Google App Engine Let's Your Web App Grow Up

Google released App Engine less than a year ago (Radar post). It was the first chance for external developers to use the power of Google's servers. The powerful platform supported Python and was free (within limits). It now supports 45,000 apps and those apps get over 100 million page views per month. Those pageviews were all free, but they had limits.

That's going to change. After today developers can pay to have more storage, more bandwidth, more CPU time and send more email. The costs as of this morning are listed below with a comparison to the AWS equivalent cost.

• 10 cents per cpu core hour (AWS charges $.10/hr for a small, standard Linux instance and up to $1.20/hr for an XL, Hi-CPU Windows instance in EC2)
• $.10 per gigabyte transferred into AE (AWS charges $.10 for all data transferred into S3)
• $.12 per gigabyte transferred out of AE (AWS charges $.17 for the first 10 TB/month transferred out ofS3)
• $.15 per gigabyte stored per month (AWS charges $.15 for the first 50 TB/month stored onS3)
• .0001 dollars per email (AWS does not have an equivalent)

Without running a more advanced cost calculation it seems that App Engine is slightly cheaper for smaller web apps. Pete Koomen, an App Engine Product Manager, would not say if they would add tiered pricing. I can't imagine it happening until after they add background processing for applications.

Developers will only pay after their app surpasses the free limits (and there are several AE apps that already have like buddypoke.com and mentalfloss.com). The existing free quotas will be reduced in 90 days. The new paid quotas do have unpublished limits, so if you need to support more than 500 requests/sec you'll need to contact Google.

Developer will use their Google Checkout account to cover their apps costs. This means that the new features are restricted to the U.S. and U.K. only. Hopefully the Checkout team expands their scope soon.

This is a significant step for App Engine. By setting a theoretical limit above the dreams of many web apps they are now putting out the call for serious applications. They've already added Google App Engine Apps to Google Apps For Your Domain. I could envision AE becoming the backbone of an Enterprise Dev Marketplace.

AE still has many significant to-do items on their public Roadmap. Not the least of them is the support for more languages (Java is a good bet as it is used a lot internally) and to add support for background processes.

A huge concern with App Engine is platform lock-in. Google provides a lot of powerful, but non-standard APIs and features that make switching platforms difficult. Developers can extract themselves from App Engine via projects like AppDrop, but it is still risky to use their platform without an SLA. Without a guarantee Google could theoretically decide to raise prices unreasonably. Is it likely? No, but it is something that developers need to think about before committing to any platform.

Google I/O already has many sessions listed for App Engine developers. I'll give a free pass to I/O to the person who suggests the best AE app in the comments. Vic Gundotra, who runs the App Engine team, will be at the Web 2.0 Expo SF in April.

Ignite Show: Kati London on Botanicalls: Homegrown Terra-rists

Today we are releasing "Botanicalls: Homegrown Terra-rists" the second episode of the Ignite Show. This week's speaker is Kati London, the co-creator of Botanicalls, a device that will let you know when your plant needs watering via Twitter. Kati doesn't spend much time explaining Botanicalls instead she talks about some fun(ny) uses for it.

If you want to learn more about Botanicalls check out their site. Or you can see what the Twitter feed of one Robert Plant (an orchid) is like. Or you can pick up a kit at Maker Shed or ThinkGeek. Botanicalls was created by Kati London (the speaker), Rob Faludi, Rebecca Bray and Kate Hartman.

Enjoy the show!

Kodu: Visual Programming on the Xbox with P2P Level-sharing

How do you make programming fun? How do you make it fun enough for kids to want to spend hours learning how to make loops and if/then statements? Simple you give them simple visual commands that let them control robots on the Xbox -- or at least this is the thesis of Microsoft Research's Kodu (formerly Boku).

Kodu (Boku) made a splash at Techfest two years ago and gave a demo at Ignite Seattle (Radar post). Since that time the levels and characters have gotten much sexier and the controls simpler, but more powerful. I sat down with the Matt MacLaurin, creator of Kodu (get it? Code-You) at MSR's Techfest last night. He told me that we can expect Kodu to be released on the Xbox this Spring (it's in select schools right now on the PC, but there's no word about a broader release).

It takes just 8 lines of "code" (see the image to the right) to create a game. Matt and his team have replicated most game types you would expect including Races, RPGs, Shooters (with cool missiles), Strategy and Puzzle. They've also included Sample Levels that teach a specific lesson (like how to change color, create loops, etc.).

Embedded into the game are the notions of sharing and openness. Any level can be tweaked. In fact the first option after finishing a level is "Edit This Game". I saw a working version where levels can also be shared amongst gamer friends via a form of P2P. When you are online you can choose to share all of your levels. Each level could fit on a floppy disk (not that your kid will know what that is). Embedded in each level is the creator and all subsequent editors. Kodu will track changes and try to determine who has made the most significant modifications to the level. When you start playing make sure you share with the Kodu team. They want to track how far levels are spread to create kind of a genealogy.

I took a lot of pictures and video of the game last night. You can see the video after the jump and the pictures on Flickr.

Visual programming environments are on the rise and something that every techie parent will want to keep an eye on. Kodu seems like the most accessible to me. It effectively hides the programming with "fun". I'm looking forward to its release.

We're featuring MIT's visual programming language Scratch at ETech this year. Use et09ffd code for 40% off the admission price.

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Ignite Show: Jason Grigsby on Cup Noodle

Today we are launching the first episode of the Ignite Show. The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker each week. This week's speaker is Jason Grigsby doing a talk that was originally performed at Ignite Portland. Jason takes fun look at how Cup Noodle was created and how the team had to embrace constraints and new ideas to create this new food.

Ignite will be released for free weekly. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site (file) and via iTunes (we'll be in the store shortly). It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Ignite has spread to over 20 cities in the past two years. The third Ignite Boulder happened last night. The fifth Ignite Portland will happen tonight and New York's third is on Monday. We want to highlight speakers from around the world with the show. If your town or city has lots of geeks throw an Ignite to bring them together!

The format of Ignite is 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds. When you are on stage giving an Ignite talk this can be quite exhilarating (sometimes terrifying). The added adrenalin really adds to the presentation and I think that will come through on the small screen.

Thanks to Ignite Organizers, sponsors and attendees from around the world for making this show possible. Thanks to Social Animal for editing the show, Bre Pettis for co-hosting the first episode (and starting Ignite with me), and Sam Valenti of Ghostly Records for letting us use Michna's Swiss Glide. Thanks to everyone at O'Reilly who has supported Ignite through the years especially Mary, Jennifer, Laura A., Laura P., Cali, Roberta, Mike, pt, Jesse, Sara, Laura B and Tim.

Web 2.0 Expo: Launchpad Extended, Developer Discount and Ignite!

The Web 2.0 Expo is our annual West Coast gathering of web technologists. As always there a lot of ways to participate -- many of which will not cost you a dime, all of them can be quite valuable to you.

Launchpad: We are giving 5 companies 5 minutes on stage at the Expo Launchpad this year. While the definition of a launch has gotten cloudy in this age of public betas, we're looking for new companies or products that make us take notice. And while venture capital has been the focus in past years, the reality of the market is that companies must gain the attention of customers. So our judging panel and criteria this year focus more on what is essential and transformational in today's market than on ability to get funded. The judges this year are Matt Marshall (VentureBeat), Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb), myself and our sponsor Microsoft Bizspark's Anand Iyer.

We are extending the Launchpad's submission deadline to 2/19. Put your hat in the ring!

Developer Discount: We're offering a special discount to the full conference for developers. If you're a developer you still need to learn from each other and share your stories. More than ever you'll need to learn how to communicate with marketing. You'll want to learn how to write faster code, be secure and, of course, be greener. You'll want to find out how to get value from data, how to process that data on less servers than before, and how to respect your users by giving them control of their data.

To get 20% off admission to the Web 2.0 Expo use websf09dev at checkout. This offer is open until 2/20.

Ignite: On March 31st we are going to hold our annual Ignite Expo at the DNA Lounge. Each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds. We'll have ~16 speakers. The best Ignite talks are ideas, hacks, lessons, or war stories. Submissions are due by 3/9. If you're not familiar with Ignite our community site has videos from previous events.

This year's Web 2.0 Expo is strong. Our keynotes will feature Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Will Wright (Maxis), and Vic Gundotra (Google). Our Developer, Marketing, Design, Mobile, Ops, Enterprise and Security tracks are packed with great speakers. I hope to see you there.

Photo Courtesy Duncan Davidson

Updated with Anand Iyer's name.

Come to ETech; Experiment with Physical Computing and RFIDs

RFID's are associated with credit cards, passports and inventory systems. However, they can also be used to add a proximity interaction to a service like entering a subway via a passkey (Jan Chipchase has several posts describing these interactions around the world). By linking yourself to an RFID tag you can let a device know who you are. If you add in a link to an online, personal profile the interaction can be very personal.

By having your information at the ready an RFID tag can give you a much simpler interaction with technology. It is very easy to conceptualize the possibilities, but to really get a feel for how RFIDs can effect your interaction It's an area that has to be explored physically.

That's why we are giving all of the attendees at ETech RFID tags (See the tag art to the right) that can be linked to their conference profiles (opt-in). With these tags you can interact with several projects we'll have at the conference. BTW, ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off.

We were inspired to do this after I attended PICNIC in 2008 (Radar post) and got to experience first-hand the many, many uses of an RFID badge. Mediamatic linked your profile to it and that information was used to record your experiences. We got help from Mediamatic on our implementation and even used the same vendor.

If you make it to ETech here are the projects you can play with:

Lensley's Photobooth: Leonard Lin's new project is Lensley, a high-end photobooth with online photo-services integration. He's creating a special version just for ETech that will tag photos with your name and tweet that you've just had one taken.

Personal Calendar: Radar's own Edd Dumbill is the fellow behind the profile APIs. He is going to create a project that will show attendees their personal calendar at a public kiosk.

ETech Prophet: Josh and Tarikh of Uncommon Projects (they made the cool Yahoo! geo-bike) are adding an element of play to their project. They sent me a mail describing it as: "Essentially, we’d like to make an “Etech Prophet” a kind of mechanical turk idea (perhaps in another form factor)--you wave your RFID fob, it gesticulates, makes a noise and sends you your pithy fortune via twitter"

People Collector: This is a favorite of mine. Business cards are a waste of time and paper. I just want the person's email address. Nothing else. The People Collector will be a mobile device that people can use to exchange contact information with other attendees. When you meet someone just wave your fob over their People Collector and a message will be sent to both of you. The People Collector will be built in Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson's Hands-On RFID Workshop on 3/9.

Do you have something that you want to make? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter. We are still looking for projects.

Google's Latitude Adds Location-Sharing to Mobile Phones

Google has added location sharing to its suite of products. Google Latitude was launched as a Google Maps for Mobile (Symbian, Blackberry, Android, WinMo; the iPhone and iPod Touch will be coming soon) and as an iGoogle widget. It will allow you to share your location with a set group of friends. You can determine the level of your location-sharing and easily turn it off. It's a simple but effective tool. This is the beginning of the age of continuous location-sharing and Google is helping to validate the market (as have other tools I've written about before). I am really glad that they have released this product.

Google's Latitude is not tied to a social network site (Orkut is out in the cold). Instead it's focused solely around showing your location on map and it relies on your GMail/GTalk contacts to find and share with people (Note: these contacts are not added automatically, they must be invited). This will make it very easy for Google to explain the value of the feature (share your location with selected friends), but it also means that to add more social-location functionality (pics, events) they'll have to really build out the Maps product. Is that their desire?

Google is being quite diligent about explaining privacy -- a necessary step for any location-sharing service. From their Privacy Settings help page the menu of the Latitude app you can:

Detect your location. (Let the app get and share your location as accurately and often as your client will allow.)
Set your location. (This lets you manually set your location, which means you can lie. If you are going somewhere you don't want people to know about you can just share the neighborhood. It's like incognito mode on Chrome)
Hide your location. (This lets you just turn off the sharing functionality altogether)
Sign out of Latitude (The ultimate control, but as long you have your cell phone turned on it can still be tracked. Face it you are being tracked constantly you just have to decide what features make it worth it)

Surprisingly Latitude beats the two companies who should be pioneering this space: Facebook and MySpace. Latitude will not fill the same functionality that I would expect the two lumbering giants of social networking to (eventually) include. If there other features you want add suggest and vote for them.

Google has actually had many of the tools for building Latitude available to third-parties for a while now. At Where 2.0 last year they announced their intention to release Geolocation Gears API. The other tools needed are Google Maps API and the Google Contacts Data API. Anyone could have built Latitude (and many have built services like it, but without the same amount of blogger attention).

Given that the building blocks have been out there for a while is it obvious that Google would build Latitude? Yes and No.

I do not think of Google as a social company. Though many of their products have a social component doing something with other people, being social is not usually the main focus of a product (GChat and GMail are noticeable exceptions). Instead I read feeds by myself and share selected posts. I make a map for myself and share it. I organize my photos and share some via my own web album. Latitude fits into this model: I get my location for myself (for directions or nearby search) and as an afterthought I share it with a select group of people, however because location-sharing is such a social activity I think it will begin to become a major focus of their Maps app (I wonder if I will be able to get access to my friend's locations via an API or better yet share my Latitude derived location via Fire Eagle).

Of course Google was going to build Latitude! Their goal is to organize the world's information (and find ways to monetize it). How could they possibly do that effectively if they didn't find a way for you to update your location continuously? Letting you share your location with your parents and friends is the best way to do that.

I haven't read all the coverage out there, but you can find additional good articles on ReadWriteWeb and SearchEngineLand.

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Everyblock's Dilemma: How Do You Open Source Your Entire Site and Survive?

This morning Adrian Holovaty announced that he will be open sourcing Everyblock. Everyblock is a site that crawls local data sources, aggregates the data, and then surfaces them geographically. For instance I get an email everyday that alerts me to news, fire department activity, health notices and flickr photos taken within blocks of my house.

Everyblock is available in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, DC. The data sources vary from town to town. Here are all of the news sources available for Seattle. Unfortunately, our police department only releases aggregated information so I have to learn about our rising crime via news coverage (as opposed to SF's law enforcement agency). Wanting a clean map design the Everyblock team also invested the time in building their own maps using OpenLayers (case study) and Mapnik. I've embedded Adrian's keynote from Where 2.0 2008 after the jump.

They've also used their data to develop mashups like this NYT sponsored one that shows coverage of elected officials (NYC only unfortunately).

Everyblock was funded through a Knight News Challenge Grant and they've come crossroads as Adrian explains:

But now we've reached an interesting point in our project's growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we're open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That's a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock's philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?

What do you think? How can they keep the project alive and perhaps even make it profitable if they are providing development resources to the competition? Personally, I do not think that competition will be a major concern for them. They have mind-share with many people interested in local, civic data.

I think that they should be more focused on revenue and building traffic than potential competition. In fact it seems that they could try to route around competitive sites by getting other people to bring Everyblock to other cities. The team could offer the ability for people to create their own hosted version of Everyblock for their community. Let people do the work for them. This could either be a pay service or an ad split (assuming that Everyblock decides to try advertising and there is revenue to go around).

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Github: Making Code More Social

Github launched less than a year ago, but it's already making an impact on how open-source software is being created. Rails was there from day one, kick-starting the social software repository's traffic. It has taken off though it still doesn't compare to Sourceforge's traffic.

Github combines "standard" features of social networking sites with distributed source-control Git. You can follow or message a person, you can watch or fork projects and activity streams share your behaviors. Users are able to easily fork projects and create their own versions that can then be merged back to the original or take on a life of their own. Leaderboards help you find

There are 33 languages formally listed on github. The service is dominated by Ruby (36%) and Javascript (24%) with 31 other languages rounding out the rest.

Github has a free plan that lets you create your own public repositories, work on them with public collaborators and have 100MB of disk space. The rest of the plans up the disk space and provide the ability to have private repositories and collaborators. The more you pay the more ACLs you get. It's a great example of launching with a business model from the get-go. The appeal for a company is easy to see. Why manage their own source control? Especially if they will ever be open-sourcing any of the code.

One way to really see the impact of github is on Rails. When the project began it was just DHH contributing. Slowly it grew to include the core team, but when it moved to Github there was a boom. At the 5:05 mark there is almost an explosion of new committers. This will only increase with Rails 3 and the merger with merb (which is on github along with an oft-forked merb book).

Ruby on Rails from Ilya Grigorik on Vimeo.

Before and After Rails Moved to Github:

Github was founded by 4 developers, one of whom impressively left Powerset during the Microsoft's acquisition to go fulltime with Github.

There is also a visualization of all the code sharing and forking on Github itself (and Python and Apache - though they are not on github). These videos were created using code_swarm.

I expect github will be talked about a lot at the Web 2.0 Expo this year.

Hope Art

The Capitol Hill Seattle blog has produced a short video about the surge of Obama art around Seattle. On the street you can find Shepard Fairey's Hope image has been put on garage doors and merged with donuts. It's also being used to advertise for local businesses (as seen in these coffee posters).

The other day I heard an interview with Shepard on NPR about how his art went from the street to the inauguration. It's definitely worth a listen.

Recent Posts

• ETech 2009 Schedule Posted; Early Registration Ends Monday on January 22, 2009
• What Will Change Everything? on January 1, 2009
• GeoData Explorations: Open Street Map's Growth on December 18, 2008
• GeoData Explorations: Google's Ever-Expanding Geo Investment on December 16, 2008
• My Netbook Took Me Back To Windows on December 15, 2008
• Where 2.0 CFP Closes December 2nd on December 1, 2008
• Where 2.0 2009 CFP Is Open on November 14, 2008
• Your Search Activity Predicts Flu Outbreaks on November 11, 2008
• The Shape of Flickr Nation on November 10, 2008
• Mary Meeker's Annual State of the Internet on November 5, 2008