Scaling Your Startup, Hacking Happiness, and Modeling the Brain

Covering a lot of ground here this morning, in three wildly varying sessions. The first was Werner Vogels of Amazon giving a pitch on “Web-Scale Computing Architecture” provided by — what else? — his firm’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. Nothing new here, as others have commented, but he had a couple of users on stage to give reports. He cited a recent 37Signals book on how to do a Web 2.0 startup, which has a chapter entitled something like “Scale Later – Because It’s Really Hard.” That, of course, plays right into why you should let AWS worry about such things. “Focus on your idea,” said Werner, “and let our web-scale computing services meet infinite demand, cheaply and effectively.” A customer from RightScale.com, Thorsten von Eicken, said he’s been “running his service on Amazon for six months and will never go back.” Doug Kaye, CTO of Gigavox Media, said the service “has been big for us,” and that the price is right: his firm’s bill from Amazon for the first two months was only $84. “How great is that for a startup?”

Jane McGonigal of Avant Game gave a fascinating talk on “Creating Alternate Realities.” She spoke of the three realms of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning, and how the gaming industry can deal with these, even suggesting that making improved quality of life should be a priority. “The new games are supergames,” she said. “They have massive scale, they are a superimposed hybrid experience, they’re super heroic, and they’re supercomputing.” What does all this have to do with the three realms of happiness? “They make you feel a part of something bigger, that you’re making meaning,” said McGonigal. Her talk closed with her ETech call to action: “Understanding and innovating happiness is the new capital. Hack happiness!” she said. And she told everyone to check out www.AvantGame.com/happiness. (I hope that link works for you, because it doesn’t for me yet.)

The last big presentation of the morning was by Jeff Hawkins, cofounder of Numenta, and late of Palm and Handspring fame. His latest company is about neuroscience and traces back to a book he wrote a couple of years ago, “On Intelligence.” A new friend I just met, Alex Iskold, wrote a post about Numenta this morning on Read/Write Web, which I discovered about 7:00 am when I went online in the hotel lobby. (And I see it’s already been Dugg about 500 times.) Hawkins said there’s no computer today that you can ask, “What is this picture?” But he’s working on that problem of visual perception, as well as a number of others, with a platform that’s based on a theory of how the neocortex works — Hierarchial Temporal Memory. The platform is called NuPIC, and, said Hawkins, “It works. We already have several customers.” He stated that the technology is especially of interest to companies in industries such as automotive, gaming, network modeling, drug discovery, vision systems, market analysis, and business modeling. The future? He said likely uses will be in music, language, and robotics.

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