This site contains my general blogging, published articles, and information on speaking dates where I discuss how business, technology, and finance can be used to create an open, healthy, and environmentally and economically vibrant society. Please feel free to contact me at troy at troyangrignon dot com to rant, discuss, or have me speak at your organization.

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

"It's all about the infrastructure" by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations

• The cloud sounds romantic but it's 1.5 million pounds of batteries, 1 million pounds of steel, 300 miles of cable. Not so romantic. (Image courtesty of Niall Kennedy's Flickr photos)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Opex and Capex are THE KEYS: If your revenue goes up a hockey stick....and your CapEx and OpEx curves go up with it...you haven't succeeded
• [finally!! Somebody else is talking about this!! This is super critical in SaaS. It's easy to make a company deliver apps over the web. It's hard to do it in a way that you can serve a lot of people cost effectively and make more profit as you scale.]
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Scale: can you scale up to 3.5GB/minute TOMORROW?
  
• Reach: Microsoft is running services in 235 countries around the world
• Servers: This is critical
  
• configration optimization: go for standardization / optimization
  
• Density: watts/square foot is important; drive density up by 200% you can drop power costs 40% (!).
  
• Storage costs: There has been an 85% drop in a Terabyte of data THIS YEAR.
• Technology evolution: staying on the curve helps you be operationally efficient.
  
• Data center critical success factors. (there are more but she wouldn't share them)
  
• connectivity: critical
• location, location, location (close to connectivity and supplies and resources and people)
• materials and equipment: (if you buy a million pounds of steel and steel prices go up....you have a $5M bill)
• trades and labour: we have waited months for an electrical person
• power:
• we now count in terms of megawatts not square footage. That is a key metric.
• 30-40% of your power usage is COOLING!!!! so build green!
  
• looking at solar - it's incredibly important to us
  
• Opening a data center in Quincy Washington that is completeley carbon neutral
• Additional useful links:
• Operations: The New Secret Sauce.
  
• Generators for Data Centers Getting Hard to Find
  
• Behold the Server Farm
  
• Microsoft bets big on Server Farm
  
• Wired / The Information Factories
  
• Data Centers on rise in rural areas
  
• Utility offers millions to help data centers go green
  

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

A Conversation with Jeff Bezos, Amazon

• S3 and EC2 are storage and processing. They should not be very interesting. So why are people so excited?
• Because the time from concept to delivery has been collapsed. We removed server hosting, contract negotitation, server infrastructure, etc.
• We have removed the "muck"; You come up with an idea, you wade through the muck, and then eventually you get to working on the fun parts.
  
• And then when you come up with your NEXT idea you have to go through the muck all over again.
• up to 70% of your time, energy, and dollars for web-scale apps goes into undifferentiated, heavy lifting and "muck"
• We want to swap the 70/30 to 30/70 (undifferentiated muck / differentiated work that makes you stand out). That will free up 40% for more creativity and differentiation!
  
• Web scale computing should be elastic; fast; always on; rock solid; simple cost effective; pay per use.
• It is being used by Xerox Global Services (S3, Simple Queuing Service and E3), Second Life; PowerSet (Natural Language Search) - now using EC2 as their back-end infrastructure;
  
• Tagline: "We make muck...so you don't have to."
• "We have been a low-margin, high volume business with aggressive cost structures for 11 years. I feel that that is the best and most defensible model because it doesn't have a soft underbelly that people can come after aggressively unless they're as good at it as you. "
  
• [For a long time I have been trying to come to terms with conflicting approaches. I now see that Dan Pena's model (>80% margin or don't do it) is great when you're consolidating an industry and need to do cashflow lending to buy the companies you are acquiring. And given that his goal is to consolidate, aggregate, and then re-sell, that model makes sense. Bezos' approach (which is also the Dell / Wal-mart approach) is viable when the intention is to build the business up and keep it. I have to admit that I hadn't considered that operational excellence in minimizing margin could be a defensible strategy but it makes sense now.]
  
• Battelle: Why are you doing this? Bezos: We think this is a great business and we're good at it. We have three businesses: consumer facing, seller facing business, developer facing business. The consumer/seller businesses drive our revenues. The developer facing business will one day have significant impact.
• [I'm surprised that Battelle would ask this question but as the emcee, it is his job to ask the obvious and/or painful questions. Maybe that's why he's asking it. It only makes sense that Amazon, having developed this core competency, would turn around and resell it. Jay Abraham has a long set of principles, one of which is, figure out what your company has become really good at from a practices, systems, and technologies perspective and turn around and resell THOSE in addition to your core business.]
• Fulfillment by Amazon is a very simple service. We have a global network of fulfillment services. You can ship something to us and we'll receive it. We get it. We stow it. And then you can send more calls to us and when you do, we'll pick those out and we'll send those things to you. We're giving pay by the drink, variable cost fulfillment to the marketplace.  This allows developers to use us by writing software, to treat this 10 million square foot network of fulfillment centers as a peripheral device like a printer.
• Battelle: Sun tried to do grid computing before and failed. You are succeeding right out of the gate. Why? Bezos: We have a policy of not talking about other companies. But I'll talk about S3. We think that there are three reasons it is succeeding: it is pay-per-use, it is self-service, and it is VERY simple for people to work with.
  
• [The shadow space of that statement is that Sun's attempt was none of those things...which was true. It was heavy to implement, heavy to negotiate the contracts, and relative to S3 - very inflexible. S3 is to Sun's grid as Google's AdSense is to Doubleclick.]
  
• Battelle: what is your cost of power? Bezos: Our biggest costs are not power, servers, or people. The largest cost is the opportunity cost of not fully using our facilities. And the same goes for our customers. The rest of the world is building data centers that they're only using on average 17% of the time. People are buying 747s and parking them 83% of the time! This doesn't make any sense.
  
• [This goes to the heart of the Abraham principle above. Not only does this type of service mean that Amazon is running at near 100% asset efficiency (or more, since they're making money on them?), but their customers can run at near 100% capacity as well, rather than at 17%. Higher asset efficiency = higher shareholder value.
  
• [Mike Cannon-Brookes and I were joking that it would be fun to build a company and take it from concept to bizplan to website to goods to online ordering to application development to online fulfillment to peer-based service and support....in 24 hours. Sounds ridiculous but with the number and type of services now available, it would be do-able.
  

 

This car rocks. I'm a big fan of this type of vehicle design where the drivetrain, rather than using one engine that transfers power to the four wheels, simply uses one power source at the core that transfers electrical power to an electric motor at EACH wheel.



Thanks to Justin Thomas for his nice blog post about this awesome car.

I think I have found the magic number. Every fifth article from Mark Morford is so brilliant, insightful, and articulate that I need to post most, if not all, of it here for my readers. Today is the day for another.

In one fell swoop, Mark has managed to hit on a whole bunch of my favourite subjects: the environment, structure driving behaviour, adaptation, complex system effects, social policy, cultural behaviour, global policy....he has hit it all.

The archive of his writings can be found here. The current article is below:

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree?

Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium.

It would take some finessing. Maybe also give a price break to some truckers and trucking companies (so vital to the overall economy), but not so much to global delivery companies (FedEx, DSL et al.), because not doing so would force them to raise shipping rates and force you (and me) to reconsider buying everything online and hence will encourage you to shop locally once again, thus reviving a stagnant local economy.

Voilá -- gas crisis, oil crisis, warmongering agenda, pollution issues, road rage, traffic congestion, urban decay, oil profiteering -- all completely almost totally somewhat solved. Or at the very least, dramatically, gloriously shifted toward ... I don't know what. Something better. Something more humane, less greedy, more sustainable. Could it work? How outraged and indignant would you be to have to pay that much for gas? How long would that feeling last?

Take it one logical step further. Set up a national system whereby if you want to buy a vehicle that gets less than 20 mpg in the city, you pay a $1,000 Global Warming Surcharge and that money goes straight to a local organic farm, or school, or environmental think tank. And if it gets under 12 mpg, make it three grand, plus a slap to your face from a small, angry child. Got yourself a shiny new Hummer? You pay five grand extra, you can only buy gas once a month and all the truly beautiful women of the world will shun you like Charlie Sheen (oh wait, that already happens). See? Revolution is easy.

What, too far fetched? Too implausible? Not at all. Sure, 10 bucks a gallon would be extremely painful for a while. Citizens would wail. Commuters would scream and stomp and die. But then we would do what we always do. We would evolve. Adapt. Systems would quickly transform, habits would instantly shift. It would be easier to implement than the goddamn mess that is Medicare reform, far easier than Lots of Children Left Behind, more viable and livable than the toxic existence of Homeland Security and the disgusting Patriot Act.

But of course such an idea is also, right now, absolutely impossible. It will never happen -- not 10 bucks, not six, not even a buck more per gallon -- and not just because no politician anywhere on either side of the aisle has the nerve to come out and suggest that Americans might actually need to drive less and conserve and make a change in their gluttonous habits. This is, of course, absolute death for a politician. Tell Americans what to do? Dare to suggest that they're doing something wrong, or that their behaviors are dangerous and destructive and irresponsible? Are you insane? This is America! We're flawless!

No, the primary reason such reform won't happen is because, simply put, we are the most entitled nation in the world, perhaps in the entire galaxy. Americans are trained from birth to believe we deserve as much as we desire of every exploitable resource on the planet, be it water or natural gas or oil, coal or salmon or steaks, Big Macs or diapers or iPods or bizarre varieties of blue ketchup. It is, in a word, perilous. It is also, in another, slightly more devastating word, our downfall.

Look, I adore cars. I adore driving and I cherish open roads and smooth horsepower and a musical exhaust note and I fully believe most German automotive engineers should be sent gifts of candy and Peet's coffee and porn. I would, like most everyone else, be absolutely loathe to give much of it up.

But you know what? Big freaking deal. I could learn to live without so much. I like to think I would be able to step back and see the bigger picture, realize what is and isn't absolutely essential, what does and does not absolutely define my identity and my life, modify accordingly and laugh/shrug/sigh it off in the process. In other words, I could make it work. And so could you.

Ever been in a citywide blackout? One that lasted for more than a few hours and stretched on into the night? Ever see people suddenly shift gears and become astoundingly helpful and polite and sharing? Happens in a matter of moments. Disasters do it. Katrina did it, on a scale we haven't seen in years. Sept. 11 did it, emotionally speaking, before BushCo whored that tragedy and turned it into the most vile political poker chip in American history. Shocking change brings people together. Brings out the best in humans. Or at least, makes you rethink what's truly important in your life.

Another example: You know what would happen if guns -- all guns, everywhere -- were banned outright tomorrow? Well, right off, nothing much. Criminals would still commit crimes. Lawsuits would skyrocket. The NRA would shoot itself in the face in screaming protest. Crime rates would dance all over the map. It would be a little ugly.

But then something remarkable would happen. Over a short blip of time -- say about 10 or 20 years, as gun manufacturing ceased and the culture of gun violence died down and our favorite death object was less visible in the news and in video games and on TV and in every aspect of modern life, well, guess what? Guns would begin to disappear. From the culture, from the drug dealers, from the streets, from public consciousness. They would turn into a sad relic, like eight-track tapes, like the bubonic plague, like the Miami Sound Machine. Think 20 years is too long? BS. It is but an eyeblink, a twitch, a faint toe spasm in the great long orgasm of time.

This is the unappreciated, under-reported magic of the human animal. We are infinitely adaptable. We can accommodate far more than politicians and pundits and the morally knotted Christian right would ever have you believe.

Ten bucks a gallon. Imagine the mad scramble by carmakers to invent new ultra-gas-sipping, enviro-friendly technologies. Imagine communities coming together for ride-sharing and mass transit. Bike sales would skyrocket. Walking shoes would be the new bling item. We would mourn the loss of cool car culture even as we celebrated the birth of, say, moped culture. Telecommuting would explode. Sure, the superrich would still tool around in their bloated Escalades, oblivious to the world around them, thinkin' the world is their dumb bitch.

So what? The rest of us can simply roll our eyes and laugh, evolve and sharpen and sigh, and wonder what great change we can embark upon next.

I'm intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS.

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Steven Jones, the leader of the UBC Snowstar team  - a team of UBC students who are entering the NASA Beam Power and Tether Strength Challenges - two contests that are used to encourage research and development in technologies that could be used to build a space elevator.



The challenges are held during the Elevator Games in Mountain View California by the Spaceward Foundation; a group dedicated the development of a Space Elevator. The technologies that are required to win the competitions will have many uses and one of those will be in the construction of a long cable in stable geosynchronous orbit around the earth that will allow for equipment and people to be transported to space on a space elevator at a fraction of the current cost.

In the 2006 NASA Beam Power Challenge the team has to provide a robot that is at least 10kg and capable of climbing a 60 m cable in 60 seconds but it can not have any batteries or other stored energy on board. All of the power must be transmitted wirelessly from the ground by a beam source that the team also has to provide.

In the 2006 Tether Strength Challenge teams must create a 2 gram cable that forms a continuous loop with a circumference of 2 meters and is stronger than the cable supplied by Spaceward that is allowed to weigh 3 grams. UBC Snowstar is one of the few teams in the world to have experience at the Elevator Games through their participation in 2005 and in the Beam Power competition they were given the only award at the competition: "Most Likely to Win in 2006".

The New York Times just ran a great story which the Snowstar team uploaded onto their site in a PDF.

If you are interested in helping Steve and his team by sponsoring them, please contact him directly at info@snowstar.ca.

Here are the details on one of the first Sustainability Cafés:

When: Monday, March 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
Where: BCIT Campus (CHBA BC, Building NW5), 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby, BC

SUSTAINABLE HOMES

Description: What do you consider a “sustainable” home? What do you need to get there? Where is “there”? An innovative dialogue hosted by the Sustainable Building Centre and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association of BC.
 
Moderator: Helen Goodland is the Executive Director of the new Sustainable Building Centre on Granville Island and is a LEED accredited architect with over 15 years of experience in green building design, education and construction.

Please visit http://www.sustainablebuildingcentre.com for more information.

(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.)

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

Special features of the website include: 

The 19th Annual Angel Forum came to a successful close this afternoon. Thirty-six companies in the software, manufacturing, communications, internet, and medical device sectors presented to 70+ investors over the course of a full day of sessions.

Each presenting company was given 10 minutes to pitch their company, market, team, market problem, solution, and investment needs to a group of prospective investors. Then the investors had a Q&A period with the entrepreneurs.

In addition, we had some excellent presentations:

* Bull Housser Tupper spoke on Intellectual property protection, employment issues, and term sheet negotiation;
* PriceWaterhouseCoopers spoke on Top 10 tax issues for startups
* The TSX Venture Exchange spoke on how to go public

Thanks everybody for a great day and we look forward to seeing you all back here in Fall!