General — View Comments
15
Jul 10

Layerboom Acquired by Joyent!

I’m happy to announce that my company Layerboom has been acquired by Joyent, a leading provider of Cloud Computing services and solutions. Here’s the press announcement.

Layerboom & Cloud Computing is something I’ve been working on for 2 years but I’ve been thinking about cloud since school. Startups require quite a bit of sacrifice, and this definitely wasn’t an exception. I had to give up a lot for the opportunity to try and for that reason I have a ton of people to thank. Most of you I’ve thanked in person already, but here it is again for ‘the record’.

A big thanks to our Investors for taking a chance on a couple guys with a laptop and an idea, and a big congratulations to the rest of the guys on the Layerboom team for being persistent, forward thinking, and above all a pleasure to work with.

I also have to thank my Friends for being really supportive and putting up with my bullshit over the last 2 years; You’re like family to me and in case there was any doubt, you’re worth more to me than anything.

As part of our deal I’ve taken a job at Joyent and I’m really happy to be working for a company with excellent leadership and vision . We can’t wait to show everyone the projects we’re working on!

ps We’re hiring, so if you’re a developer and you’re looking for a killer opportunity send me an email.

Canada / Geek / General / wtf — View Comments
14
May 10

Mobilicity Launches… on GoDaddy

Mobilicity, a new mobile phone carrier is launching in Canada on May 15th, 2010. Starting in Toronto, then covering other major cities like Vancouver, and Montreal, the service is competitively priced with unlimited plans for calling and text messages at around $35 dollars (CAD) a month, which is pretty sweet.

After seeing some buzz on Twitter about Mobilicity, I went to their website, which was so slow I thought I was on dial-up.

This amateur stuff from a Telecom?
No… It can’t be.

But after seeing a database connection error (This means shit is broken for all your non-techies) I realized something was really up.

Check this out:

# host www.mobilicity.ca
www.mobilicity.ca has address 173.201.38.96
# host 173.201.38.96
96.38.201.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ip-173-201-38-96.ip.secureserver.net.

Huh? Secureserver.net is….

# whois 173.201.38.96
 
OrgName:    GoDaddy.com, Inc.
OrgID:      GODAD
Address:    14455 N Hayden Road
Address:    Suite 226
City:       Scottsdale
StateProv:  AZ
PostalCode: 85260
Country:    US
 
NetRange:   173.201.0.0 - 173.201.255.255
CIDR:       173.201.0.0/16
OriginAS:   AS26496
NetName:    GO-DADDY-SOFTWARE-INC
NetHandle:  NET-173-201-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-173-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: CNS1.SECURESERVER.NET
NameServer: CNS2.SECURESERVER.NET
NameServer: CNS3.SECURESERVER.NET
Comment:    Please send abuse complaints to abuse@godaddy.com
RegDate:    2009-09-18
Updated:    2009-09-18

Its GoDaddy. A telecom that hosts its website on GoDaddy.

Yikes.

General — View Comments
02
May 10

This man is my Hero

Yvon Chouinard has got a pretty amazing story. This video is him speaking at UC Santa Barbara about turning Patagonia into a more sustainable business.

Brainstorming / Business / Geek / General / cloud — View Comments
30
Apr 10

Clouds and The Fate of the Help Desk

As an efficiency nut there’s one thing that makes me really happy about Tablets:

The Help Desk will be going away.

It’s important to understand the meaning of the term “Help Desk”. I don’t just mean people who sit around all day with headsets, answering phone calls. It turns out there are a *lot* of people employed in IT whose job it is to just keep the lights on. Vendors, Integration specialists, Sysadmins, and the guy whose entire job it is to  click the right button to clear the printer queue. Entire countries have devoted a lot of resources to greasing the gears of computers. They all work in a Helpdesk somehow.

CTO’s and CIO’s are starting to appreciate that their function at a company isn’t about technology implementation – it’s about how technology can help their business. Who cares if your OS is running Windows or Linux if all you need is a Word processor (and Solitaire). It’s become totally irrelevant.

What matters is the applications that are delivered to the end user; everything else is just implementation dogma. The people doing these implementations are Help Desks too, they’re just a few degrees removed from the end-user and prefer snazzier titles like ‘Application Services Engineer.’

It’s gonna take awhile. The PC will be around for a long time and people still need to type. But as we shift to tiny, integrated, crash-proof devices we need help desks less and less. The intuitive nature of the computer will suggest that it’s no longer important to be adept at using them. Not only that, but as we cycle through generations of people, the technical citizens will supplant the technical immigrants

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