Archive for January, 2011

Sensr.net Review, Video Monitoring in the Cloud

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
Sensr.net is a really cool service that let’s you set up a camera and monitor is from your computer 24/7.  This video monitor is hosted and stored in the cloud.  Sensr.net raised $1.5 million in seed funding through Spark Capital, Charles River Ventures and other strategic angel investors.
Sensr.net does some pretty cool things including keeping track of unusual and cool images and alert you when something happens. The new video cloud startup will send you an email or a text message if they detect something out of the ordinary or weird.
1000’s of people are using this service if they go away for the weekend and don’t have anyone to sit their house.  You can set up a online web-cam to monitor any suspicious activity in your home. Sensr.net will alert if you if they feel there is anything out of the ordinary.  It’s a pretty cool service so I put it to the test.
I think their system is only based on movement.  I set it up at my house where our house cleaners (I know, stuck up) came in and I watched them clean the house.  Once they entered the frame it sent me a text message telling me that someone had entered the home.  It was pretty cool how fast and efficient everything worked.  This service also allows you to set up the camera private or public, allowing all your friends to see what’s going on where your camera is set up. Pretty amazing service.  Hope they don’t run into privacy concerns or sexual lawsuits for helping perverts.
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Amazon SES

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

Amazon Web Services just announced a new bulk email offering, called Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). The Amazon cloud-based service is aimed to help developers and businesses who don’t want to build a in-house email product but want to call upon a powerful service to send large volumes of emails.

The Amazon SES email service if offered for free to everyone, but Amazon will charge fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfers. Pricing for Amazon SES is $0.10 per thousand email messages sent. But, a customer can send 2,000 email messages for free each day when these emails originally come from the Amazon EC2 platform.

Amazon SES offers a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.  I wonder how they are going to keep spammers out of this system if they offer 2000 email messages a day.  Do they just shut them off from a free account?

Has anyone tried out this system yet?  Please let me know what you think about it

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Elastic Beanstalk By Amazon Made For Easier App Deployment

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business of Amazon.com, this morning announced a new offering dubbed AWS Elastic Beanstalk, aimed to simplify the deployment and management of AWS cloud applications developed by third parties.

Elastic Beanstalk is designed to help developers automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and health monitoring.  As part of this AWS still allows full control the underlying resources so that you can switch them up at any time.

There is no extra charge for this service to any of the ASW cloud server customers, they pay only for the AWS resources needed to run their applications.

John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard, is quoted in the press release thusly:

“We’re working with AWS to provide an Elastic Beanstalk Ruby on Rails container that leverages the optimized Engine Yard stack which has been battle-tested by thousands of high-growth companies.”

For more information, check out the FAQ and Documentation sections.

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