Trend #1 – Amazon AWS has absolutely exploded. Even my wife uses AWS for some film stuff. With Amazon AWS awesome operational infrastructure vendors like RightScale have come along. And Google Apps Engine has come along with cool features like integrated mail & jabber servers!
Peek is a big chunk of this traffic
Trend #2 – Hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper, so why pay 2-10x more to use Amazon AWS. Check out this article, petabytes on a budget. Frankly all this infrastructure as a service is built for the rawest of start-ups who need to pay as they go. Buying your own is sooooo much cheaper, as soon as you have any revenue you should do it.
Trend 3 – Everything has an API. When we started Peek in early 2008 here was the landscape:
-Hotmail was closed off, no POP
-Yahoo was closed off, no POP
-Facebook was closed off
-AOL was not open for mobile access
Now, everything has an API. Facebook streams, Twitter, Hotmail opened POP, Google made love to Jabber, and so on. And we can go get it all!
Trend 4 – The cloud pwns data. Everything that used to be hidden behind a firewall or stuck on a PC is now stored on the Internet. Apps for people like to-do lists, calendars, mint for finances, etc to B2B apps like Basecamp for project mgmt, freshbooks for finance, zendesk for customer care.
Trend 5 – Nobody cares about privacy of their data??? Everybody posts everything everywhere. Companies like Mint have people’s most sensitive financial data and credit card numbers stored somewhere, and frankly nobody cares.
Mint Knows You Better Than Your Own Mom!