the webthinking blog

I’m close to finalizing reading the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Awesome book by the way! A good part of it touches upon outsourcing jobs to India, especially call centre jobs.

So, here’s my story: Bell Sympatico DSL users have been experiencing major service disruptions in the Toronto area over the past few days. This affects me as well, living in Richmond Hill, always hitting a Toronto server and an IP address that had a reverse name as “basXX-torontoXX.dsl.bell.ca”.

I pick up the phone to call Bell and ask them “How much longer?” An extremely polite Dominique answers my call. “Sir, before we go any further, just in case we get disconnected, is there a number I can call you back?”

Uh, ah, I thought I was talking to Bell – the phone company. Why should I get disconnected?? Because the ‘net is not working for me?

So my question to the Rep was “Do you mind if I ask where are you located?”

“No sir, in Southern part of India”. Ahaa, just as Friedman’s stories from the book I’ve mentioned above.

After convincing the person at the other end (of the world) that my modem was actually powered on – I get a new challenge.
“Sir, how can you possibly experience connectivity problems related to the Toronto area when you are living in Richmond?”

Hmm – I get it. Now I have to convince him that I live in Richmond Hill, ON and not Richmond, BC.

Two days later Bell has not fixed the problem yet. I’m posting this through my BlackBerry. Lovely!

To Bell: in addition to all screen captures of modem types in use posted on that intra/extranet, you should make available a at least a Google Maps lookup tool, as well. :)

If you are looking for a podcast hosting service, this might interest you… And you might be familiar with Libsyn.com just as well. BTW: if you are using it, you might pay more than you need to…

I have been evaluating and using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for couple of months now as a back-up hosting service for iSPINIT.com and I will definitely use this service for the upcoming iSPINIT.com Premium edition.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. That is applicable for large podcasting media files.

Let’s do the math first:

Libsyn’s highest package, Podcast Supreme, will set you back $30.00 per month for 800MB of space. Fair enough. This should cover the bandwidth costs as well.

Now this is what you would pay for Amazon S3:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using this calculator, you can get a price quote depending on you hosting needs. Let’s say you have about 1GB of data and 50GB (!!!) of files to ship out of the door every month: $10.36

Interested? This is what you need to get started with Amazon S3:

• an account with Amazon
• a neat Firefox plug-in – S3Fox (available on Mac and Windows)
• access to your domain DNS settings

Amazon S3 uses “buckets” as their terminology for “folders”. You can create your unique bucket – e.g. media.mydomain.com. After all, a domain name can be a folder name!

Next step: create a CNAME entry for media.mydomain.com to s3.amazonaws.com

Voila! Your cost effective hosting service is all set-up. The only thing left is uploading your data using the S3Fox plug-in in your browser. Firefox that is:

Enjoy paying only for what you use!

I don’t normally talk about my day job on the blog, but I’m extremely proud about running this web project and the way it came to life: Renaissance Investments “invest well. live better.” Merging web sites without affecting the client experience is not always easy, but it is nice to get a positive feedback in the end. I also want to tip my hat to my team – it was quite a ride!

So, if you are an investor or an adviser, check out Renaissance Investments or Investissements Renaissance. There you go – you got my next step – getting some Google juice to flow.

Although I was able to attend the 2007 Podcasters Across Borders for just one day, it was a blast! So many things to learn, so many people to meet! Kudos again to the organizers – Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche!

I had the privilege of sharing the “cool table” with Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and Julien Smith:

Some quick facts worth mentioning:

• YouTube usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 616%! [Mitch Joel]
• FaceBook usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 2424%! [Mitch Joel]
• If MySpace were a country, it would have been the 6th largest country on the planet! Want to buy a banner on the homepage? Be prepared to pay $1.000.000 per day! [Chris Penn]
• Canadians spend 48% of their leisure time online! Is that the whole winter?! [Mitch Joel]
• “Google couldn’t care less about your podcast!” [Julien Smith]

More:

• PAB2007 on Flickr
• PAB2007 on Technorati

While Apple is getting ready to launch  iTunes Plus – DRM-free music – the landmark Sam the Record Man store on Toronto’s Yonge Street is shutting its doors on June 30. There is no doubt “digital” is the way to go… It is somehow interesting to observe the steps.

“We are making a responsible decision in recognizing the status of the record industry and the increasing impact of technology,” said Bobby Sniderman, the son of Sam Sniderman and present owner, in a news release. Via Toronto Star.

Ella and I just launched iSPINIT.com, our podcast! We love music! Indie and Podsafe music, for that matter. Music has and always will be part of our life, so, we created iSPINIT, for our indulgence and yours!

iSPINIT is a channeled music podcast that comes in several different flavours: (iSPINIT) Pop, (iSPINIT) Rock, (iSPINIT) Electronic and (iSPINIT) Jazz. You can subscribe to any one channel, depending on your taste, or get them all. Ella is hosting the rock and jazz shows, I get the pop and electronic/dance editions.
Since most of the music featured on the podcast comes from the Podsafe Music Network made sense for us to join the PodShow family.

Enjoy our hand picked “Naturally Famous Tunes”!

Looking forward to this event! Register for PodCamp Toronto. See y’all there!

Apparently the cheapest place to buy a Nano, at $144.20, is Canada!
Some iPod prices around the world:

1. Brazil $327.71
2. India $222.27
3. Sweden $213.03
4. Denmark $208.25
5. Belgium $205.81
6. France $205.80
7. Finland $205.80
8. Ireland $205.79
9. United Kingdom $195.04
10. Austria $192.86
11. Netherlands $192.86
12. Spain $192.86
13. Italy $192.86 
14. Germany $192.46
15. China $179.84
16. South Korea $176.17
17. Switzerland $175.59
18. New Zealand $172.53
19. Australia $172.36
20. Taiwan $164.88
21. Singapore $161.25
22. Mexico $154.46
23. United States $149.00
24. Japan $147.63
25. Hong Kong $147.35
26. Canada $144.20