Spent the afternoon down at Cooper Union in Manhattan to listen to Amazon galavant about their Amazon Web Services suite/platform.  I chose to attend the event because I knew very little about the platform before today and wanted to increase my knowledge base.  I also had some friends attending (Michael, Nate, Jonah, Jason, Howard, and others) and wanted to network with other successful New York innovators/entrepreneurs.  I even had the chance to meet Esther Dyson in person.

Amazon certainly impressed me with the event.  The general population knows Amazon as a shopping mall (says Fred Wilson), but if you ‘long’ them, they may very well turn into the Web OS.  From online storage, on-demand computing, and their recent entry into payment services, Amazon could very well provide the facilities that a next-generation application needs to get off the ground.  Why would an entrepreneur chose to use this new platform?  Simple:  leverage the power and economy of scale of Amazon and pay severely reduced rates over other independent providers.

Now, for me, I’m skeptical although, cautiously optimistic.  I like it a lot.  Almost too much.  It’s one of those things where it’s almost too good to be true.  From an investment standpoint, would you want to see one of your portfolio companies putting all their eggs in one basket, a basket that is brand new and doesn’t offer an SLA at this point?  What happens if Amazon’s S3 (cloud) goes down and your files cannot be found.  What if the EC2 (computing) goes down and your processes do not get executed, thus, your service/business returns either incorrect or no data.

I’m sure there are plenty of companies (some expressed them today) experiencing growing pains with the AWS service, but the benefits may outweigh the issues.  There were a few companies that showcased their products and companies like Mogulus is powered solely by AWS.  Other than the front-end and administration areas, it’s backbone is AWS.

New York has a thriving digital media scene as evidence today.  The participants in the presentation were all NY based companies (though Cruxy has people all over) and it’s great to see the industry picking up.  As an entrepreneur and digital media guy, I really enjoyed learning about AWS and look forward to studying it further for possible uses in the future.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Internet & Web X.0, Startup & Venture Capital, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.