Vi har förberett mycket av det tekniska och ligger ganska bra till. För närvarande har vi lite strul (för gammal kärna) med en av våra VPS:er från GleSYS men supporten jobbar hårt (trots att det är söndag!) med att lösa det

The full presentation can be found here: Frog leap technology

For convenience, this is the websites referred to in the presentation.

• TED
• afrigadet.com
• Fredrik Hären speaking on ‘Kunskapens dag‘
• Did you Know?

So far it seems to be no public sign-up but there is an information-registration form for those who are curious. Remains to be seen whether I will get an evaluation account soon. One thing that is interesting is Sun’s target groups:

Use the Cloud- best option for startups, research projects, or Web 2.0 developers who want a simple, low-cost way to “load and go.”

Leverage the Cloud- alternative for existing enterprises to offload overburdened IT infrastructures.

Build the Cloud- many large enterprises are experimenting with developing private clouds and standards.

Be the Cloud- service providers offer new value-added capabilities

Options one and two are pretty straightforward. But option three is interesting for large companies may (or equiv.) who do not trust the public clouds, but still want to take advantage of a cloud infrastructure. Finally, there also seems as if Sun wants to take a piece of service provider cake by offering infrastructure for application development (Web2.0 applications, Facebook apps, etc.).

What makes the initiative even more exciting is that Sun is already working with Amazon in the sense that they offer Open Solaris-ami: s using EC2. They will in some sense to compete with themselves. Exiting times ahead.

Today I had, for another project I’m working with, the need for a premium SMS service. I did a short investigation and found that there were a bunch of providers on the Swedish market (some of the providers listed below are Swedish only). There is also a bunch of international providers offering services on the Swedish market.

The price level is common for most of the providers. It’s an ‘expensive’ market in the sense that the operators share of the total price is quite large. In general the providers take about a third of the revenue. It might be fair but there is a trick – it’s the mandatory 50-öres (~5 cent)  confirmation SMS being sent.

For a premium-SMS on 1 SEK (1 SEK = 100 öre)  the provider will take a about 33 öre in revenue share (including tax). Then the confirmation SMS is 50 öre (62,5 öre inc tax). The remaining revenue will be 100-33-62,5 = 4,5 öre. The conclusion is that for small payments the model is not working and it basically invalidates the use of premium-SMS as micro payment system.

The investigation lead to one good thing though – a list of companies providing these services:

• Multimobil – http://www.multimobil.se
• SMS Teknik – http://www.smsteknik.se
• Smart SMS – http://smartsms.se
• 42IT – http://www.42it.se
• MO-SMS – http://www.mosms.com
• Fortumo – http://fortumo.se/
• ViaNett – http://sms.vianett.com
• MyPay – http://www.mypay.se

Note that the above list is by no means complete. It is also completely un-ordered and is only meant as a starting point to compare different providers.