So, everyone lies – at some point, in some form, to various degrees. Kids lie, because they are just copying their parents. I came across Raul’s ‘mesmeric yet whimsical’ rant about the lies he told his 3 year old. But why do parents lie? To protect their children? And maybe in the course of it, unknowingly, teaching them a bit about the vulnerable human nature.
Recently, Vishal Sharma and I decided to devote some of our time towards a dedicated blog portal covering technology startups and interviews with prominent people from IT, TeleComm and Green Tech.
Vishal successfully led the Australian Startups Carnival, and the Top Web2.0 Apps in Australia survey. I’m thankful to him for inviting me to collaborate on the ‘Following Startups & Tech Trends’ blog. We are planning to diversify it into a full-fledged startups portal, which will be focused towards Australian and Indian startups to start with.
Anyways, while we gradually move towards that direction, I was tempted to launch the Startups Business Model Survey 2008 — a global survey that presents an open comparitive analysis of the business model of early-stage (ideally upto 12 months old) startups. Its an open survey for all early-stage startups to participate in, and eventually learn more about the functional business models of other startups in a similar market segment catering to a similar audience. We hope that this survey-based analysis will help early-stage startups to gauge their business model and streamline their revenue channels.
You can quickly fill-in the survey in less than 5 minutes, or read more about its objective on the startups portal blog.
With the announcement last night of Google App Engine, it’s now literally possible to build your entire web app on top of Google’s vaunted infrastructure – the BigTable, CPU cycles, and bandwidth – all courtesy Google.
It has already been possible to do that (and more) on top of Amazon’s infrastructure for some time now, and so far, Amazon’s AWS is in the lead. Amazon EC2 and S3 are highly scalable platforms, which provide the advantage of utilizing resources on-demand from an external hosting node as well.
Google App Engine comes with its own limitations, but never-the-less this is Google’s grand entry into consumable cloud computing.