Jeff Bezos and Amazon EC2
In their blogs, my two co-founders Barney and Steve, both pick up the Business Week cover story from this week (Jeff Bezos's Risky Bet), featuring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in occasion of the announcement of the latest addition to Amazon Web Services initiative: the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).
EC2 is a very interesting service which allows anybody to leverage the same reliable and massively distributed computing grid that powers Amazon's own operations.
The article is a great coverage of the importance of EC2 and its sister services in Amazon's new strategy. It also mentions, amongst other things, Powerset's use of EC2 as part of our technology strategy. Steve will be coming out with a new post with more details on EC2 and Powerset, after Jeff's talk on wednesday.
From the Business Week's piece, here are the relevant sections:
Consider Powerset, the secretive search startup backed by A-list angel investors, including PayPal Inc. (EBAY) co-founder Peter Thiel and veteran tech analyst Esther Dyson. Co-founder and CEO Barney Pell harbors ambitions of out-Googling Google with technology that he says would let people use more natural language than terse keywords to do their searches. By analyzing the underlying meaning of search queries and documents on the Web, Powerset aims to produce much more relevant results than the current search king's.
Problem is, Powerset's technology eats computing power like a child munches Halloween candy. The little 22-person company would have to spend more than $1 million on computer hardware, two-thirds of that just to handle occasional spikes in visitor traffic, plus a bunch of people to staff a massive data center and write software to run it. That's when Pell heard about Elastic Compute Cloud. He was sold. Based on tests so far, using the Amazon site for part of the company's computing power could cut its first-year capital costs alone by more than half.
... Highly anticipated search upstart Powerset Inc. plans to use the Amazon computing service, even though it's still in test mode, to supplement its own computers when it launches its service sometime next year.
EC2 is a great piece of a larger story abut how Powerset is being enabled to focus its core competence - developing the technology that will bring to maret the next breakthrough in search - without reinventing the wheel. I am planning a more detailed post on this topic, but most likely it'll be after Steve's post on EC2.