The man who gave us Alice, Randy Pausch, the professor at Carnegie Mellon University who also inspired countless students in the classroom and others worldwide through his highly acclaimed last lecture, has died of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.

A must-watch video for anyone, but especially for entrepreneurs (and yes, he was a professor):

* Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things and they let us prove our dedication.
* Help others.
* A brilliant quote from his mentor he received as a young man: “It’s such a shame that people perceive you as arrogant, it’s going to limit what you are going to be able to accomplish.”
* You can’t get there alone: always tell the truth, be earnest, apologize when you make mistakes and focus on others.
* Get a feedback loop and listen. When you stop getting feedback, it’s really bad. It means people have given up on you.
* Don’t complain, just work hard.

The panel at Mobile Monday discussed the role of mobile and location based services in the monetization of social networks. ‘It can’t just be about advertising,’ says Verizon’s Jennifer Byrne.

Tonight’s Cloud Computing panel that I put together was held at the offices of Meetup Inc. (thanks to Jonah Keegan) and had great speakers and a great audience.

Our speakers were (from the left):

Mike Nolet - AppNexus

Jamal Mazhar - Kaavo

Hans Zaunere - New York PHP

Hank Williams - KloudShare (stealth - see Hank’s excellent blog)

Geir Magnusson - 10gen

Ronald Bradford - 42SQL

The panel started with an attempt at defining what cloud computing is. The term has become too popular and hence everyone started using it too loosely. So it now means different things to different people, but mainly, it’s the abstraction of services from hardware and scaling of data services properly so that services can scale to run on any number instances easily for different levels of demand.

But services do not move magically into the cloud and scale. Almost all applications have to be re-architected and rewritten. Engineers in the audience also noted that it requires a rather fundamental change in their thinking.

Different performance requirements almost always require a re-architecting of a service, the panel noted. For example, Ebay had been rewritten from scratch 4 times so far with completely new architectures everytime their performance requirements have changed. Here is a great article about ‘lessons on scalability from Ebay‘

In CC, ‘consistency’ almost always takes a backseat to ‘availability’. That is, it is much more important for a service to be available than for it to be consistent. For example, on Amazon’s SimpleDB, it takes around a minute for a DB write to settle across the system.

Data security is another big issue, and, for example, AppNexus is solving this for some of their customers by giving them dedicated hardware, so there wouldn’t be any ‘jumping out of the VM’ issues.

But eventually not every company with a website wants to have specialized system administrators on their staff 24×7. So, specialization of skills and economies of scale will lead to mass adoption of CC. Jamal noted that CC is now a $200M industry posed to grow significantly over the coming years.

Hank identified 5 different levels of creating a web service:

1) Rolling your own: buying a machine, colocating it, maintaining it, etc.
2) Traditional dedicated hosting.
3) Smart hosting: Amazong EC2, AppNexus, etc.
4) Tools layer: where tools help with the abstraction, for example SQS, S3, SimpleDB
5) Platform: Coghead, SalesForce.com, Google App Engine

Here, 10gen probably is between 4 and 5.

The panel predicted that levels 1 and 2 will eventually disappear or morph into levels 3 and up.

It was agreed that ’standards’ would help spur the demand side but the supply side cannot focus on standards yet since it is still ‘very very’ early in the industry and the innovation cycle, so it’s hard to predict how the industry will evolve and what will become the ‘de facto’ standard that might evolve into industry standard. Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving field that will bring us a lot of innovations and we are excited to watch it grow. Unype will definitely be using one of these solutions to scale.

New York Video 2.0, New York's largest community of online video startups, content producers, media companies, advertisers and investors that meets monthly to showcase and discuss emerging trends in online video, is featuring a panel of the "content kings" for the July 28th meet up. Moderated by Yaron Samid, the panel includes Robert Millis from Hudson Street Media, Andrew Baron from Rocketboom, Jay Smooth from Ill Doctrine, Sarah Austin from Pop17, Kathleen Grace and Thom Woodley from Dinosaur Drama Productions and Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination.The sold-out meet up begins at 6:30pm at Webster Hall in New York City, don't be late! Click here for more details.

NY-based Squarespace is announcing the launch of version 5 (v5) of their online publishing platform today. Squarespace v5 is a total rewrite of the platform and is "completely different" than previous versions. Squarespace is a hosted publishing platform focusing on blogging similar to Wordpress' hosted version. There's a new user editing interface which allows complete control inside of a Web browser. There are a variety of widgets including search and data collection. The Squarespace team has invested in the backend architecture as well and is using Peer1 in NYC for hosting.

Squarespace is different than most other hosted blogging platforms as there is no free option available. All Squarespace clients pay for their usage and Squarespace Founder Anthony Casalena explains that this is part of the contract between the client and Squarespace. He says that people put their money in and expect a high level of service or will leave. By charging all clients, everyone is treated at the same level and it has helped the team to put their priorities in place. By charging clients for their usage, Squarespace doesn't have to worry about the drop in online advertising fill-rates and pricing. Without a free version, their total users will always be lower than other free services, but their revenue per user should always remain higher.

I spoke with Casalena this morning who tells me that the company has grown to seven employees and he has also brought in Dane Atkinson as the new Squarespace CEO. I can never seem to get Anthony to share any stats but he did say that Squarespace is generating revenue in the "multi-million dollar" amount yearly and that the business is "more than supported" by their paying customers. Casalena also noted that the customer makeup is evenly split between companies and individuals.

I am going to try to get over to their offices next week for an in-person demo and also get Anthony's thoughts on the new crop of commenting services on the market and how they differ from what Squarespace offers. Check out our Squarespace interview with Casalena along with my thoughts on free vs. paid services.

Here are some screenshots of the new Squarespace v5:

Along with the new and greatly simplified GUI thanks to feedback from all of you, now Unype also has more ways to connect with others. Here is the latest look:

Here are some of the improvements:

* Simplified GUI. We got rid of the screen clutter to make it easy to get to where you want to get. “Items” and “Tours” have been simplified into the “Shared” tab.

* New ‘quick-access’ latest visitors, voters, contacts, who added me, most popular view. This is a dynamic view of who is looking at you, who is voting for you, who added you. You can also see the list of most popular users and see if you have made it in there!

* Better online users view. The new online users view located to the left of the map gives you a better view of the users that are online in the system. Note that, this view is now ‘collapsible’. You can hide it if you want to see more of the map view.

* Number of profile views! Now you can see how many times a user’s profile has been viewed.

* Popularity! Now, you can vote for users on their profile and also see how popular they are.

We just passed the 160,000 users mark and as always, we are looking forward to more of your feedback, please email us directly at murat at unype.com!

Today, I’m excited to announce that BricaBox, LLC is taking the first steps to open source the BricaBox Platform.

Since I announced the end of BricaBox as a business last month, I’ve heard from a number of people that open sourcing — or “freeing” — the code would be a good way to let the dream live on. After speaking with with several folks in the open source and free software communities, I believe this is the right thing to do.

So, today I’m asking you to help me make the dream live on. The code isn’t ready for downloading yet — readying a large, once-private code-base with will take some time and resources — but there are still several ways you can get involved today.

First and foremost, if you’re a fan of our vision for the BricaBox Platform (see this great article and video to refresh yourself), we’d like to you be an early member of our BricaBox.org community, where you’ll be able to influence and/or take charge of important roadmap and development initiatives within the community of developers.

Join us today on our developer list, where we’re already discussing next steps in readying the BricaBox code-base and debating which license to use.

Meanwhile, we’ll be using Google Code as a place to organize bugs, tasks, and to-dos, so check that out going forward.

And lastly, having BricaBox open source will require some legal fees and hosting costs (we’d like to keep BricaBox.com live, so people can see it in action). If you’re interested in donating, please follow the link on the BricaBox.org homepage.

We’re very excited to start working on freeing and open sourcing the BricaBox code-base. While we have no expectations, we do revel in the prospect that someone else may. If you think you’d like to work with the BricaBox platform in the future, please join us today.

This morning I headed down to the Apple Soho neighborhood to meet with the team at Betaworks. I wanted to find out more about the URL shortener that's apparently a tech blogger's dream. The name of the URL shortener is bit.ly and bloggers including Marshall Kirkpatrick were in love with the tool like nothing else. Before we get into bit.ly, here's some details on Betaworks.

Betaworks is a NYC company that helps startups move forward. They were quick to say they aren't a vc or an incubator like Y Combinator is. They have a variety of NYC-based companies they either work with or invest in. The Betaworks company list includes: microblogging service Tumblr, location service Outside.in, conversational search service Summize (recently acquired by Twitter) and casual games site iminlikewithyou.

Alright, now back to bit.ly. Bit.ly is a URL shortener. What that means is that if you want to share a long URL in an email, it can create a nice short one that doesn't break onto multiple lines, etc. That's the basic concept for all URL shortener tools. The idea for bit.ly came from another project the Betaworks team was working on. They needed a URL shortener for Twitabit and the current 70+ shorteners didn't fit the bill.

In my chat with Betaworks executives Andy Weissman and John Borthwick, they called bit.ly the "professional" URL shortener. There's statistics, an archive, page thumbnails, and a platform and API which is open to all third parties. The real key they say is in the API and the ability to process pages for "entities". Entities are bits of content on the page that bit.ly can extract and display them to help find other content that matches one of the entities you select.

Currently they use Amazon Simple Database for the database functions but are in the process of moving to MySQL. They also use Amazon's S3 storage option for the site thumbnails. There have been 40,000 bit.ly URLs created so far with 5,000 added everyday. They are a Mac shop and here's bit.ly lead developer Nathan Folkman cranking out code:

Betaworks is now an investor in Twitter after the Summize acquisition. I was curious to find out if they planned to push Twitter to move away from TinyURL and instead use bit.ly as their primary URL shortening service. John replied with a "no comment" but noted that they want to earn respect as the best URL shortener first. Here's my bet... the switch over will take place by the end of 2008.

Lastly we spoke about the bit.ly business plan. While they wouldn't share any specifics yet, the model is centered around data, data usage and there will also be a set of premium upgrades available for publishers and companies using the bit.ly service.

The bit.ly team is currently working on a sign-in option which will allow vanity URL's to be changed. They are also working on continuing to improve the API and on datastream access.

Can a URL shortener become a real business? I guess we will see as bit.ly moves forward on their product roadmap.

You’ve read the stories.  Warner Bros.’ “The Dark Knight” scores the biggest movie opening in history.  $155 million dollars and counting.  Watershed IMAX ticket sales. A possible Oscar for Heath Ledger.  Blah blah blah.  Lost in all of the hype was the fact that Kyle Piccolo – Comic Shop Therapist, the blockbuster new web series, is clearly the reason behind the success of the film. Warner Bros. sponsored the first five episodes of Kyle Piccolo, including a three day window when the only place you could see the new Dark Knight trailer was in the "Emerald Ringer" episode of the web series.  Do you see the connection?  Kyle Piccolo is the new kingmaker of Hollywood.  His Midas touch, along with the Mandarin’s rings and some Gamma radiation thrown in for good measure,  should not be underestimated.  Don Buckley, the fabulous one of all that is interactive at Warner Bros. certainly didn't. Now, did Eddie Murphy’s “Meet Dave” advertise on Kyle Piccolo?  It did not.  The result?  Less than $10 million at the box office. Hollywood studios, take note.  If you want a successful film, call Kyle Piccolo. If he can't do it, no one can...

Web2NewYork meet up

Web2NewYork, the networking events and blog for post-internet media, advertising and business, is hosting a New York Web Entrepreneur meet up on Tuesday, July 22nd with presenters Ben Kaufman from Kluster, Robert Wenger from Virtual Drinking Buddy, Ned Canty from New York Television Festival and Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination. The meet up will take place at the Gallery Bar on 120 Orchard Street between Delancey & Rivington, is hosted by Peter Verkooijen and will features an array of web entrepreneurs, programmers, designers, marketers, media and advertising professionals and investors. Make sure you RSVP. Thanks Peter!