Dealer's lounge: People Making Money Net

VMware, whose core products specialize in virtualizing Windows and Linux workloads, is making some interesting maneuvers in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) space with their Cloud Foundry offering.

a href=”http://www.cloudfoundry.com”>CloudFoundry.com is a hosted PaaS solution, in which people can deploy and run their web apps without ever mucking around with the underlying OS or application stack. There’s also the Micro Cloud Foundry, which is a virtual machine image you can deploy on your own hardware to set up your own Cloud Foundry PaaS. Going even further, the software that powers Cloud Foundry is open source and available on GitHub under an Apache Software License, so anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of PaaS can check it out.

It’s extremely interesting to me that VMware, a company that makes gobs of money by selling complex proprietary software, has so boldly embraced the free software development model for their PaaS offering. It’s also worth noting that the other major Linux PaaS offering, Red Hat’s OpenShift, is not yet open source.

While OpenShift is an all-Linux PaaS, and Microsoft’s Azure is an all-Windows PaaS, Cloud Foundry extends VMware’s overall OS agnosticism. The default offering is Linux, but recent additions to their product have added .NET support.

The long-term value of .NET in Cloud Foundry remains to be seen, since you still need to provide your own legal licenses for Microsoft Windows for each instance (in the parlance of Cloud Foundry: an execution agent or “DEA”) you might deploy; but I think it’s an impressive testament to VMware’s Cloud Foundry design. Because Cloud Foundry runs on Linux but manages Windows-based DEAs the same as any other DEA, developers will have a common model for deploying and scaling both Java and .NET applications, as well the newer frameworks supported by Cloud Foundry.

If you’re a heterogeneous environment, Cloud Foundry offers a one-stop shop for handling diverse workloads.

From there, using TuneTug is pretty straightforward, and really fun: Guests can vote up or down on what song should play next. If the songs are playing from Spotify, guests can add new songs to the playlist. Hosts maintain the right to veto song choice.

Making party DJing a democracy

According to TuneTug founder Rolf Rando, the app was built to solve a simple but real problem: “I’ve seen disagreements at house parties over what music should play next, or just a lot of silent spots where people are all in front of the computer trying to decide on music. This just makes the process really democratic.”

At its inception nearly a year ago, TuneTug was a project made within ImageChef, an app also run by Rando that lets you create slideshows with photos and clip art. TuneTug has since been spun out as an independent entity, and currently has four full-time employees of its own based in San Francisco. Spotify integration was added last month, since the libspotify API was just opened to third-party developers in August.

Making the leap to real revenue

For now, though, the company does not make revenue. Rando says it has not been a huge concern thus far, since ImageChef is comfortably profitable, but money-making plans are in the works. However, the path to large-scale monetization could be a bit rocky, being that personal music services such as Spotify and iTunes libraries are legally constrained from being used for large scale entertainment because of music licensing issues. Rando says he is in talks to raise seed funding to make TuneTug into a bigger concern. That way, the company could potentially build apps for use in retail environments and the like.

But even as it stands today as a consumer app, TuneTug is really cool — it adds a fun element to basic get-togethers, and I think it’s a no-brainer addition for anyone who owns a Spotify Premium account and invites friends over. It is also a really smart use of the Spotify platform which is just starting to get some traction, and it’ll be exciting to see how other third-party developers utilize its API in the future.

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Monday, December 26, 2011

People Making Money Net

Making party DJing a democracy

Making the leap to real revenue

1 comment: