Laurent’s blog

Around the web this week

The past week has been intense. Quite a few subjects kept being discussed all week long. So, again, in no particular order…

After Amazon EC2 outage last monday (aws forum, explaination from amazon, techcrunch), Facebook was plagued by an API bug that broke some of the 3rd party applications (bug report, user complaints). All of this the same week Google releases Google App Engine, an infrastructure for using Google’s massive infrastructure to host and scale an application transparently. The issues with Facebook should be a warning signs to startups planning on or exclusively building on facebook. Be careful and plan for the worst, why stay locked in. Same thing for investors. As much as I second anyone saying that investing in infrastructure is a waste of the investors money (or yours), I think you cannot base your whole business on facebook (as a plateform) or Google Ads (as a revenue stream). As for Google App Engine, running on such a closed service will likely mean developping for the new infrastructure exclusively. To the contrairy AWS (EC2 or S3) provides a (somewhat) standard infrastructure  - ok, maybe not S3.


The other big news is the continuous game Microsoft and Yahoo, and now AOL, have been playing for the last few weeks. A few links if you really missed the saga, otherwise just skip. Yahoo Shareholder Nearly Doubles Stake, Yahoo weighing Options, Keeps Them Open (The New York Times), Yahoo Fence Sitting - Will Meet With Microsoft And AOL Next Week (Techcrunch). Interestingly, the fact that Gordon Crawford is increasing its position in Yahoo seems to indicate that (he thinks that) a deal will actually be made soon. Implying Microsoft may be desparate for this move and will rase its offer sooner than later.


SueEasy.com joins HelpMeSue.com into the lawsuit marketplace (larketplace?) bussiness. They describe themselves to be “a platform for you to simplify the lawsuit process.” Can there be something similar anywhere outside the US?



It should be a dedicated section, but I don’t want to list all the tools derived from twitter. It’s such a fun and easy service that a new tool pops up everyday. This week get a hold on twitter.summize.com a “better twitter search” (compared to tweetscan.com at least). I’ve replaced the tweetscan’s email alerts for our trend and brand monitoring by summize’s search feeds.


1,125$. Thats the price, with 9 days to go on the auction, that someone is ready to pay for buying over a twitter account with 1500 followers! You can place your bet on ebay or follow Andew Baron’s twitter stream. Will twitter cancel the account? I wouldn’t.



Harvards MBA opens up. Litterally, they have announced to include Open Source classes to their MBA programs. If tomorrows managers are not aware of open source and how to “handle” the crowd effect properly, they could easily be outweighted or could just end up missing the point.  Thankfully they may inject some science into the business of open source.

In honors of the second win of the Canadians against Boston last night, some canadian web news. There is close to 1,000,000 .ca domain names registered. Follow live from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority webpage. 999,811 as the time of this post.

Canadian Innovations Exchange 2008 is next week and has announced companies that will present. including Akoha the latest startup from Austin Hill and Standout Jobs a recruitment 2.0 company that Silentale has been using for a few weeks now.


And one last funny post from Frederic Dumeny’s blog (in french) where he had a lot of time on the day of his birthday to record how friends and family had wished him this special day. The surprising fact, still 11% by email, one third on the mobile (SMS + voice) and 7% in real life! oh, I don’t see Second Life anywhere on the list?