Magnusson - 10gen
Ronald Bradford - 42SQL
The panel started with an attempt at defining what cloud computing is. The term has become too popular and hence everyone started using it too loosely. So it now means different things to different people, but mainly, it’s the abstraction of services from hardware and scaling of data services properly so that services can scale to run on any number instances easily for different levels of demand.
But services do not move magically into the cloud and scale. Almost all applications have to be re-architected and rewritten. Engineers in the audience also noted that it requires a rather fundamental change in their thinking.
Different performance requirements almost always require a re-architecting of a service, the panel noted. For example, Ebay had been rewritten from scratch 4 times so far with completely new architectures everytime their performance requirements have changed. Here is a great article about ‘lessons on scalability from Ebay‘
In CC, ‘consistency’ almost always takes a backseat to ‘availability’. That is, it is much more important for a service to be available than for it to be consistent. For example, on Amazon’s SimpleDB, it takes around a minute for a DB write to settle across the system.
Data security is another big issue, and, for example, AppNexus is solving this for some of their customers by giving them dedicated hardware, so there wouldn’t be any ‘jumping out of the VM’ issues.
But eventually not every company with a website wants to have specialized system administrators on their staff 24×7. So, specialization of skills and economies of scale will lead to mass adoption of CC. Jamal noted that CC is now a $200M industry posed to grow significantly over the coming years.
Hank identified 5 different levels of creating a web service:
1) Rolling your own: buying a machine, colocating it, maintaining it, etc.
2) Traditional dedicated hosting.
3) Smart hosting: Amazong EC2, AppNexus, etc.
4) Tools layer: where tools help with the abstraction, for example SQS, S3, SimpleDB
5) Platform: Coghead, SalesForce.com, Google App Engine
Here, 10gen probably is between 4 and 5.
The panel predicted that levels 1 and 2 will eventually disappear or morph into levels 3 and up.
It was agreed that ’standards’ would help spur the demand side but the supply side cannot focus on standards yet since it is still ‘very very’ early in the industry and the innovation cycle, so it’s hard to predict how the industry will evolve and what will become the ‘de facto’ standard that might evolve into industry standard. Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving field that will bring us a lot of innovations and we are excited to watch it grow. Unype will definitely be using one of these solutions to scale.
