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re:Invent Attendees: Support WorldReader’s ‘e-Books for Africa’ Project and Get FREE AWS Credits

Posted by sam on November 28, 2012 | No Comments

The Short Version: If you’re at re:Invent, go to the WorldReader booth (booth 630). Make a donation and get a free matching AWS credit for more than the amount of your donation!

About WorldReader

Worldreader is a US and European non-profit whose mission is to make digital books available to children in the developing world, so millions of people can improve their lives. As of October 2012, WorldReader has put over 229,000 e-books – and the life-changing, power-creating ideas contained within them – into the hands of 1,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa. Those children now read more, read better, and are improving their communities.

The WorldReader program takes advantage of the dramatically reduced cost and complexity of delivering books electronically, everywhere. As they make reading easier and less expensive, they help children in the developing world read more.

The organization was founded by former Amazon.com executive David Risher, and, no surprise, they have a partnership in place with Amazon, who provides technical and operational support, as well as discounted Kindle e-readers.

WorldReader at AWS

WorldReader is exhibiting at the AWS re:Invent conference this week to raise visibility for their programs, and in conjunction with their presence here they’ve got a great program running in partnership with AWS: re:Invent attendees who donate to the WorldReader program receive a matching AWS credit.

Up to $10 donation => $10 AWS credit
$11 to 25 => $25 AWS credit
$26 to 50 => $50 AWS credit
$51 to 75 => $75 AWS credit
$76 to 100 => $100 AWS credit

You read that right—a $76 donation gets you a $100 AWS credit! If you’re a regular AWS user you’d be crazy not to run over to the WorldReader booth and make a donation.

You can also support WorldReader by voting for them to win a $1 million grant in the American Giving Awards sponsored by Chase. To vote, visit vote4books.com/WR_AWS.

Webinar: The Economics of Scale-Out Storage

Posted by sam on June 14, 2012 | 1 Comment

Please join me for the first in a series of webinars on the Economics of Scale-Out Storage, hosted by Red Hat and featuring yours truly. Register here to attend.

Looking to build a business case for deploying scale-out storage in your organization? Explore the many capital cost advantages of scale-out storage in this webinar, part 1 of a series on the economics of scale-out storage, featuring CloudPulse Strategies analyst Sam Charrington.

How scale-out storage affects your bottom line
Scale-out storage technologies like Red Hat Storage have rapidly gained popularity over the past several years, successfully crossing the chasm from niche technology to mainstream enterprise solution. As this shift occurs, more enterprises want to understand the advantages of the newer technology when it comes to the storage of exploding amounts of unstructured data.

Many have explored the advantages of scale-out storage from a technology perspective. But few have taken on this challenge with a focus on the bottom line. Until now.

Tagged economics, scale-out storage, webinar

(Unofficial) NoSQL Logo

Posted by sam on October 29, 2009 | 1 Comment

My proposal for a logo for the NoSQL movement, based on fun lunch-time discussion with @botchagalupe, @binary42, @boorad and others.

Unlocking the Power of the Cloud for Application Development

Posted by sam on December 4, 2008 | No Comments

We talk to a lot of developers and architects about cloud computing, and one of the things that we run across from time-to-time is an element of skepticism due simply to the incredible amount of hype out there in the marketplace. I know it’s hard for you to believe that software engineers are a skeptical bunch, and maybe it’s just that we talk to so many in the “Show Me” state, but it’s true.

Fortunately, once we get beyond all the buzzwords and hype, the substance behind cloud shines through and we’re able to have great conversations about the implications of cloud on software development.

There are many implications… By making infrastructure more readily available, cloud can streamline a process that is frustrating for many organizations. (It seems like there are never enough boxes around!) And certainly cloud changes what users expect of our applications (e.g. QoS characterstics), impacting the choices we make during application architecture and development.

These are some of the issues we’ll be addressing, along with our partner Skytap, in an upcoming webinar called “Unlocking the Power of Cloud for Application Development.” I invite you to join us for for the hour-long session, to be held on Wednesday, December 17th at 11 AM Eastern Time (2 PM Pacific).

Some of the topics we’re planning to discuss include:

* Benefits of a cloud-based development environments to build, test and deploy your applications

* Best practices for building cloud-ready applications, and retrofitting legacy applications for the cloud

* Case studies featuring end-user successes with enterprise cloud computing

but I’d love to hear your feedback. What else would you like us to address on this topic?

Please do join us for the event. You can register here.

Tagged application development, cloud infrastructure providers, Events, partners

Appistry to Host First “Lambda Lounge” Meeting; Stop By for Lively Discussion on Functional and Dynamic Languages

Posted by sam on December 3, 2008 | No Comments

Tomorrow evening, Appistry will host the first meeting of a new group “Lambda Lounge,” spearheaded by Alex Miller (of Terracotta). The group is an open forum for exploring various topics related to programming in dynamic and functional languages.

The agenda for the first meeting has shaped up nicely:

[Alex is] planning on kicking off the meeting with an open discussion about what functional and dynamic languages are and we can maybe arm wrestle about whether the two have anything to do with each other.

Next, Matt Taylor of ~~G2One~~ SpringSource will talk about Groovy MetaProgramming with Categories and Mixins.

Finally, Ryan Senior of Ferguson Consulting is going to do an overview of OCaml, of which I know not much, other than that it is a mixture of object and functional styles, dervied from a ML-style static type system (but with type inference).

More details are available on the Lambda Lounge site. If you’re in St. Louis we encourage you to stop by Appistry HQ at 6 pm for the meeting.

Tagged Events, software development