Here's a short video that Yahoo developer network made about the new SlideShare app.

(blog post here).

The cool thing for me about the app was that the first version was made with no management input at all! A couple of developers just decided that slideshare needed a mobile app, so they showed up at Yahoo hack day and built it (and won first prize!).

I was interviewed by Erick Mott from Lyris (a marketing software company with a very cool SAAS offering) during the Web 2.0 Expo conference last month. Here's the video.

The blog article (can be found here).

Over the last couple of months I've been trying to set up my television for watching video content online. Like many people, I don't feel I like I get enough value from my cable TV subscription to justify the cost (85$ a month in my case). All I want is to watch the same movies that are available in my local DVD store (or on netflix), and I'm more than willing to pay the same price (4$ or so per movie).

The results have been disappointing to say the least.

My HDTV is hooked up to a mac mini, and I've been experimenting with Amazon Video on demand, itunes, and Netflix. I have a logitech wireless keyboard with a built in touchpad. All in all It's a pretty sweet setup, and the technology works just fine.

Here's the problem. On Itunes and Amazon, some videos are available for rent, while others are only available for purchase. This makes the process of shopping for a movie to watch tonight almost impossible. Even though lists of movies available for rent can be found, the second you start browsing, searching, and clicking on related content, you end up finding co-mingling the movies that need to be purchased with them movies that you can rent..

The result of this is that about half the time, you find a movie you want to watch tonight, and only THEN you find out that the only way to watch it is to buy a digital copy for the same price (or more) than you would pay for the DVD (clearly a ridiculous proposition: does anyone ever do this?). Neither platform has any way to exclusively view movies that are actually for rent, and this is basically a fatal flaw.

Meanwhile, Netflix has a different model for streaming rentals: they let you stream as many films as you want, but only from a very limited subset of their catalog. Unfortunately, the inventory they have available for streaming doesn't include a lot of new releases (fair enough for all-you can eat pricing), and the interface doesn't provide strong ways to search or browse while only looking at content that is available for streaming. So while the pricing model is different, the experience is broken the same way as Amazon and Itunes: the interface presents me with a large selection of digital objects to choose from, many of which are not available for streaming over the internet. This makes selecting a movie to watch extremely difficult.

Comcast, as shitty as it is, doesn't show me movies and then tell me that I can't rent them. So despite the fact that apple, amazon, and netflix have products that are in many ways is orders-of-magnitude better, they fail due to this one fact.

The whole thing looks stupid enough that it CAN'T be a simple design blunder. Amazon, Netflix, and Apple have some of the best best designers, engineers, and product people in the business. It smells like a licensing fiasco to me. After reading Marc Cuban's excellent
A la carting of video will lead to disaster, I understand why TV people are loath to license their content a la cart. But why movies? Streaming at a per-rental rate is identical to renting a DVD, except it's more accountable so the studios can presumably negotiate a nice per-stream rate. What is the blocker here, and can someone in Hollywood please have lunch with someone else in Hollywood and resolve this? Sweet Jebus, we want to pay you money, but if I have to wait another year for this I'm finally going to learn how to use bittorrent, and then you people will *really* be in trouble. ;->

Amazon today announced a plan that makes EC2 boxes a bit cheaper to rent for customers who use the box 24/7. It's called a "Reserved Instance", and it basically means you pay a certain amount up front in exchange for a large discount for either one or three years.

Is this a good deal? As always, it depends. Let's assume that you actually use a certain base number of servers from amazon 24/7 (like we do at slideshare). Ignoring bandwidth costs, a small instance costs $.10/hr * 24 hrs *365 days = 876$/year (or 73$/month).
With the one-year plan you'd pay 325$ up front, and ($.03/hr *24 hrs * 365 days), which ads up to 325 + 263 = $587, or a 32% savings. Your monthly cost ends up at 49$/ month.

Things get better on the three year plan. Here you pay $500 in exchange for the right to the .03/hr pricing for three years. Your total cost ends up being $500+ ($.03/hr *24 hrs * 365 days * 3 years), which is $1289 for three years, a 52% savings. Your monthly cost comes down to $35 / month.

So this seems like a good deal, but there's some caveats. You have to pick what size instance you are going to prepay for: if you prepay for a small and it turns out you need a medium, there is no recourse. Also, you are having to pay money up front, which is definitely a negative (one of the great properties of AWS is the "pay by the drink" model which lets you pay for services AFTER you use them rather than before. This is obviously great for your cash-flow). Finally, reserved instances are not available for Windows servers yet, only for Linux ones.

A 52% discount is nothing to sneeze at, so if you're sure you're going to be using a particular machine type 24/7, it makes sense to take advantage of this program. A smart way to do it might be to move one machine over, and then pay for subsequent reserved instances over time with the savings. This way you can avoid committing too much money up front (which is never a good idea, especially in a recession).

We just released something really cool! It's a.plugin for PowerPoint that lets you do pretty much anything that you can do on the website ... from within PowerPoint.

As Keanu would say, whoa. Using PowerPoint to browse a site for sharing PowerPoint. Very meta.

We call it the "SlideShare Ribbon". The best part IMHO is that you can search for PowerPoint files and download them directly from slideshare into PowerPoint. Also, uploading is really convenient, so if you're working on a presentation, once it's ready you just click one button and it will upload in the background.

The best BEST part, though, is something we really should have built into SlideShare (don't worry, it's coming soon). It's a console that shows you how many views, comments, and favorites each of your presentations has received. If you're using SlideShare to market your business, this is a really handy way to see, in one screen, exactly how many people you've been able to reach.

Major props to the Microsoft crew over in Seattle ... they were incredibly helpful to us over the course of this project.