I’m pleased to announce that we have a new StartUp SF (version 2.2) coming on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009. This event is just around the corner (I’m just so “good” about planning in advance) so be sure that you register now and share this event with your friends and co-workers.

For your learning pleasure, we have none other than David Weekly, founder of PBWorks (“online collaboration that just works” – formerly PBWiki) and Founding Director of Hacker Dojo (a community center for hackers & thinkers to meet, discuss, learn and create).

David’s presentation is titled “Give Your Ideas Ex-Lax“. Just the title alone is intriguing! He describes the theme as “you should find an uncomfortably quick way to launch your idea and iterate on it instead of building grand designs.”

Ticket are now on-sale! Scroll down for info and GoGrid blog readers get a special discount.

Date: Wednesday, December 2nd
Time: 6-9pm
Location: Microsoft, 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94103
Cost: $10 (online) or $20 (at the door)

As with every StartUp SF, our goal is to help startups begin, grow and become successful. The format is simple, for an hour, you network with technology peers, entrepreneurs, VCs, and other like-minded professionals, then you hear short “elevator pitches” from a few select Demo Companies. After the pitches, a Guest Speaker gives you first-hand experience on the Do’s and Don’ts of kick-starting your startup. Once the speaker has finished, there is a Question & Answer session and then more time for networking. We provide food, drink and engaging conversation.

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Last week, I published the November 2009 GoGrid Customer Update newsletter on the GoGrid blog. In it, I highlighted the important changes that were included in the recent deployment of GoGrid, including our new GoGrid CDN, the GoGrid Exchange, new RAM Hour & Bandwidth plans, new Windows Server base images and some other items.

To follow up with that newsletter, which was sent to GoGrid customers by Mario Olivarez (VP of Products), I thought that it would be useful for those interested in GoGrid to learn a bit more. So, I spent a few minutes interviewing Mario about these recent changes and what they mean to our customers.

This video is also available on the GoGrid Facebook page as well as our GoGrid YouTube Channel.

If you have any questions about what you heard or saw on the video or GoGrid in general, please leave a comment on this post or ask us on Twitter (@GoGrid). Stay tuned for more updates and videos coming your way.

Just in time for the Microsoft PDC 2009, GoGrid is excited to showcase an integrated solution for Windows Azure™ developers, using the GoGrid Cloud for seamlessly building and deploying applications for Windows Azure. Our solution interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure and includes preconfigured development environments which allows developers to build applications and publish them to Windows Azure.

GoGrid’s VP of Engineering, Paul Lappas, narrates the video below demonstrating the interoperability between GoGrid Cloud Infrastructure and the Windows Azure Platform:

GoGrid provides infrastructure services in the cloud allowing customers to rapidly deploy load-balanced and hybrid servers without purchasing costly hardware.

With the release of the Windows Azure™ platform, GoGrid wanted to extend its services and enable its customers to develop, test, deploy, and back up Windows Azure applications efficiently and cost-effectively.

The Windows Azure Application Lifecycle Management Service interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure. With this pairing, Windows Developers enjoy a variety of advantages. For example:

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A few days ago, the GoGrid newsletter was delivered to our customers. As with the past newsletters, we want to be sure that all interested parties, whether you are a customer or not, are informed of our important updates. We have a wide variety of items that are covered in this November 2009 newsletter so be sure to read on. If you want to get these updates and others regularly, I encourage you to subscribe to the GoGrid RSS feed, follow us on Twitter (@GoGrid) and become a fan of us on the GoGrid Facebook Fanpage.

Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (November 2009):

Hello Michael, (more…)

Last week, we released a new version of GoGrid which includes new RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans, included larger volume discounts. Further details of this released covered in this post are:

• New RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans
• New Linux & Windows Base Images
• Behind-the-scenes Performance Improvements

Read on for more details.

New RAM Hour and Bandwidth Pricing Plans

With this release, we are also making some changes (for the better) on our pricing plans. Coupled with this, we have now made it even easier to upgrade (or downgrade) your plans from within the GoGrid portal.

These new plans are listed below:

Server RAM Hours

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Yesterday GoGrid and EdgeCast Networks jointly announced the availability of the GoGrid CDN (Content Delivery Network). With the GoGrid CDN (currently in beta), GoGrid customers can scale their web presence as well as accelerate the delivery of web content using the GoGrid CDN global infrastructure.

What is unique about the GoGrid CDN (powered by EdgeCast Networks) is that it is a pay-as-you-go service with no contracts or usage requirements. Also, the CDN boasts 16 Points-of-Presence (PoPs) on 4 continents. There is no need to set up specific zones as your coverage is truly global. More details can be found on the GoGrid CDN page.

Webinar

GoGrid will be conducting a webinar about the new CDN to answer any questions you may have. Details are:

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I had the pleasure of not only attending the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, CA this week, staffing the booth and generally enjoying talking to a wide range of developers, technologists, vendors, partners and others, but I also was able to do a couple of interviews with Peter Silva, Technical Marketing Manager of f5 Networks. If you don’t already know, free f5 load balancing has been built in to GoGrid since its launch in March 2008.

Below are pair of interviews that appear here as well as on the f5 DevCentral site. We hope you enjoy them!

First is the one with Peter as “interviewer” (also available at f5 DevCentral):

Then the one where I interview Peter about the Expo:

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I came across an interesting article in the CNN Tech section of CNN titled “A trip into the secret, online ‘cloud’” written by John Sutter. The article itself, takes a unique approach as the author “searches” for his data in the “cloud.” As Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm points out, the goal of the article is to “explain cloud computing to the masses” however, she continues by saying that the premise behind the CNN article is not quite on target. The example that is given in the article is that of uploading a picture to an image sharing site like Flickr or Picasa, and that once you do that, you just “started using Cloud Computing.”

The problem that I have been having with mainstream media is that now putting stuff “into the cloud” seems to be synonymous with “using Cloud Computing.” It is not. Simply uploading data or files to a service that stores it is just that, storing data on someone’s server. Cloud Computing is much more, especially when you factor in the different types of Cloud Computing layers (Infrastructure – like GoGrid or AWS, Platform – like Google App Engine or Force.com, or Software – like SalesForce). Some would say, myself included, that Gmail is a type of Cloud Application, however I’m starting to view SaaS or Cloud Applications almost in a class of their own since the boundaries or somewhat blurred and the characteristics of Cloud Computing (on-demand, scalable, utility billing, elastic, self-service and even virtualized) might not be fully present with the SaaS space. That is a different topic entirely.

While the author, John Sutter, of the CNN article brings up some good points, he is obviously frustrated by the lack of visibility within the cloud and of the vendors that provide Cloud Services of one sort or another. I personally extend an open invitation to John to visit the GoGrid offices where he can fully explore our offering (yes, we too will have to put some things under NDA or “off the record” but we are always fairly forthcoming on our direction and thought-leadership in the Cloud Computing space).

Back to the title of this article. John’s story on the CNN site opens with the following video called “Cloud Computing Explained” and discusses, in a friendly format, how his picture travels into the Cloud. Its a somewhat good attempt at explaining how “the cloud” works, but misses much of the true benefits and features of Cloud Computing. Watch it below and read on.

Over a year ago, I conceived and scripted a video ALSO called “Cloud Computing Explained.” It was produced in-house with our web development team and simply uploaded to YouTube without any real hype. As of this writing, it has over 100,000 views, a 5-star rating (almost 300 ratings) and over 150 (mainly positive) comments about it. Of course, we took the approach of explaining the Cloud Infrastructure layer, because that is what GoGrid provides, Cloud Infrastructure Hosting as a Service.

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