So after our initial posting about bringing a blog into the CW network we had several dozen applications - the first blog were both parties felt it makes sense to pool our efforts will come up soon here in the network.

However essentially we are proving a publishing platform here to A) Sponsors and company who want to build a blog and reach out to and audience B) Bloggers who would like to move heir blog to the next level and sell their own ads and C) bloggers who would like to outsource blog operations to us and just keep blogging.

Here are some of the features:

• Free 350,000+ stock images from Photos.com
• Wizard to write XHTML compatible entries, auto-corrects bad HTML
• Publish-On, Publish Now, Draft articles
• No editing from CW as long as no offensive posts (sexual or harassment)

• High Availability Platform with dozens of delivery servers
• Daily live backups to Amazon S3
• Local Content Delivery in Europe/ US
• Professional layout with customizable header, colors, sidebars etc.
• optimized templates and keywords

• Multi-editor
• Edit Sidebar content
• edit categories
• get weekly status reports

• AJAXified Comments
• Advanced Spam Checking (Trackback and Comments) with 99.9% recognition rate
• Full Trackback Support (Outbound and inbound)
• Send to friend via Email
• Vote for articles
• Blog This (user can directly blog from our system)

• HTML Newsletter every 5 entries, new blogs will be featured there within categories
• related entries integration network wide
• Sponsored Blogs are featured in the CW network
• Sponsored Blogs get dedicated viral and PR package included

• Fully automated Self Service that sells banner ads
• Many existing category campaigns that can be extended to your site
• Fully featured ad server (Openads)

• Let us sell the ads and get a fix monthly payment plus traffic bonus OR
• Use the platform and do your own ad sales
• 
  
  So what options do I have?
  
  Option A) You can use our platform WITH content written by a CW blogger/editor and marketing (we pay an editor and guarantee a number of posts). (We call this the Sponsored Blog product), only your ads are shown. Prices start at $1500/month.
  
  Option B) You can use our platform WITHOUT content from us for $500/month. You sell ad spaces.
  
  Option C) You can bring in your own (existing) blog and we will pay a monthly stipend in exchange of getting ALL ad revenue (no initial payment from your side). Blog needs to have 50k visitors from US or Germany. We will provide customized offer (starts at $240/month, can be substantially more in guaranteed and bonus payments for high traffic sites).
  
  Let us know your feedback and ideas!
  
  

This is not new for people watching the space - and I have seen many news last year about this but recent research for kinkaa made my realize the magnitude of Amazon Web Services launched over the past 18 months.

Amazons services that remain far less adopted as they should allow startups to work and scale as before only IT behemoths could. Reading through and testing these solutions it dawned on me how different the internet (and business plans) would have looked like in 1999 if Amazon services would have been around. Back in 1998 I even started my own data center in the office and found that seriously cool :(

Amazon has something for any developer concerned about scaling:

- Amazon S3 gives you fast and virtually indestructible and indefinitely scalable storage for pretty much any use you can imagine. Also you only pay for the usage - so once you are connected there is no additional cost (given that your business model can pay these incremental costs). Amazon's costs are fair - not really cheap but as they take all teh hassle out very fair.

- Amazon EC2 gives you Linux machine that you pay by processor hour used - how cool is that? While it needs a bit more knowledge than fining the 'Power On' button it is sooo much easier than running a data center (I did that see above :(

- Amazon Simple DB allows you to use Amazon super scalable and simple database. You thought Mysql was simple but when it get used a lot it gets very quickly clogged up. Simple Db takes away that issue.

- Amazon Simple Massaging System that helps you to send messages from computer to computer safe and secure

What I find so amazing (hehe we are talking about Amazon here) is that their API's are great and simple. The payment model is simple. It all makes perfect sense.

However few developers have either heard about it or trust it. The success story page seems rather short filled with many less well known companies. So why are so few startups using it?

Building a big content delivery game (i.e. video. audio) needs no hardware cost or worry anymore. If you build a search engine, just build that software.

So VCs of this world if a company that pitches you still has exponential server costs and hardware management costs in it's business plan - send them a link to AWS :)

Also I could not withstand to highlight the Amazon Storage System design requirements and design principles. Remember all the brain power that went into this you can use starting at 10 cents.

Amazon S3 was built to fulfill the following design requirements:

* Scalable: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support an unlimited number of web-scale applications. It uses scale as an advantage: Adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness.

* Reliable: Store data durably, with 99.99% availability. There can be no single points of failure. All failures must be tolerated or repaired by the system without any downtime.

* Fast: Amazon S3 must be fast enough to support high-performance applications. Server-side latency must be insignificant relative to Internet latency. Any performance bottlenecks can be fixed by simply adding nodes to the system.

* Inexpensive: Amazon S3 is built from inexpensive commodity hardware components. As a result, frequent node failure is the norm and must not affect the overall system. It must be hardware-agnostic, so that savings can be captured as Amazon continues to drive down infrastructure costs.

* Simple: Building highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive storage is difficult. Doing so in a way that makes it easy to use for any application anywhere is more difficult. Amazon S3 must do both.

A forcing-function for the design was that a single Amazon S3 distributed system must support the needs of both internal Amazon applications and external developers of any application. This means that it must be fast and reliable enough to run Amazon.com's websites, while flexible enough that any developer can use it for any data storage need.

Amazon S3 Design Principles

The following principles of distributed system design were used to meet Amazon S3 requirements:

* Decentralization: Use fully decentralized techniques to remove scaling bottlenecks and single points of failure.

* Asynchrony: The system makes progress under all circumstances.

* Autonomy: The system is designed such that individual components can make decisions based on local information.

* Local responsibility: Each individual component is responsible for achieving its consistency; this is never the burden of its peers.

* Controlled concurrency: Operations are designed such that no or limited concurrency control is required.

* Failure tolerant: The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation, and continues operation with no or minimal interruption.

* Controlled parallelism: abstractions used in the system are of such granularity that parallelism can be used to improve performance and robustness of recovery or the introduction of new nodes.

* Decompose into small well-understood building blocks: Do not try to provide a single service that does everything for everyone, but instead build small components that can be used as building blocks for other services.

* Symmetry: Nodes in the system are identical in terms of functionality, and require no or minimal node-specific configuration to function.

* Simplicity: The system should be made as simple as possible (but no simpler).

And as a last question to my dear readers - If Google is as 'no evil' and 'open' as they made many people think - why did they never open up their platform to spurn innovation in this world?

Kissnofrog is (as you may have guessed) a new online dating service. The company just launched in Germany and let's user talk in dedicated sessions via web cams and microphones.

I'm an investor in the company and have watched a little how the team assembled the solution of the last months. It's a pretty cool way to meet new people without going out of the house much. The voice and video also adds way more 'signals' as what chat, emails or personal profiles can do. It enables people to simply find each other.

The service just started so expect a couple of small glitches but try it out and get the web cam of yours to work finally...

One of the big breakthroughs of the Internet in the last 15 years has been financial tools. Information distributed with the speed of light that can be translated into instant profits - the internet is the best tool ever for investors looking for a quick trade or trying to dive into first hand research.

Currencytrading.net has taken the time to organize a list of 40 Web 2.0 tools for investors. A super list with many sites that you should not miss out on like:

- GStock: Use this supercomputer's power to pick stock using calculations from a huge amount of investment strategies.
- Predict Wall Street: Find out what this community thinks will happen on Wall Street. You can share your thoughts, read blogs, participate in contests, and check out news.
- Instant Bull: On Instant Bull, you'll find posts from some of the best trading forums and blogs. At the same time, it offers access to financial portals for research, making it a one stop shop for trading information.
- FeedtheBull: Find out what's hot in the market on FeedtheBull, a social media site that lets you vote on top stories in investment.

Jollo.com is a website that relies on the long tail to find translations for common phrases in multiple languages.

Right now phrases such as "Je voudrais réserver une place près de la fenêtre, s'il vous plaît." are translated into Chinese, English, German.

It's a cool site - needs a bit of traffic and if it finds enough followers scale really well. It might need to get in touch with one of these old-school online dictionaries :)

I just came back from two hectic weeks in Europe. A lot of good news - kinkaa relaunched its interface and raised it's first round of 600k EUR from HTGF. HTGF invested 500k+ in loans and equity together with the existing business angels that invested in 2006 in kinkaa.

We are very happy to welcome HTGF as a kinkaa investor and hope we can redeem the trust that has been invested into us very soon.