Bay Area Startups and Technologies Marina's Web Scale Coral Reef

While I'm evangelizing Sun's technology and our Sun Startup Essential program across the Bay Area communities, there is often a question on "Why as a developer or a technology startup I should pick Sun". So, put aside all the great offers from the SSE program like free technical assistance, VC connect, and discounted infrastrucutre, here are a few reasons to consider:

- Every startup's ultimate goal is to grow and sustain the volume. Sun has a proven record of enabling companies to scale. With applications like BumperSticker, which is deployed on Sun Joyent Accelerator and scales up to 1 bln page hits a month, we're helping startups to grow and scale at their pace.

Sun's technology stack includes a couple key components like MySQL and OpenSolaris that are essential to the business:

- MySQL is a de factor database in the Web 2.0 space. Sun allows you to leverage our in house expertise to architect your back end solution with reliability, fail over, and other critical systemic qualities in mind. Today nearly every startup has a question on how to effectively deploy and optimize MySQL, the best company to answer those questions is Sun.

- Why deploy on Sun? OpenSolaris offers unique value add characteristics such as
-- DTrace (dynamic tracing) that allows startups monitor their applications run time and determine the bottleneck to prevent the application performance issues, also with DTrace companies can optimize the application. This is a unique feature of OpenSolaris.
-- ZFS is a file system that can store large volume of data. With growing number of the social media applications, it's important to pick the right file system that enables to store large files, and ZFS provides you exactly that.
-- Containers. Out of the box, zero cost, negligible overhead virtualizaiton that comes with OpenSolaris allows companies to deploy their application in a more effective way. Whether companies utilize Containers for Dev/QA/Staging environment or if they utilizing servers with Containers for Web/App/DB tiers, Containers provide a key value add to the businesses that deploy applications on a dedicated set of servers.

And of course you can learn more about the program by visiting Sun Startup Essentials. We've just launched an infrastructure clearance program that you may take advantage of.

I'm at Startonomics in San Francisco, where you can see the live streaming of all sessions and live blog. The session content will also be available afterwords. Great event, I got a chance to meet old buddies from other SF events, meet new people like Scott Rafer, as well as meet local startups and talk to them about technologies. Don't know if it's just my opinion, but Ruby seem to be a very popular and enjoyable language to use, fast to learn, fast to deploy, and fun all around. The great foodies of SF are now in the startup business including TastyR - SF restaurants review, TCHO - a new delicious chocolate startup, try it out while at the event.. yammy and I'm not even a chocoholic. And of course we're here to educate startups on the Sun's Startup Essential program. A few offerings like VC Connect and discounted storage for those who're storing large media file are getting a lot of momentum.

Guess where the SF startups and bloggers are going next.. Amsterdam Blog 08 Rockstar of the Web

Any innovator got inspired after attending Cybera event that took place at the picturesque Fall setting in Banff, Canada. The summit gathered Alberta's researchers across national institutions, startups, and entrepreneurs to discuss innovation, trends, challenges, and the future of the Cloud Computing. Among topics we've covered were Grid, Cloud, Open Social and Social Networking, scientific computing and its evolution, how today's technology help us to be more productive, be more social, and nevertheless be aware of the privacy and other risks that are still being addressed as we speak. We had an interesting panel, that I was part of, discussing trends of Cloud Computing, whether it's relevant to us and how startups, end users, corporations and researches view and participate in the trend. A few times, the discussion turned into an open forum with the audience expressing their opinion and impact of modern technology on society as well as the role of the government, particularly in Canada. Interestingly, in Canada, unlike in the US, government plays a significant role in connecting with startups, helping with funding, and jointly working on innovation. I think it is a great way to boost the technology advancement in the local community.

The Facebook and OpenSocial meetup last night was a nice networking event and the organizers hosted a presenter of one of the most popular (#5) Facebook apps. The topic spanned across various aspects of the Facebook application development and specific features of Green Patch. That included user self-expresssion, ability to obtain credit for caring for someone's patch, and its eco-friendly motif with regards to helping the environment and help in case of the natural disasters. David King, who is the main author of the app, gave audience a perspective on the evolution of the app and how end users steered the original features and designed towards what the site is today. There are over 5mln users of the app which is pretty cool. He also addressed some of the technical aspects of the application with regards to its architecture and technology utilized. It includes PHP, MemchacheD, MySQL, LightHTTPD ("lighty"), and the app is deployed on Amazon EC2 cloud with some usage of S3 for image caching.

While I've been busy attending local events and working with startups, I finally got a minute to blog about some of the events that stood out. Last night's VLAB EVENT - Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web event had quite interesting and colorful set of panelist. Panelists included Bret Taylor, Co-founder of FriendFeed, Loic Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic, Jeff Clavier, Founder of Softtech VC, Leah Culver, Co-founder of Pownce. Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal editor, did a great job moderating the event. She was entertaining and quite provocative. Here is her capture of the event if you're interested in watching the entire panel discussion.

Some of the questions and topics were popular and you hear them all the time, such as what's the success criteria for a startup and how do you define your business model. There was a hot debate over whether we continue to see proliferation of the chat sites, video streaming sites, and other similar sites, or whether there will be consolidation of similar ones and major industry players will win over the smaller ones, and there will be just a handful of sites, same as we see with search engines today. Kara was of the opinion, and I tend to agree, that the latter paradigm wins. But Leah brought up the point that every site has its own flavor and depending on user preferences and interests, many of them can co-exist.

Last thing I want to mention is an interesting thought Bret shared with the audience around how to turn your application into a killer app, or what should people consider when building open a social application. The key success factor, highlighted by Bret, lays in ability to measure a product feature in a quantitative or other way, e.g. Google AdWords. I think this is a fundamental criteria that doesn't implicitly come to mind when rolling out an open social app - being able to implement an application feature in such a way that you can go back at any given time obtain a quantitative statistics on it, a very interesting concept, and sure makes a lot of sense.

LA event was different. First of all it was in the courtyard at Rubicon Project with the warm LA air (although I expected it to be even warmer) and welcoming atmosphere. Since it was my third Mashable events, by now I got used to the traditional Social Networking and Social Media ideas of the local startups, but LA had something new and different. A few startups were radical in their thinking and had their innovation not just around social networking but also in the form of physical gadgets that they were creating and distributing. OpenSolaris and Sun Startup Eseentials offering were the popular topic at the event. I think out of the three events I attended and participated in, the LA one was my favorite… even despite of the red eye flight I had to take that night to get back home.

At every Mashable event I had a chance to present to the audience, as Karen and Pete were kindly inviting the sponsors to the stage to welcome everyone. If you haven't yet had a chance to attend the Mashable event, the SummerMash Austin is coming up July 30th, don't miss it.

This was by far the craziest Mashable event I’ve attended so far (of course NY may be even bigger and better). Not only with the unique SF atmosphere of Mighty night club that was overfilled with young guys and gals of Social Networking and Social Media startups, but just the entire event that was energizing, accelerating, and to some extend overwhelming. The new generation of the Bay Area LAMP developers were sizzling with hot ideas. Our discussions covered different ways to scale up and tips on how utilize OpenSolaris features such as ZFS and DTrace. Event sponsors were giving away drink tickets among other giveaways, so you can imagine how busy my table was the entire night. I had an OpenSolaris demo running and people were very interested in Sun Startup Essentials program, specifically the hosting offerings we have with Joyent and other partners. Everyone was Twittering the entire time, with messages displayed live by the EventVue site that was projected on a large screen for everyone to enjoy.

With new cities added to the Mashable Summer Tour this year, the Seattle entrepreneurs and startups were excited to leverage the opportunity to meet each other and have a place to socialize and exchange ideas. Seattle for sure is a new area of growing startup community with technology ranging from .NET (Redmond is nearby) to Ruby and PHP, from SQL Server to MySQL, and last but not least from Windows to Linux and of course OpenSolaris. Some of the successful startups I talked to were attracting thousands of registered users in their pre-beta release. Web 2.0 community members were quite pleased to see Sun participating in the event and learn about the Sun Startup Essentials program that helps startups to monetize their ideas.

Don't miss the Mashable Summer Tour 2008 in your local area.

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