TechYob

Ive previously riffed about one of the guys who invented Captchas - Dr Vohn Ahn.  One of my other favourite geniuses, Seth Godin, gives his take on how to commercialise it. 

Provide it as a free service, except instead of just random numbers place the highest paid advertiser.  Granted, you can already get it for free, but his take is original none the less.  I just love it how he puts this stuff out there. 

I recently bought Seths book Small is the New Big for a long time friend for his birthday.  Its the perfect ’thought of the day’ for people trying to bust out and make a difference.  Given my friend put me onto Unleashing the Idea Virus, it was the least I could do.  As Molly Meldrum would say, do yourself a favour and buy it. 

Friedman is talking about the Flat World.  Bezos is building it.

Techcrunch lets the cat out the bag today about Amazon’s yet-to-be-released SDS Service - rumoured to stand for “Simple Data Service”.  This coincides with an article I read this morning over breakfast in the Australian Financial Review about Amazon’s web-services-as-a-service venture.  Rob Hof gives an insight into the tech offerings that may well position Amazon as one of the leading players in utility computing.  

Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud and Simple Storage Services just made it easier for kids to start their own Web 2.0 company with some loose pocket change.  Back in the dot-com boom when working for Accenture I remember the massive tier-3 architectures we’d build and deploy for ecommerce companies.   Now I can enter the game for 10 cents an hour for a server computer, and 15c per gigabyte per month for storage. 

This got me thinking back to a comment made to me by one of the respected wags here in Sydney over a couple of Pale Ales

“I can’t afford a million dollar house in Paddington.  But I can rent one!”

Bezos may have some doubters on Wall Street, but Im a believer.