ETech day two: quick observations from the morning session

A great discussion led by Tim O'Reilly that delved into the intricacies and consequences of transactional efficiencies is one of the highlights this morning.  The big takeaway is that in Some net economies, where the difference between making and losing money is measured in nanoseconds, that location does, in fact, matter. Using brokerages as an example, the panel points out that data center proximity to the exchanges will be a competitive advantage and a critical point of differentiation for service providers and hosts.

I'm a bit disappointed in the presentation being given by Werner Vogels of Amazon.com right now. The topic sounded promising but the execution focuses too much on sales and technical information and not enough from their customers. When the customers do get on stage, you're able to appreciate the real world implications of what Amazon is doing with their three services: S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), and SQS (Simple Queue Service).

When GigaVox (they host IT Conversations) talks about staging an alpha platform for their audio hosting service for a first month's investment of $84.00, that's powerful. When you hear statements like "nobody is wearing a pager... remember those days?" or "we don't have to worry about that anymore (a server outage) - that's oembody else's problem), you know you're hearing a revolution taking place.

And, whoever chose the color palette for the slides should be sent out for a color blindness test. Many of the graphics were utterly illegible. (sorry - recovering graphic designer rant there). UPDATE: I had a chance to speak briefly with Werner at lunch and it turns out the color issue was a function of a bad connection to the projector. Even after doing a complete dry run prior to presenting, stuff can still go wrong.