2007-02-19 Disruptions:
I just recently ran across the following services and they seem to have some potential:
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
OK, so maybe I’m a little late on this one, but I was talking to a local venture capitalist last week and he clued me into this service by Amazon. Apparently this is an attempt by Amazon to make inroads into other business arenas. S3 provides unlimited storage priced at $0.15 per gigabyte-month and $0.20 per gigabyte transferred with no minimum fees or startup costs.
Data is accessible via SOAP or REST interfaces and the intended usages are only limited by imagination. Think of S3 as a good solution for media sharing sites (photo, music, and video), online backup. Check out JungleDisk for a cool application that lets you use Amazon S3 as a drive share (via WebDAV) and has a nice pricing matrix comparing the storage costs between competitors at different levels of storage requirement.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is probably one of the most unsung protocols on the Internet these days, but has a hand in practically all your Internet activities. OpenDNS labels themselves as a safer, faster, smarter DNS and is a free service targeted at end users and server operators. As an end-user you can use OpenDNS as your primary DNS in place of your ISP’s DNS. OpenDNS offers a speedier service due to its It offers increased speed to a high-performance distributed network and a large, smart DNS cache. Secondly it intercepts phishing sites and automatically corrects typos in urls.
For server operators, OpenDNS allows you to use their service as your primary DNS server, allowing configuration of all the DNS entries for your domain. They mention they make their money off of unresolvable domains - instead of display the typical 404 page not found, they display an error message along with some advertising. Good to know how a free tech service plans to survive.
UPDATE (3-4-07): I think I spoke too soon on the above. Doesn’t seem that OpenDNS does DNS hosting after all. Unfortunate being a server operator and always looking for a better way to do DNS, Oh well.
Have a development project? Looking to staff it, but can’t afford the high costs of local talent? Before you head off to Bangalore, take a look at oDesk. oDesk helps mediate the process of bringing Buyers (with projects) and Providers (with skills) together. Similar to sites like Rent a Coder, oDesk offers a number of ways to ensure your Providers are working on your projects through webcam, keyboard and mouse monitoring and screen captures. You pay only for what you’ve been billed by Providers and it looks like you have a great deal of control over what is developed as well as a paper trail of documentation that describes what the Provider has been spending his or her time on.