Along with the announcement of a few, not that great Kindles this week was one for something called the Amazon Silk browser for the Kindle Fire tablet. When requests are made within Silk processing is being redirected and offloaded onto Amazon’s EC2 servers. These servers will deal with the multiple domain calls (if needed), dynamic content assembly and other work normal browsers do locally and deliver the final result to the silk browser. It also recognizes that a small screen mobile device is asking for an image and scales it accordingly, saving bandwidth in the process. The selling point in all this is that Amazon EC2 servers are more powerful than any server you could run locally and may even already have the content you requested cached (they say its endless cache) allowing them to serve the content directly without even having to go outside. Another benefit is predictive loading which they will do based on what users are requesting. The example they give is if they see most people going to nytimes.com then go to the business page, thats the one that will be pre-loaded after you request the first so that its ready to go when requested.
That is a pretty big deal. I tried to get more clarification from Amazon’s spokesperson, who emailed me back that “Usage data is collected anonymously and stored in aggregate, thus protecting user privacy” and pointed me to the FAQ page.
Amazon did follow up by saying that URL’s are stored only to trouble shoot browser issues and pointed out that users always have the option to browse in ‘off-cloud’ manner.
“Is Amazon able to peer into its customer usage behavior and use that to offer services based on that data. For instance if you see thousands of your customers going to buy SeeVees shoes from say a store like James Perse at a certain price, can you guys use that data to specifically tailor the Amazon store and offer up deals on those very same pair of shoes?” – the answer is no
This browser will most likely be made available to other platforms once they establish it on their own devices. I’m still suspicious about Amazon not doing anything after being able to tie every single browser request made by someone whose credit card info they already have. Then again Google already knows all that.
Technical interviews are always an unknown entity with a lot depending on the skills and knowledge of the person conducting the interview. A candidate can only hope questions are asked relative to their experience.
In my experience, questions asked usually fall into 3 categories. I’ll use examples of MySQL questions for each.
1. The ‘textbook’ questions – These are ones that are asked by people that either don’t know much about the topic themselves or just need someone that can crank out code. No thinking caps required. e.g. What is the statement to add a column to an existing table? What is a left join? Boring!
2. The ‘senior level’ questions – These are questions asked by people with knowledge of systems and real world experience working with them. e.g. What are the differences between myisam and innoDB? When you would you use which? What are the drawbacks of adding too many indices on a table? Ok questions, nothing too special here but something an experienced developer should have come across over the years.
3. The ‘thinking mans’ questions – These are the interesting ones. Questions that even experienced developers might not ever bother looking into and concepts that are grasped only by a particular type of developer, the one that’s interested in thinking outside the box. e.g. How are myisam and innoDB tables stored in the filesystem? (Two engines for the same DB but stored very, very differently) Is there a way to determine the most efficient field type for a column for a table that already has data in it? And my personal favorite is one with two parts to it:
a. What’s the difference between a char and varchar datatype? A super simple question leading up to…
b. If storage space is an issue why might one still prefer to use chars? This is a good one. *
None of the questions above are ones that would (or should) make or break an interview but the level of questions asked are probably an indication of what might be in store when working at a place thats asking them.
* Variable row sizing is always requested by admins due to table size considerations because why would you reserve space when it could be dynamically adjusted by the db? However, since varchars can be of random length MySQL needs to calculate the length of each field in a row so it knows how far to jump to get to the next record. If it were a set length, as it is with a char data type, MySQL can jump a pre determined length.
I attended a talk given by Paul Irish, Google Chrome developer advocate and jQuery team member, this week on ‘The State of HTML5: Summer Edition‘. This talk not only increased my amazement of whats possible with modern browsers but gave a whole new insight into the direction web based development is headed in.
Till recently, each browser had its own rendering and processing capabilities requiring individual tweaks and corrections. This is where the torture of cross browser compatibility came in. There wasn’t an expectation that the browser would know even the simplest thing such as how to play an audio file without building out a player for it. Modern browsers nowadays are powerful enough to utilize the computers GPU for rendering components and soon enough capable of splitting tasks among cores of the processors.
Intense stuff like this aside, simple programming functionality that ‘just works’ in HTML5 capable browsers across platforms is a developers dream. Creators are free to produce content/features with parameters that update and render correctly in the front-end based on the implementation of the browser, device is irrelevant.
This is a rock solid, feature rich, powerful playground to bring users experiences via the browser that were only possible with a local applications. Utilizing these features is opening up a brand new world of consumer engagement on the web even though the medium of consumption has been around for decades. Its the abilities of that medium that are all grown up now.
Here is the link to the slides from the talk. It is a must read for anyone building anything online: goo.gl/EUJqh
Barça puts more emphasis than any other major team on growing its own players. Other football teams often resemble the United Nations—the Arsenal first eleven, for example, frequently includes just two native-born Britons. Barça, by contrast, is still dominated by local players… Eight of the team’s leading players are products of its football school, La Masia.
It sounds practical that companies would benefit most from developing talent in house and providing opportunities for growth rather than falling back on the usual practice of hiring resources as and when needed. This requires a specific strategy underlying all efforts worked on within the organization and shouldn’t be thought of as a process separate from getting day to day work done.
Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great”, argues that the secret of long-term corporate success lies in cultivating a distinctive set of values. For all the talk of diversity and globalisation, this usually means promoting from within and putting down deep local roots.
The Internet has probably evolved as much in the last 8-10 years as the automobile industry has in the last 50. Of course it has but in which way in particular? Realizing that interaction with consumers is as important as content creation.
During the bubble of 2001 some of the biggest rises (and then busts) were of The Globe, market cap at IPO $840M in 1998 and GeoCities which Yahoo bought for $3.57B in 1999. These companies were built on the concept of allowing everyone to create content making it easy to throw something up for a worldwide audience to see. Problem was/is that a passive audience is as good as no audience. Traffic sells ads but its going to plateau and generating more content is not proportional to growth in traffic as can be attested to by newspapers and blogging companies. Even today, your blog post may get read but how many people leave comments? What if that same post was made on Facebook where social interaction is built into the core of the content serving platform?
For the past few years companies have decided to jump head first into the world of Facebook and Twitter to allow us to become their best buds. This is only a start and should in no way be thought of as ‘the solution’. You need to put in some elbow grease to make this new relationship work.
1% will create content, 10% will engage with it, and 100% will consume it.
That 10% is who companies should be aiming for. I think 12 years of strategy on how to win consumers is good enough for most but there is nowhere near that much information on how to get that 10% to go up to 11%.
Personalization on the Web… is becoming so pervasive that we may not even know what we’re missing: the views and voices that challenge our own thinking.
Personalization… channels people into feedback loops, or “filter bubbles,” of their own predilections.
This is going to the other extreme in terms of interaction with consumers. Netflix is a prime example but there are hundreds of highly trafficed sites that use Facebook’s OpenGraph Protocol to push content tailored just for you. Tracking your browsing patterns is not new but serving up content specifically based on that info AND your friends patterns is relatively new.
More willing interaction from consumers and folding that user generated content into the companies content thereby generating even more interaction? Might be a future in that.
Today’s announcements pulled the rug from underneath more than a couple of well established, successful apps like Dropbox (iCloud), Instapaper (Reading List) and Remember The Milk (Reminders) but the best was who they stepped on with iMessage. The big, bad phone service providers.
From Gruber:
A well-informed little birdie tells me that Apple’s phone carrier partners around the world found out about iMessages when we did: during today’s keynote.
People will be able to message other phones on the iOS platform for free. A sweet source of money is soon going to dry up once people (inevitably) start canceling their messaging plans. 20cents a text msg? Which country in the world do providers get away with charging that much?
Pre IPO estimates of $25 then $35 and then $45 a share went out the window when Linkedin opened at $83 valuing the company at $9.1B on Thursday. With estimates that the company will do about $100M in revenue this year on ~20M subscribers, this social networking company definitely got the jump on bigger, better and more profitable companies like Zynga, Groupon and Facebook.
The puzzlement of why my limit order, of $47 set at 9:25am, did not go through lasted till 10am since I wasnt able to see the actual stock quote for some time. Maybe because it was a new stock, needed to propagate through the network, no idea, but when I did see the opening I quickly canceled my order before someone at Schwab saw it and had a good laugh.
Circled below in the day chart is the period between 11:30am and 11:50am when the stock shot from $91 to $115 and I almost lost my power of rational thought and almost fell for what is surely to be the first and most definite sign that the second tech bubble has begun.
