Carlos Bueno wants your 5-year-old to think like a programmer. By day, Bueno is a Facebook engineer. He helps hone software on the servers underpinning the world’s largest social network. But he moonlights as a children’s author. His first book is called Lauren Ipsum, and it’s a fairy tale that seeks to introduce children — as young as five or as old as 12 — to the concepts of computer science.
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If you work for IBM, you can bring your iPhone to work, but forget about using the phone’s voice-activated digital assistant. Siri isn’t welcome on Big Blue’s networks.
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Jamie Dimon was not on Capitol Hill Tuesday but he and JPMorgan’s big loss were center stage at a Senate Banking Committee hearing. “The company’s massive trading loss is a stark reminder of the financial crisis of 2008 and the necessity of Wall Street reform,” said Committee Chairman Tim [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! In an unprecedented move, in June 2011 the U.S. Treasury Department granted the Chinese government direct-bidder status to purchase U.S. Treasuries direct from the U.S. government, reports Reuters. All other central banks must purchase U.S. Treasuries through primary dealers on Wall Street, which then place bids on their behalf [...]
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And now comes some news about the Facebook (FB) IPO that buyers deserve to be outraged about. Reuters’ Alistair Barr is reporting that Facebook’s lead underwriters, Morgan Stanley (MS), JP Morgan (JPM), and Goldman Sachs (GS) all cut their earnings forecasts for the company in the middle of the IPO roadshow. This by itself is [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Every time oil and gas prices jump, as they have in the past year, a great cry goes up: If only America had an energy policy. Well, we do have an “energy policy,” it’s just being directed by ExxonMobil (XOM), not Washington, D.C., according to Steve Coll, president of [...]
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Pinterest is an awe inspiring example of how much can be achieved with minimal investment in tech and people these days. As most of you will know, the enablers are cloud computing and open source software. What is interesting in this case is the power of those enablers.
I just read the following numbers on the High Scalability blog. Pinterest now supports 18m users with growth running at 50% per month with the following:
- Amazon costs are around $39k for S3 and $30k for EC2 (I assume per month)
- Traffic costs them $52 an hour during peak times, down to $15 during the night
- They have 31 employees, up from 12 in December.
The geeks amongst you will be interested in the following details:
- Pinterest has 80 million objects stored in S3 with 410 terabytes of data
- They have 275 EC2 instances
- 70 master databases
- Written in Python and Django
This is an amazing story, but it isn’t unique. Instagram had similar efficiencies, and we will see more and more startups aspire to and beat these benchmarks and try to emulate Instagram’s $1bn exit or Pinterest’s $1.5bn valuation.
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