Jon Paul Davies

Blabnote.com - Vocal Social Network

I’ve got 5 invites to the brand new voice powered social network Blabnote to give away. This new application, currently in private beta, promises to give users access to advanced communication tools, ad-hoc creation of contact conference groups and industrial strength feature rich voice mail and messaging. To win an invite, drop me an email and the first 5 to land will get one.

Edit: Too late! All gone! Leave a comment and i’ll get back to you if I get any more invites to distribute.

Thinking Digital: 21-23 May 2008

I’m off to the Thinking Digital conference at The Sage Gateshead this time next week. Billed as an ‘event where outstanding individuals gather to take part in an exclusive conversation about technology, ideas and our future’ it’s a great chance to see some of the best speakers the planet has to offer in action. Highlights on offer include:

Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s Software plus Services Lead and all round top bloke, demonstrating some of the coolest new technologies to come out of Redmond, including what’s expected to be a first UK demo of Live Mesh.

The Fake Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Dan Lyons, Senior Editor at Forbes), author of Internet sensation The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, giving his unique, hilarious take on the world of technology, the people who drive it, and the future of media.

Greg Dyke, Chairman of the British Film being interviewed live on stage by Andy Allan, the former CEO of Carlton Television, about management and leadership challenges, as well as his views on the future of media.

World-renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil speaking via stunning Teleportec technology about his groundbreaking work on The Singularity and the point at which computer intelligence will surpass our own, in every form.

Hopefully it should be clear to you that with such a lineup set to appear, I’m more than a little excited to be one of the lucky 400 who gets to attend!

Mosso Pricing Update - Compute Cycles

A couple of months ago, Mosso the cloud based hosting provider introduced a change to their billing model that had existing users up in arms. The change that caused all the concern was a move to bill users partly on the number of requests that hosted sites incurred. If your sites clocked over 3 million requests in a month, you would be billed at quite a hefty rate for the number of requests over this limit. This site alone would burn 3 million requests easily given the amount of traffic I get: It only amounts to about 70000 unique visits per month.

Well the latest news is that Mosso appear to have been listening to users and revised the strategy yet again, to a metric that will be based on the concept of ‘compute cycles’. Pricing and the amount of cycles you get in your package has not been released yet but obviously users are keen to see if Mosso still provides the value for money that was originally apparent.

The fact is that with new technology models, new pricing models must follow: it remains to be seen if new pricing models build successful sustainable businesses.

Mosso

Given my current obsession with all things cloud bound - including Live Mesh and my employer Qire ( the world leader in cloud based intelligent telecoms ) i’ve upped sticks from my current hosting provider and decided to give Mosso a whirl.

Only time will tell if it will work out for me, given the new 3M request policy.

So anyway, the point being, if you see anything broken on the site, leave a comment or drop me a line. Thanks!