Mike Koss is starting a new organization called StartPad.org. The goal is to help entrepreneurs (including first timers) get started with their idea by providing the necessary infrastructure for them to work on it.
The purpose, according to them is:
"
StartPad.org is an organization for software-industry entrepreneurs, developers, and students. Our mission is to promote startups and development projects by providing:
Education
Referrals to service providers/professionals
Peer support for technical problems
Startup infrastructure (office space, IT support, data center)
Networking for hiring/recruiting and forming partnerships
We took our eye off the ball for a few months and we were all celebrating our great growth month-over-month when yesterday I received an email from our Data Center. We were consuming more bandwith than what was allocated on our package. Our costs are going up.
Here is our monthly transfer total for the last 6 months:
April: 72 GB
May: 106 GB
June: 118 GB
July: 131 GB
August: 197 GB
September: 141 GB
October: 165 GB (est.)
There is a strong correlation between data transfer and page views, although, it's not perfect because small changes on the system can cause step-functions on the amount of data transfer.
If you look close at the data you'll see that in September we had a drop of 28% in total transfer despite the fact that we served more page views. The primary reason is because we enabled HTTP Compression. If we hadn't done that, our transfer rate would be about 300% for October to what it was in April.
But the reason we enabled HTTP Compression was primarily to provide our users with faster downloads when using our service, the bandwith reduction is just a bonus for us.
This year will be known as a turning point on the character of the pilots of Formula 1. Not a week goes by that a new scandal doesn't pops up, usually involving some unethical behavior from one or more pilots, mechanics or big bosses.
More specifically, McLaren, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton are always on the middle of the controversy.
On the top of my head, three sad moments this year (I'm sure there are more):
During qualifying Alonso takes longer to leave the boxes after the pit stop to prevent Hamilton from doing a quick pit stop, hence guaranteing the pole position.
Alonso and Hamilton are involved with a espionage scandal that costs McLaren $100 million (!!!) in penalties.
During a safety car lap on Japan's GP, Hamilton reduces speeds abruptly causing two cars behind him to crash.
Very sad. Like any sport, when things like this start to happen the audience starts to loose interest.
I know of three startups looking for kick-ass developers to join their team in very high level positions (CTO, VP of Engineering and Sr. Architect). If you know anyone ready to make the jump from BigCo into the startup world let me know and I'll give the info.
Just to be clear to my friends at Microsoft (or any other big company), being a VP of Engineering has nothing to do with being a VP at Microsoft. A VP of Engineering (or CTO, or Architect) at a startup is a very hands-on person, writing code, installing servers, design and implementing features, architecting components, testing it, etc. The ratio of "useful production" to "management crap" is very low.
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November, 2007