A fun place for food and drinks when visiting Amazon.com in Seattle

Amazon.com is hiring a lot and expanding its data center presence.  This is bringing more and more people to Amazon.com's office in Seattle.  The main offices in South Lake Union are in a much more convenient location for restaurants and drinks.

The Brave Horse Tavern is right next to some of the offices.

I've been to this location a variety of times to attend AWS events.  And, a nice sunny April day in Seattle was able to visit the Tavern.

Here is a review of the location by a frequent local.

Over the last couple years Tom Douglas has expanded his bevy restaurants quite substantially. The Brave Horse Tavern is one of three restaurants housed in the historic Terry Building in the South Lake Union area. The two-story building is a warm respite from the modern, but a little cold, glass and steel Amazon buildings that surround it on three sides. In the same building you’ll find Cuoco and Ting Momo.
The Brave Horse is a little different from Tom Douglas’ other locations in that the bar has a much more significant part in the scheme of things. This location is about beers, burgers, pretzels; watching games on the many TVs; gathering after work with friends for a quick game of shuffleboard or darts. Having said that, it’s much more than a standard tavern or standard tavern fare.

The Tavern has a Woodstone oven which is great for...

Brick Oven Pretzels ~ malt boiled, hearth roasted

hearth roasted asparagus
melty teleme cheese, grated egg,
green garlic bread crumbs 10.

penn cove clams, brave horse brew 10.

And, gave me more ideas on what to cook at home.

A guy who lives on e-mail goes from Blackberry to iPhone and back to Blackberry

Most people who still use a Blackberry live on e-mail.  Here is a post by a reporter for ZDNet that explains his woes going from Blackberry to iPhone and back to Blackberry.

Saying goodbye to my iPhone, the data hog

After flirting with an iPhone for a month, here's why I switched back to a BlackBerry. The iPhone was fun, don't get me wrong, but I know where my loyalties lie.

Here is the author's usage that gives you an idea of his perspective.

I get between 200-250 emails on an average day. I receive roughly 20-30 tweets or direct messages a day. I get dozens of Facebook notifications, calendar alarms, and numerous phone calls. Each and every time, my BlackBerry vibrates for a whole second, and the LED notifier flashes. Yet even with this, my battery lasts two days without needing to charge, while an iPhone seemingly lasts for only 12-14 hours without charge, but only if small animals are not sacrificed to the Apple gods at regular intervals.

This isn't a story you often hear.  The author closes with his conclusion he wants a Blackberry.

My business and work partner for a month, my iPhone. It was fun, don't get me wrong, but I know where my loyalties lie. And perhaps that's what makes the general consumer market so different. We want, we take, and we rarely focus on what we actually need. I need my BlackBerry, and while I still want an iPhone, I know full well it will take time before it needs me.

Unfortunately for RIM this is a minority.

Google's Future Growth is Mobile and Social, are you focusing on this too?

Forbes has an article on how much Mobile and Social are fueling Google's growth.

Google's Earnings Show That Mobile And Social Are The Future

Trefis Team, Contributor

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Image via CrunchBase

Google reported its earnings for Q1 2012 on April 12, with gross revenue of $10.65 billion, up 24% year-on-year. ^[1] It also reported a significant jump in operating and net income, and the same ratio of traffic acquisition costs as a percentage of advertising revenues as in 2011 – 25%.

As a result of its push into mobile advertising, the cost-per-click dropped nearly 12% over last year, but there was a 39% growth in aggregate paid clicks, which led to a healthy increase in advertising revenues. We expect this trend to continue as mobile search advertising drives the next phase of earnings growth for Google while traditional online search advertising takes a backseat.

Note how traditional online advertising has taken a backseat.  This is like Microsoft having Windows and Office take a backseat to Mobile and Facebook-type products.

An interesting way to look at Google is how it's stock is valued.

Here is Microsoft for contrast.

Interesting that this same system shows Amazon's company value to have Kindle and AWS equal.

Time in a Data Center, a service for tracking time related events

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham has a post on a new service for time related events.

Meet TempoDB, a database startup with an eye for time

By Stacey Higginbotham Apr. 13, 2012, 9:28am PT No Comments

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TempoDB, a startup out of Chicago, has built a database-as-a-service offering specifically for time-series data. CEO and co-founder Andrew Cronk presented at the TechStars Cloud demo day earlier this week, and laid out the need for a specialty database for data that comes from thermostats, sensor networks, networking gear and other machines that spit out both values and times. But does the world (or the Internet of Things) need a specialty time-series database?

Time is a way to track events and supports a post analysis process, and it is interesting that a company has chosen to make time their main value proposition.

When I read this I thought of the song "Time in a Bottle".  If you could wind back time that would be worth using a cloud service.

Instagram's Mike Krieger Presentation on scaling its infrastructure with 5 employees

TechCrunch has a post on Instagram's founder Mike Krieger discussing its infrastructure.

How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup: A Guide From Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger

INGRID LUNDEN

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Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have been noticeably silent since their photo-sharing app Instagram was bought by Facebook earlier this week for $1 billion.

In the meantime there has been a lot written about that deal, from praise to backlash, parsing what it meansand why.

But if you’d like to hear a little (actually, a lot) about how Instagram got to where it did, read on.

Last night, Krieger gave a presentation at an Airbnb event for employees and members of the network, part of a regular series called the Tech Talk. The subject was “Scaling Instagram.”

The presentation is here with 185 slides.

The most interesting slides I found at the end.