VOID Station

Cloud based services and Platform as a service (PaaS)

Sinds the start of the Wikileaks, Tumblr and Mobypicture drama, I have been thinking about dependencies to the cloud.
I personally feel that some people “assimilate to the borg” to quickly. You should at least have an exit strategy that could be handled in 24 hours.
For instance run your services over two different cloud hosting services. This will force you to adept to your one intermediar load handling layer and API’s.
I have always tried to architect new services in this maner.

If you have an exit strategy (business wise) you should also think about this. Big companies run there one architecture and require that your to be bought service is able to adept to there platform. Lock-ins to Amazon specific building blocks is not something an other giant would like to buy.
Think about it.

Marktplaats.nl Innovatiewedstrijd HTML5

Last month in November I have entered a competition to Pitch for a HTML5 based search filter for a Dutch classifieds site Marktplaats.nl .
My idea was to make a big canvas to let customers explore the content more and let them have more fun with the platform. My experience in this field tells me that the competition (2dehands, Schibsted SCM, OLX and Gumtree) of eBay Classifieds have a more compelling proposition in the rest of Europe, so my idea is based on making it a more european experience.

It was a long shot because I know that the Dutch company probably would find it to “ground breaking” to introduce on their platform.
Therefore I think I might look for others in this market that would like it or just build it for my use on top of other API systems around europe.

To comply with the openness  that we all like to be having, I am publishing this idea here on my website. Lett me know what you think.
Marktplaats_Innovatiewedstrijd_NL.pdf