Yeah, that one. Well, it’s nearly finished. At least, finished enough that Apple can start hiring key staff for the installation. AppleInsider.com reported on Friday that Apple has posted 10 new job listings for the data center in Maiden, NC;

The company seeks to hire site managers, coordinators, and service, mechanical and electric technicians. The listings seek people who have worked in large data centers with more than a thousand servers.

Here’s the complete list of job roles, just in case you fancy applying;

Data Center Site Services Technician (x2), Data Center Site Services Manager, Data Center Site Coordinator, Data Center Mechanical Technician, Data Center Electrical Technician, Data Center Maintenance Technician (x4)

Notice anything? That’s right, not one clue as to the primary purpose for Apple’s shiny new data center.

Guesswork

When plans for the data center were officially confirmed last summer, Gov. Beverly Perdue welcomed Apple to North Carolina and described the project as a “significant economic boost to local communities and the state.”

The data center is expected to create and sustain over 50 full-time positions, and it’s clear from this initial list of 10 that Apple is beginning to look for key first-wave personnel.

Did I mention how nobody knows what the data center is for? It’s not hard to guess that iTunes, MobileMe and iWork.com will benefit from this major new installation, but that’s sheer conjecture. And this is Apple we’re talking about. Perhaps this is exactly what we think it is, and nothing more. Or maybe it’s the next major step forward for Apple in its new role as a mobile computing company?

Personally, I’m holding-out for the possibility that this is the site of Steve Jobs’ new (not so) Secret Lair, from where he will command his Empire from a throne chair with impractically-high armrests. You know, just like any respectable Imperious Leader would.

Image courtesy Universal Studios

Thanks to residual jet lag from my Le Web trip, I woke up in the middle of the night last night and started reflecting on how much things have changed — and how little.

In the early days, the blog was just a blotter to accompany my reporting duties, where I would posted some of the more interesting tidbits that I would pick up on a daily basis. Given that my two employers, Red Herring and Business 2.0, were monthly publications, I started writing news-focused posts in 2005. A surge in traffic followed and a year later, I was working on a business plan for The GigaOM Network. In July 2006, thanks to funding from True Ventures, we officially launched.

My partners in the venture were Katie Fehrenbacher and Liz Gannes. Since then, many more folks have joined us, a few have subsequently left, and in the meantime we have celebrated weddings and babies — and survived at least one major crisis. And our community has grown larger, in particular the number of friends and supporters who have been guiding us on a daily basis, via direct email or public comments.

Let’s talk about how things have changed in past eight years.

When I started blogging, it was a highly personalized and opinion-based medium spearheaded by the likes of Doc Searls and Dave Winer, and one in which links begat links — that was how the conversation unfolded. One added to Anil Dash’s commentary by writing a post of one’s own. Somewhere along the line, however, technology blogging transformed itself into a news machine.

I have come to appreciate the good of this transformation, mostly because we (along with our peers) have started to replace the technology publications from the last generation. Business 2.0 is gone. Red Herring exists somewhere in the back alleys of the web. Wired magazine isn’t nearly as interesting as the Wired.com blogs and their social news web site, Reddit.

But there’s been a downside to this shift, too: A certain uniformity has set in, making one tech blog largely indistinguishable from the next. It’s one of the reasons why we redesigned GigaOM.com. In doing so, we looked to our yesterdays and reconciled them with our tomorrows. As I wrote when we launched the latest version of the site, “What we’ve tried to do is strike a fine balance between what is a blog and what would be an online magazine.” Indeed, we’ve gone back to our roots by linking more to other folks, because “we don’t have a monopoly on ideas, and since our business is based on your attention, it’s our job to make sure that your attention is being put to good use.“ And it is the attention of the community that will separate the successful blogs of tomorrow from the search engine-optimized drivel increasingly being mass-produced by AOL and others.

Such attention will come as the result of deeper, more meaningful relationships with what old media describes as “readers” or “unique visitors.” I dislike both words in this context but especially “readers” because it makes it sound like the folks who read don’t participate. Yet if you read the comments on our blog posts, you’ll get much more value than you would by reading the posts alone. Those “readers” are in fact co-creators by virtue of participating in the conversation. We bloggers need to remind ourselves of that fact; we can’t just view the world in terms of page views.

I don’t fret about the robo-content trend being championed by AOL and others. Michael Arrington writes, “It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today.” I disagree. Michael would still get my click, because he would engage with me. The spammier the Internet gets, the more people are going to gravitate towards content they value. Have you seen Demand Media’s line-up? It’s about as interesting as the chassis of a Kia.

These companies are trying to create search engine-driven content just as the notion of search is being challenged by discovery engines such as Facebook and Twitter.  It’s all part of the ongoing shift on the web that many bloggers, including the super smart Chris Dixon, are already talking about. Late last spring, I outlined how the distribution — and discovery — of Internet content was changing. The web is transitioning from mere interactivity towards a dynamic two-way medium, I argued, and it’s easier to create and publish content than ever before. Most importantly, the web is being disaggregated, the so-called “destination web” becoming a thing of the past. This new, more dynamic web is the best friend of niche publications and blogs that thrive on the “attention” of their community. In a subsequent post a few months later on the evolution of blogging, I pointed out that:

As Twitter has become increasingly ingrained in our everyday lives, its value as as source of information tidbits has become clear. Think of it like that plate of chips and salsa you get before the entree arrives: tasty — spicy, even — but not entirely satisfying. Meanwhile, blogging has become the main course — the source of context. And the evolution into that role has injected new life into the blogosphere.

Indeed, eight years on I find myself re-invigorated by blogging and what it’s come to represent. Here’s to the future!

The Top 10 Posts on GigaOM.com

1. 5 Ways to SMS for Free (2007)
2. A quick guide to netbooks (2008)
3. Forget iPhone, Think Google Phone (2006)
4. The Magic behind Magicjack (2007)
5. Top Ten most popular MMOs (2007)
6. 10 Must have apps to pimp out your Symbian phone (2008)
7. The Nokia N95 Review (2007)
8. Google, YouTube & Dark Side of Online Video (2006)
9. Skype on iPhone, No Seriously. (2007)
10. 5 Great & free games you are not playing now. (2007)

As you can see, the list doesn’t include any posts from before 2006 because I wasn’t tracking the data back then. Of the top 10 posts, I wrote four of them -– all circa 2006-2007. I guess I’ve been slacking since then ;-)

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1. Invest in hard times. Intel invested heavily in capacity, and when it came out of the downturn, it was able to meet the pent-up demand faster than others.
2. Consensus is mostly good. Except when it is not. “There’s a time to let everyone twist the knobs and a time to make a decision,” Barrett says.
3. Follow the business, not Wall Street. No arguments about that, though in the case of start-ups, his advice is not to follow the pundits, media and others who are not your customer. “The job of the CEO is not to reward the short-term speculator of your stock, but to do a good job long-term for your shareholders, employees and customers,” he says. Look what happened to the old AT&T, which paid too much attention to Wall Street.
4. When something works, don’t reinvent it, reproduce it. McDonald’s fries, anyone?
5. Good competitors matter. “It’s like athletes: To be a great company you need great competitors…It’s what keeps you alive and keeps you honest,” Barrett says.

You should really read the full article, though it seems to be behind the WSJ paid-wall. (Photo courtesy of Intel Corp.)

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So it seems almost natural that the Kentucky Derby would have a YouTube account, but nonetheless it’s gratifying to see that it exists, and has in fact existed since 2006. This meant that immediately after the race on Saturday, there was an official video available for those who had missed it — a video that’s officially viral today, having racked up half a million views since being posted.

And no wonder: The complete race is a tense three minutes of horse-powered excitement. Without the pre-race coverage introducing you to the horses and their jockeys, the context is a bit lacking, but the official commentary makes the action easy to parse. When the announcers declare that 50-to-1-rated Mine That Bird is the upset winner of this year’s Kentucky Derby, beating out the higher-ranked favorites this Saturday to take home $1.4 million in cash, it’s almost as thrilling as seeing it live.

The Derby’s YouTube account also archives notable races from its 135-year history, as well as videos capturing the culture that’s sprung up around the event. Because sure it’s fun to play the ponies, but you know what’s even more fun? Playing the ponies while sipping a delicious mint julep and wearing a really big hat. Since the Derby wants you to have the best time possible, they’ve produced shorts on these exceedingly important topics.

Hosted by the pleasant and engaging Michelle Yu, these videos are a lot of fun. The mint julep clip not only offers instruction on how to properly prepare the beverage, but includes basic notes on making your own simple syrup (which it turns out will keep for a week in the fridge! That’s seven days’ worth of mint julep joy!).

The hat-making segments could be much tighter — Part 1, at three minutes, focuses on Yu picking out the materials for her custom derby hat, while Part 2 is a 20-minute millinery odyssey that barely cracks 4,000 views. But it’s still an interesting look at a part of the culture that honors an era in which you could raise your profile just by swapping your headgear.

And all the videos all add to a sense of the horse-racing world beyond talk of steroid scandals and public euthanasia, which they desperately need after last year’s tragic death of Eight Bells. By embracing YouTube, the Derby allows those who are catching up a taste of what they missed — while also getting them excited for the next race.

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Most engineers are familiar with the initial phone interview: a short, technical interview prepared by the prospective employer, and used to verify that the programmer meets the minimum technical qualifications of the job. Lots of employers think these screenings are a quick way to weed out bad engineers, but personally, I refuse to do them. Here are three reasons those looking to hire the best engineers should reconsider the “phone screen” interview altogether and jump right to a full-length phone or in-person interview:

1. Recruiters and other non-technical people typically don’t understand the questions they ask, and that leads to a one-way conversation. In addition, questions are often stated incorrectly, or without the originally intended context and as such suffer from lost-in-translation syndrome. Correctly evaluating a candidate over the phone takes longer than a typical “screening” interview, and should be done by equally tech-savvy individuals on the employer’s side.

2. From the perspective of an engineer, if an employer asks a lot of trivial coding or algorithm questions, it usually means the job they’re hiring for isn’t going to be that interesting (activate the big-company-coding-job radar). Phone interviewers do occasionally ask deeper questions, but given the limited time of a screening interview, and the inability of a candidate to present code or design diagrams, they are often forced to ask trivial ones.

3. Intelligence assessments can be a good indicator of talent, but don’t waste time asking them to solve puzzles pulled off the Internet: Look at SAT or GRE scores, school transcripts, or some other substantial proof of intelligence (or lack thereof). This kind of background on a candidate can usually be found without the need for a phone interview.

Only good engineers can accurately measure the skills of other good engineers, and it takes a lot of probing in an in-person, back-and-forth conversation to get there. A meaningful engineering interview has to be conducted in person, with multiple engineers, and over the course of several hours (if not an entire day). It’s worth the effort.

Evan Paull is a software engineer and a startup consultant.

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We seek to make great films first. If a great film gives birth to a franchise, we are the first company to leverage such success. A check-the-boxes approach to creativity is more likely to result in blandness and failure.

Well said. It is easy to fall prey to a “check the boxes” approach and veer away from the core beliefs and values of your company. If that happens, you’re left with forgettable products that lack vision.

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Some of them pointed out the difference between Bezos and Bailout CEOs, who are good at offering excuses. Or others, like Auto Industry executives, who are often compared to lazy, brainless lumps. As someone points out, the bailout money is going to companies that are big, not necessarily the best. The best companies wouldn’t need to be bailed out because they would be good at what they do. Part of running a good company is knowing how each little part works and recognizing the importance of every person who contributes to the effort. Bezos clearly gets that. The bailout CEOs don’t.

Photo courtesy of Etech via Flickr

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Ed Mallen, President and CEO, TimeDriver

One of the key sales criteria in the enterprise application space -– and one of the greatest development challenges -– is the ability to scale. At TimeTrade Systems we have met that challenge, creating a successful business selling SaaS-based applications that enable very large organizations and businesses to schedule and manage millions of appointments.

So, when we saw an opportunity to leverage our technology and deep scheduling knowledge to help individual web workers, it was a no-brainer. From a development standpoint, we’d already solved the scalability problem, and we felt designing a web-based personal appointment scheduler should be easy – and tailor-made for viral distribution. Through the process of designing, supporting and marketing TimeDriver, a Web-enabled personal scheduling solution, we’ve learned some interesting lessons. Here are our recommendations for any company looking at similar opportunities for growth.

1. Focus, focus, focus. Carving out a separate development team was the best way to initially develop the product. Trying to leverage our enterprise developers on a “part-time” basis for the web 2.0 product would have meant that both products suffered.
2. Balance ease of use with true business value. We had an imperative to create an easy-to-use solution that would also empower individuals to personalize their appointment invitations. In addition, we needed to ensure that users knew that the solution was not a toy and would help them better manage and drive their consulting or small businesses. Describing a range of use cases proved tremendously useful in helping users understand ways to apply TimeDriver.
3. Be prepared to face the challenge of changing the norm. We were asking end users to adopt a new way to book appointments. To drive rapid acceptance, we made the product available on free trial. Even though we see our new approach as easier, there’s always resistance to adopting a new way to perform an old task. We found that providing live support encouraged the early adopters –- which included a broad mixture of recruiters, HR professionals, lifestyle coaches, faith-based groups, insurance agents and sales people — to make TimeDriver their business appointment scheduler.
4. Listen to feedback from end users. Web 2.0 end-users are very vocal and very passionate, eager to share their feedback and experiences. We’ve leveraged their feedback when considering new features and applied them to our enterprise product, as well. There are no bounds to end-user creativity and ingenuity, and being prepared to listen will help direct new capabilities and leverage new sales opportunities.
5. It always takes longer than you think. We leveraged Web 2.0 technologies for development, and some delays in the process were simply out of our hands. For example, we chose the Dojo toolkit to ease the development of cross platform, JavaScript/Ajax-based applications. As Dojo is Open Source, we ended up waiting for releases to support certain functionality. Be prepared to allow for extra time in your development cycle, especially if leveraging open source tools.
6. Pick a “no turning back” deadline. Software is never perfect and every development team has a natural tendency to want to continue to “tweak.” We decided to launch TimeDriver at DEMO ‘08, so we had to be ready for prime time by then. This strategy had dual benefits. Not only did it provide a definitive date to development, but the developers also received very public recognition for their efforts.

Ed Mallen is the President and CEO of TimeTrade Systems, 25-year software industry veteran, surfer for many decades and an avid cyclist and runner.

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Increasingly, geeky pasttimes are seeping into the mainstream. Like creatures in a Neil Gaiman story, the boundary between the dimension of the fantastical and the land of the normal is blurring. And with that blur, faithful adaptations of heroes and villains have made the leap to the world of movies.

That means that in addition to Spider-Man, regular folk are suddenly familiar with the likes of Dr. Manhattan, Coraline and Hellboy. What’s more, graphic novels are showing up on our iPhone screens. Scrollmotion’s latest app, Daniel X, brings to us the adventures of a teenage alien hunter with a vivid imagination.

Creating The Hero

“Daniel X”‘s backstory is a little different than that of standard comic book fare. Created by author James Patterson, it’s not part of the Marvel or DC stable; there’s no rich history or über fan cult of longtime readers, either. He’s a completely fresh character, seemingly designed with a teen audience in mind.

Although Patterson has found success with the “Daniel X” series, he’s also written a stack of celebrated books, several of which have made the transition to film, too. Yet despite all this, Patterson kicks off “Daniel X” with little more than a hackneyed genesis of our soon-to-be hero.

Back when Daniel was knee high to a grasshopper, his father was an alien hunter. One ill-fated day, a particularly irate alien decided that he’d do a spot of murdering and Daniel’s folks were, due to all the alien-hunting stuff, fair game.

Much like various X-Men, Harry Potter, Batman, Spider-Man and an array of other heroes, Daniel X ends up an orphan before discovering his superpowers. Poor Daniel. For a character with so much potential, it’s a shame he had to wind up on the wrong side of a particularly unfortunate cliché.

Although the kid happens to be from Kansas, it seems that he’s stationed in Tokyo, apparently a hub of alien criminal activity. Plus, he has super strength, super agility, the power to imagine things into existence and the ability to morph. Apparently the author also has the power to morph things, too, as he’s managed to transform the entire graphic novel into one massive cliché.

Tip of the Iceberg

Above and beyond the core story, the app itself isn’t a total disappointment; the technology is impressive. Designed by Scrollmotion, their engine, entitled Iceberg, is custom-designed for playing back exactly this sort of content.

The app opens with a tutorial — as you drag your finger across the screen, a watermelon explodes. Dragging back rewinds the fruity detonation. The control mechanism is novel and feels like you’re leafing through frames of a film.

There’s an automatic mode, too. Tapping the screen reveals a control menu, allowing you to set the speed of playback, alongside a play/pause button.

Using Iceberg, the graphic novel’s artwork has been brought to life. Reading “Daniel X” feels less like a comic and more like scrolling through scenes in a cartoon: The camera pans across each shot, bringing the characters to life as speech bubbles pop into existence and gracefully fade away.

The artwork seems to be painted as opposed to inked. It has texture, which, when combined with the kinetic nature of Iceberg, makes Daniel X’s adventure seem less humdrum and a little more exciting.

Iceberg Issues

There are, however, several enjoyment-impeding issues with the software worth pointing out. The inertia, when dragging pages, is incoherent — a small drag can seemingly whizz through several frames, or sometimes a big drag squeezes just a tiny bit of movement out of one panel.

Plus, switching to automatic mode can be frustrating. Even at the slower speeds, speech bubbles can zip past, with barely enough time to digest Patterson’s corny dialogue.

The iPhone screen also dims while the app is running and as there’s no settings menu within the app, there’s no way to stop this happening. What this means is that when reading “Daniel X” in automatic mode, you’ll find yourself having to tap the screen every few minutes to wake it up again.

Summing Up

The screen sleeping issue is irritating; it detracts from any opportunity to become engrossed in the experience. But then, the same could be said of the story and dialogue, too.

Patterson’s writing is downright awful. The dialogue is tired — we’ve heard it all before, but by arguably better comic writers — the story is predictable, the journey it takes us on more like a boring cruise than a narrative roller coaster.

Furthermore, at $9.99, the price is a serious shocker. In fact, it’s like Scrollmotion decided that since “Daniel X” is devoid of any effective narrative trickery, they’d throw in their own plot twist of sorts by charging $10 for the app.

I understand that a great deal of work — and as such, cost — went in to developing the app engine, licensing Patterson’s uninspired graphic novel and, most evident of all, taking the accomplished artwork and creating vibrant cartoon-esque scenes. I really do get it.

However, if an app is so costly to develop that it’s set at an unrealistic or prohibitive price point, then somebody is being greedy or unrealistic, or both. Whatever the reality is, speculation aside, there’s a lot of fun to be had from the App Store, much of it at significantly lower prices than that of Daniel X.

This is potentially good tech and yet it’s filled with vapid content, certainly not worth the price tag. I want to support graphic novels making the leap to a fresh medium but this is poor content at a baffling price and as such, should be avoided.

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The panel didn’t break any new ground with its discussion on the Bay Area’s proximity to capital, abundant talent and reverence of startup culture. However, cracks are beginning to show, as startups need less venture capital, California’s economy worsens and as the reverence of a startup culture that celebrates the go-big-or-go-home way of creating a startup fades.

The Bay Area startup ethos that calls for millions in venture funding and a giant business built in three to five years may be on the wane as the venture world faces its own tectonic shifts (see video below). “The model of tech getting used to VCs throwing crazy amounts of money at them is just crazy,” says Mike Maples, Sr., an angel investor who formerly worked at Microsoft and has funded several businesses.

Panelist Penelope Trunk, founder of the Brazen Careerist, who started her company in Madison, Wisc., called the VC model shallow and limiting for an entrepreneur. She pointed out that the traditional startup culture embraced by Silicon Valley comes at a personal cost that makes it hard for women and those with families to become entrepreneurs, and she championed building a business that generates sales and grows organically.

Panelist Kaiser Kuo, a business consultant in China, echoed the call to bootstrap, saying, “VCs should be the funding source of last resort.”

I walked away thinking the big debate for entrepreneurs is less about where you start a company, than an effort to reclaim the word “startup” for entrepreneurs who bootstrap their technology business — in or outside of the Valley. Many of these companies get less PR (they can’t always afford it), but they will likely become increasingly relevant as the downturn forces a realignment of the venture industry and forces entrepreneurs to build a startup that can make it as a business from day one.

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This Innovation Heat Map crafted by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum maps innovation across the planet. Clearly Silicon Valley is in a class of its own and perhaps that is why others want to imitate its success. Paul Graham recently offered up a recipe to replicate Silicon Valley, but even with that I am not sure anyone can pull it off. Why? Because, there are so many intangibles that cannot be quantified and replicated outside of Silicon Valley.

Nowhere else on the planet you will find a grown man who is crazy enough to fund a web site that essentially shows cat videos and expects his investment to pay off big time. YouTube, anyone!? Nowhere but in Silicon Valley is it OK to fail. More importantly, nowhere on the planet can you actually find a place to think as “freely” as Silicon Valley. I speak from personal experience, and you might disagree. I think Silicon Valley is un-replicable.

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Normally, industry analysts are a talkative, confident bunch, but generally speaking, they are like old fisherman, spinning yarns and telling tales that have become exaggerated through constant retelling.

Recent comments by leading Apple analyst Toni Sacconaghi, however, actually came out of discussions with a very good source: Tim Cook, Apple COO and acting head honcho at Cupertino during Steve Jobs’ medical leave. Not only that, but CFO Pete Oppenheimer and head of marketing Phil Schiller were there, too.

Which is why this time, when he says Apple is likely still working toward producing a netbook, I didn’t just roll my eyes and go about turning my Eee PC into a hackintosh. Not that Sacconaghi provided any firm details, just the tantalizing info that Cook “hinted” that Apple was still turning over “ideas” surrounding a netbook. Not a lot to build hope on, but better than the usual “predictions” based on “market trends.”

Other developments Sacconaghi foresees coming out of his all-star confab include pricing changes to the iPhone line-up, and new devices in the smartphone category. This, again, is speculation based on Cook’s own words, which are quoted by Sacconaghi as follows:

Tim Cook stated that since Steve Jobs announced his leave of absence, he was spending more time on new products, how Apple could take the iPhone into new markets and examining iPhone’s business model.

Cook has been hinting at new products for quite some time, so we’re bound to see some before Jobs’ scheduled return in June. Sacconaghi predicts those will be new iMacs, which might come as early as next month. It’s true the iMac is overdue for an update, and that predictions of possible new quad-core models have been surfacing lately. That said, this appears to be more Sacconaghi’s analysis and less anything said by Cook, so don’t go throwing your old iMac out the window just yet.

The unusual move on the part of Apple’s top brass to meet with an industry analyst (albeit the top rated analyst, according to Institutional Investor Magazine) is perhaps more newsworthy than the predictions themselves. They suggest a Cupertino that is willing to openly court some media speculation, even if they are still playing their hand very close to the chest. Maybe rumors of a growth slowdown are true, in which case Apple might be looking to fuel the speculative fire that represents so much of their publicity machine.

The good news for us as Apple users is that if Apple is inviting this kind of attention, they’re probably planning to deliver something soon that will benefit from it. In other words, they’re turning down the house lights and getting ready to raise the curtains. Let’s hope the show starts soon.

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To many in the IT industry, especially those considering starting companies, the motives of venture capitalists can seem confusing at best and devious at worst.. But like any other industry, VC has its own business model. While startup founders often think about investments simply in terms of percentage returns, VCs tend to think in terms of absolute return. Getting back $10 million on a $1 million investment is a huge percentage ROI, but getting $50 million from investing $10 million is a larger absolute return. The rational behavior of VCs thus seems irrational to others.

VCs, then, are doing two things: betting and experimenting. The bets are on the entrepreneurs creating the companies and, to a lesser extent, the ideas they have.  The experiments are used to identify and explore new markets. Bets are pure risk and risk management in which the goal is to maximize upside while minimizing downside. Experiments, are about discovery, and discovery means exploring many blind alleys before finding success. Scientists run tens or hundreds of experiments that fail for every one that succeeds in revealing something new.  The same is true for startups: if you are not failing, you are not innovating.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the IT industry had the lowest 2- and 4-year survival rate of any industry during the ’90s (63 percent and 38 percent).  Why? The companies, like investors, must balance risk and experimentation. Many companies start with one idea, only to discard it and try several others before arriving at the idea on which they succeed. Google is the most visible example of this, having launched its advertising platform years after starting their (non-monetized) search business. Many companies run out of money before discovering their successful offering.

The need for experimentation and scarcity of resources makes it essential that both VCs and startups be able to run their experiments as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

In the past, building a web-based startup required purchasing servers, colocation and bandwidth, and hiring the operations people to take care of load balancers, routers, disk storage, etc. This is a lot of expense and often companies either under provisioned or, more likely, bought too much equipment in anticipation of demand that never materialized. Most of this equipment later could be found on eBay, which, while good for people purchasing expensive equipment for pennies on the dollar, wasn’t the revenue building plan the investors had in mind.  Such capital expenditure is clearly not conducive to rapid, frequent experimentation.

With the launch of services like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Force.com, however, capital costs of infrastructure are zero, having been converted to operational costs that directly reflect actual demand.  For those with applications that can work within the constraints, AppEngine and Force.com will automatically scale them on demand.  The more sophisticated applications, designed from the start for horizontal scale, are better suited to the set of infrastructure primitives that make up AWS.

All of these platforms are infrastructure, but they are more than that for startups and investors: they are tools for risk reduction and experimentation.  They are engines of innovation.  In the new world these services create, startups using them have an enormous advantage over their competitors in their ability to experiment and adjust, and investors can get much less risk and much more exploration done with the same capital. Anyone building their own infrastructure will be seen as already failing.  What many see as simply a mechanism to reduce costs is, in reality, something much more powerful.  Fast, frequent failure is the most reliable path to success.

If your business plan relies on building infrastructure, it’s time you revisited it.  If you don’t, your investors will.

Benjamin Black is an infrastructure troublemaker, currently at Joyent, who has blazed a trail of game-changing technology, leaving behind angry execs at Microsoft, Amazon, and Internap. Vijay Gill builds networks and infrastructure.

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You can access the stream here or just check back on the embed above. It’s probable that Hulu’s feed will be geo-blocked for viewers outside the U.S., but EarthCam is also carrying the same live feed as well as spliced-together webcam feeds from around the world.

The satellite feed comes from the Times Square Alliance and is being offered to sites and mobile operators free of charge. It starts at 10 p.m. ET, and will be hosted by Univision’s Raul “El Gordo” De Molina and actress Angélica Vale.

Previously, Hulu live-streamed the final two U.S. presidential debates in October. The site, which had 4.8 million visitors in November, mainly carries TV episodes and some movies, but it’s also bulking up its online originals and is expected to get into music videos as well.

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Secret Keys

You know when you’ve been moving your head around and trying to get that squeeze effect to look just right, and then you have to press the button to take the photo, and then hold your head still for the countdown, and you inevitably move and the shot is ruined? Yeah, that’s lame. So if you want to cut directly to the chase, hold down the OPTION key and click the red snapshot button at the same time. BAM! No countdown.

The there are some times that the screen flash may not be desirable — I particularly need little help looking pasty white in the winter months… Nix that annoying flash by holding down the SHIFT key when pressing the red snapshot button. Want an instant, no flash Photo Booth picture? Hold SHIFT and OPTION at the same time while clicking the red snapshot button.

If you’ve got dozens of pictures in the Photo Booth viewer, it can take time to click through each set of photos. If you want to get to the beginning or the end of the collection, hold down the COMMAND key while pressing either direction arrow to fly all the way to either end instantly.

Fun Effects

Photo Booth is loaded with some fun effects to begin with, and it’s got some ‘green screen’ type effects to make it look like you’re someplace you’re not. Then on the fourth effects page, there’s space for you to add your own. Here you can drag any photo you want and use it as a backdrop. But you can also use Apple’s Quartz composer effects to do other cool things like the Star Wars Hologram or the Shepard Fairey effects. But you could also use Quartz Composer to roll your own, if you’re the adventurous type.

So there you have it. If simply reminding you about the fun that’s to be had with Photo Booth wasn’t enough, these simple tricks should help to rejuvenate that experience — not to mention, impress your friends all over again!

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