At the Game Developers Conference Online in Austin during the second week in October, a dozen hopeful young entrepreneurs approached our booth selling versions of the same ambitious vision. “We’re building a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It’s going to be the next World of Warcraft, the next Call of Duty. It’s gonna be huge,” they said. These hopeful game mavens were seeking insight on exactly how you build an MMO infrastructure. Not surprisingly, many of them were woefully unprepared. They didn’t know what a load balancer was. They had no idea about data transport costs between data centers. They hadn’t really thought about the impact of hardware at cloud providers on the user experience of their game customers (hint: old servers usually mean unhappy or lost customers).

A few years ago we would have shaken our heads, wished them good luck, and figured we would probably never see that game released. Today there is a far greater chance that these folks can bring the next MMO to market. What’s changed? The arrival of specialized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. In a nutshell, a PaaS allows an entrepreneur to focus on building their cloud application, avoiding upfront capital expenses through outsourced management of their IT infrastructure to a third party.

This is a level up from the cloud itself, which provides outsourced compute power in a more raw fashion. PaaS providers offer database as a service (MongoLab, MongoHQ) or runtime environment as a service (Heroku, Nodejitsu, AppFog), for example. A PaaS can also deliver even more advanced capabilities. StackMob, for example, puts in place a suite of PaaS offerings that radically streamline mobile application development, launch and hosting by providing in one integrated package an environment to code up, host, and run in the cloud mobile applications.

What’s more, a PaaS can even be taken to the point where it eliminates almost all technology skill requirements. GameSalad allows designers to quickly design and publish game applications that even include animation purely using visual design tools. Eliminating technological complexity serves to eliminate a critical barrier to innovation and new company foundation. We’ve all met someone who felt they had a great idea for a new application of some sort. “And I’m looking for a developer or a CTO,” is inevitably the next thing out of their mouth after they pitch the idea.

If that same great idea could be built far more easily and quickly with a far smaller tech team and nominal capital expenses, then, logically the cost of bringing that idea to market drops considerably. This is the value of the PaaS. And its not just a value to guys with no tech chops. Someone that is a very solid designer and front-end coder may be highly technical but may not be comfortable at all with designing and managing a NoSQL database.

Even highly skilled developers with both front-end and server-side chops usually turn to network engineers for help with load balancing, DNS and other infrastructure aspects that are critical to ensuring a cloud-based application runs fast and clean on any device anywhere in the world. Dennis TK, founder of Foursquare, is fond of explaining that as soon as he got funded, he hired an ex-Googler to completely recode his app to keep it from breaking. If Dennis had been building Foursquare in the present, he could have probably built a more reliable, faster app by leveraging a far more robust PaaS ecosystem to remove many of the software development and infrastructure management requirements that probably caused Foursquare to be so buggy and break all the time in its initial inception.

How many more kids like Dennis are out there with whizbang innovations that could be the next WoW, the next great service for medical records delivery, or the next amazing tool for crowdsourced scientific problem solving? We don’t know but we are a lot more likely to find out in a new era of PaaS-fueled cloud innovation.

Lisa Petrucci is the VP of Global Marketing at Joyent. She started out as a network engineer for Lotus and has held senior sales, marketing and business development roles in enterprise computing companies for the past two decades at companies including IBM and SixApart. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user ansik.

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Look, last year’s Traktor Kontrol S4 was pretty damn awesome but, at ,000 and about the size of your average Williamsburg DJ, it wasn’t exactly for everyone. That’s where the S2 comes in. Instead of four channels, it’s a “2+1″ setup that supplements the two standard audio ones with a dedicated sample channel. You still get the same high-resolution jog wheels and integrated 24bit / 96kHz sound card, but Native Instruments managed to shave a few inches, pounds and bucks off its predecessor. At 9 it’s much more affordable — still not exactly an impulse purchase, but within the range of most serious hobbyists. Check out the gallery bellow as well as the video and the PR after the break.

Continue reading Traktor Kontrol S2 digital DJ system shaves a few inches and bones off its big brother

Traktor Kontrol S2 digital DJ system shaves a few inches and bones off its big brother originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Aug 2011 20:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In this week’s Gadget Lab podcast, the Gadget Lab crew talks about Apple’s iCloud, Brian Chen’s new book and some hot new wheels.

Wired Top Stories

When you’re looking for tires for sale, it is hard to start out unless you’ve been buying them before. You will need to check and see if you require new tires. A good way to do this is with a Lincoln penny. Stick the penny to the tire’s tread with Lincoln’s head going in first. If you can still see Lincoln’s whole head, then you’ll need new tires.

The next thing that you require to do is identify what size of tire that your car requires. You can do this purchase consulting your car owners manual or by contacting the manufacturer directly, or you are able to go out and write down the info that is on your tire and find tires based on that.

Then, you have to decide where to purchase the tires. That gets more challenging. If you want to find super cheap tires for sale, check junkyards. They won’t have the warranties like a brand new tire, but in the event you just want something to get you by and you don’t want to spend a fortune, this is the way to go.

It’s also a great location to go in the event you bought a second hand car that is missing a spare. The advantage of this is that you can get a full sized tire rather than the smaller one that you discover in many cars. Many people will want the peace of mind that you get from getting a brand new tire.

Maybe you are able to just scan through your local newspaper or wait until some fliers come in the mail advertising cheap tires for sale. You will find often good deals and tires for sale throughout the year. If you live in a snowy region, there are often some excellent deals and discounts available right before winter. I’d also suggest acquiring snow tires before the season starts. Happy hunting!

The first thing individuals notice on a person are the shoes. The first thing a person notices on a motor vehicle are the rims. No matter if the car is an old beater or even a new car off the showroom floor, rims will make a difference.

When searching for rims, lots of individuals focus on price only when looking at rims for sale. In addition to price, you should consider the quality of the material, an alloy, steel, or even aluminum rim, if the rim is chrome or even painted, the size of the rim and the “lip”, or even deepness of the rim itself.

Finding a cheap price on 22 inch (or higher) rims is relatively simple. Finding good quality 22 inch rims for sale is often a problem. Also rims that would be great over one vehicle might not be appropriate over yet another. Aluminum rims on a truck used for off-road conditions are surely going to cause problems.

There is nothing worse than bending and damaging a new pair of rims. An additional factor to think about when acquiring rims is the finish. Chrome is usually the best choice, but depending on the utilization of the vehicle and the vehicle colour, painted rims may be a better choice.

Since the market for painted rims is not as large as the market for chrome, you may be in the position to find painted cheap rims for sale in a coordinating colour to your vehicle. Also, many styles could very easily be painted, thus even an off-colored rim may even so be a good value. An additional factor to consider when looking at rims for sale is the lip of the rim.

For several coupes and sports cars, you will require a bigger lip to fit the larger tires for those vehicles. On the other hand, if you have a small sedan, a larger lip may look strange or even peculiar. Usually, trucks and sports cars could handle a larger lip and may improve the general appearance of the car.

Keep in mind that you may need special performance low profile tires that might equal or even surpass the cost of the rim. It is not unusual for some tires to cost in the hundreds of dollars. Thus although you were in a position to find cheap rims for sale, you should still factor in the cost of the tires as well.

That non-standard charge port on your Tesla Roadster isn’t proprietary, it’s just outmoded — but don’t worry, a four foot adapter is here to save the day. This new J1772 to Roadster connector bridges the Roadster’s 2008 designed charge port to the industry standard J1772, adopted by automakers and energy firms over a full year after the Roadster’s debut. The new coupling cable will juice up your wheels in just four hours at EV stations outputting 70 amps, or in seven and a half hours for the average 32 amp level 2 charger. Native plug access to those thousands of ChargePoint stations will set you back 0, but if you’ve already bought a Tesla Roadster, that’s just another drop in the (0,000) bucket.

Tesla J1772 mobile connector standardizes Roadster, costs 0 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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