Cloud Computing for larger Events

I've been playing with Amazon EC2 trying to figure out how useful it is and where it economically fits in. It's potentially good for relatively large Web 2.0 services because it has fairly good bandwidth cost numbers.

It doesn't seem good for running small development machines in the cloud - minimal costs (i.e., machine costs) for EC2 are about $70/mo (@ $0.10 per clock hour) vs. running something like a virtual VPS server at A2hosting is $15/mo.

What I'm particularly interested in is using it as a backend for fairly large Event instances. It's particularly good in that it allows us to image a very detailed setup into an AMI and then save/clone as needed (i.e., clone to expand capacity and clone to add new events). It's also good in that it cleans up thoroughly and quickly (i.e., without using Elastic Bins or S3) which is the general model needed in our targetted app areas.

Meetup

Started my first group on meetup.com:

The Red Bank Life Science Meetup Group

TalkShoe

Pretty good app - talkshoe.com - for creating call-in podcasts (also look at tokbox.com). We're putting together a series of Life Science podcasts. This app was discussed by Leo Laporte on his podcast.

We worked quite a bit on an internal radio station at Lucent about ten years back (a group led by Bob Yurkovic) which focused on keeping folks up to date within the company using targeted Real audio streams. He had a world-class broadcasting studio in Lucent up in Whippany and hired someone with radio experience as the voice. He was about ten years ahead of his time...

Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Blogger vs. ...?

So many choices, each with it's own niche benefit. Playing over the next few weeks with the whole set. I'm really interested particularly in how to integrate the "best of" set into PlanetConnect events, which are going to be heavily pushing iPods and/or Android devices this year at events.

Tradeshow Blogger

Good thoughts on the industry, though a bit sparse in publishing:

http://www.tradeshowstartup.com/category/tradeshows/

It's also a little bit more focused on IT type events, I think. Good discussion of "Pay to Play" in the conference, which everyone doesn't like. Hard to understand how you can't provide it for top sponsors though.

Clean Blog for the New Year

Clean blog and starting to use twitter, at least for a few weeks. "The Browser" is the name of a bookstore (featuring only technical books) we had running in Red Bank for a few years (diagonally across from Einstein/Manhattan Bagels) - great bookstore name. I still want to open another retail presence in Red Bank (jazz/books/music); maybe someday.