Matt Rubens

Justin.tv launched last night and I’m really impressed. Check it out:

If this past summer in Cambridge was a reliable indicator, the show should get a lot more entertaining after Justin gets a beer or two in him.

Short notice, but if any of you are at South by Southwest you should stop by the People Powered Products panel at 5pm today to hear me wax poetic on the state of Jamglue. Should be a grand old time, and I’ll hopefully be somewhat awake by then. Damn daylight savings time / 6th street…

I flew down to California last week to attend the CommunityNext conference. We all know conference recaps are boring (unless they’re on Valleywag), but pictures are awesome!

As you can see, it was a fun conference. More pics here, including one of Ross watching a bar fight.

By the way, you may have noticed that my blog and I have been seeing a bit of each other recently. We’re really just friends though. And definitely not good enough friends to exchange Valentine’s Day presents. That is all.

As Casey posted over at Ye Old Jamglue Blog, we’re looking for friends and family to help us test out our startup (Jamglue). Lemme know if you want an invite…

Don’t transport your development server across the country by putting it in your checked baggage on an Alaska Airlines flight.

I had to wait at the SeaTac baggage claim for an hour before my flight’s luggage even started coming out, so I suppose I should feel lucky that even one of my bags made it to Seattle (the one containing my toothpaste and other precious liquids). But alas, the suitcase that I shipped my server in never came out. When I inquired into its whereabouts, the friendly Alaska Airlines baggage claim agents informed me that they really have no idea since they don’t have a computerized system for scanning their luggage before putting it on a plane. Now I understand why people are just shipping their luggage instead of checking it…

To make a long story short, my suitcase made it to Seattle on the first flight the next morning. Since I don’t have Internet in my new apartment, I ended up dragging my suitcase across Capitol Hill to company headquarters so I could get the server back online and we could start working again.

Ugh… this isn’t the part of startups that they tell you about in the fancy magazines. Personally, I’m just doing it for the chicks…

I just got an email this morning about a limited beta of the “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud”, designed to be the S3 of computation.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. (link)

We’re already having a great time using S3 in our top-secret-startup, and utility computation would be our Holy Grail. I wonder who at Amazon I need to name my first-born after to get one of these beta accounts… Maybe building SIPs gives me enough street cred?