Archive for August, 2006
Online Price Comparisons in the Offline World
August 31st, 2006 • Business, Reviews + Recommendations, Technology
Tags: Amazon, Frucall, price-comparison, Scanbuy-Shopper, shopping
I’m a huge fan of online shopping. The convenience of being able to instant price comparisons is a huge benefit. I usually buy stuff on Amazon for a few reasons. First, I have an Amazon Visa card which gives me 3% back on everything I buy on Amazon. Second, I use A9.com (they’re an Amazon property) as my search engine and as a result I get 1.57% (pi [3.14] divided by 2 – they’re sharing the advertising pie!) off of everything I buy on Amazon (even stuff not sold by Amazon). Third, Amazon recently extended me an offer to try Amazon Prime free for three months. The service normally costs $79 a year and upgrades all of your shipments to second day delivery for free with no minimum purchase orders. I really like this benefit, although I’m not sure that I would pay for it. I’m also not sure why Amazon extended this courtesy to me but I’ve definitely taken advantage of it.
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Part 2
August 24th, 2006 • Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology
Tags: Amazon, EC2, Elastic-Compute-Cloud, S3, simple-storage-service
Okay, so the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service isn’t as great as I thought. It is still quite interesting for bursty computing tasks though. It appears that you have to manually request an instance of your application to run. This instance (the examples they talk about are instances of a full Linux OS) can then be logged into to do work (I think through an SSH session).
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
August 24th, 2006 • Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology
Tags: Amazon, EC2, Elastic-Compute-Cloud, S3, simple-storage-service
Wow! Amazon released a beta service allowing for shared computing time this morning. The service, dubbed the Elastic Compute Cloud, works in conjunction with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). I’ve signed up for an account and I’ll provide more details once I get a chance. At first blush though, this is great for people wanting to build computing intensive startups without having to spend money for infrastructure on the front end.
New Blog Layout for SanjayParekh.com
August 21st, 2006 • General
Tags: AJAX, Marshall Memorial Fellowship, WordPress
This last weekend I decided to finally update my copy of WordPress. In the process, I installed a new template for this site using the great K2 template. Those of you reading through a feed or email updates (now available through the form on the right sidebar), you might want to look at the AJAX-y goodness of the site (check out the live search feature for example). In addition, I’ve added random photos to the top header. All the pictures were taken during my various travels. Most are from my 2004 Marshall Memorial Fellowship but there are some from other trips.
LinkExperts Attempts to Raise Money
August 17th, 2006 • 2 comments Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Venture Capital
Now, I had a heck of an experience trying to raise money for Digital Envoy back in the 2000-1 time frame. My co-founders and I went through over two hundred meetings over ten months in an effort to raise capital. That round culminated in a $10.5 million investment from a bunch of VCs and strategic investors. So I understand the pain of raising money.
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