Coup and Corkery collect map data from every source they can find, aiming to be "the one place for geodata". Since Koordinates launched in April last year they've been adding data as quickly as they can find it.
Not surprisingly, all this data takes a lot of disk space and bandwidth—which should be a big problem. Coup and Corkery aren't rich (yet), they're not being funded by a kindly investor with deep pockets, and although they want Koordinates to be profitable, it's early days. So how can they afford to make terabytes of data—by mid-year they expect to have ten terabytes online, or about 2,500 times the size of the entire Wikipedia—available to anyone who asks? Says Coup: "We looked at how we get up and running as a startup without spending an inordinate amount of money on infrastructure. How do we get it so that we can efficiently store this data, process it, access it, and make it available to people?"
Like most things, the answer can be found in a bookshop. The world's biggest bookshop, in fact: Amazon.com. In 2006, Amazon started offering space in its massive server farms to third-party developers. This service, called Amazon S3 (for Simple Storage System), allows anyone access to Amazon-grade web hosting, delivered over very fast connections to every corner of wired world.
"The price of computing is going to drop considerably when an operating system and productivity software isn't part of purchasing a computer … it will completely change the market. That's when you're going to see the real acceleration of cloud-based services, because everything will be on the web"
It's cheap, too: 15 US cents per month to store a gigabyte of data, and 17 cents to send that gigabyte to a customer. If you use more space and traffic, it gets cheaper. Many small S3 customers pay less than a dollar a month.
Have some number crunching to do? Amazon can help again:Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows users to create any number of virtual computers, running Linux or Windows, and put them to use, all from your desktop. Pricing starts at ten US cents an hour.
This is commodity pricing, and S3, EC2 and their competitors—more on those later—are commodity services. They're examples of cloud computing, a term that refers to computer resources that are deployed over the Internet and can easily scale up or down as needed.
Koordinates' developers don't know where their servers are located, don't know what hardware they're running on, probably don't even know when a server crashes. Amazon handles all the messy details; Coup and Corkery just know they have as much bandwidth, disk space and processing power as they need, and they're not paying for anything extra.
The downside? Don't expect too much flexibility: you can dump your data in S3 'buckets', but you can't then index them for searches or manipulate them as you could on your own disk. You can create virtual Windows, Linux or OpenSolaris servers in EC2, but don't presume it'll run that weird accounting package your cousin built before he realised he actually wanted to be a sculptor. And cloud servers can be as temporary as, well, clouds; Amazon warns developers that if an EC2 instance crashes, their data will be lost too. It's up to developers to expect problems and work around them.
Still, cloud computing brings the capital investment for web startups to virtually zero, removes much of the workload of systems administration and allows companies to meet unexpected demand without buying any hardware of their own. And it also heralds some far-reaching changes that could revolutionise the way we gather, store, display and consume content of all types, from Koordinates' map data to Hollywood movies.
The most competitive area of software development today is arguably in the web browser, and within the browser one area is the most competitive of all: JavaScript performance. JavaScript is the language that allows web developers to make web pages behave something like a desktop program. Apple, Google and Mozilla have all shipped much-improved JavaScript engines and announced even faster versions in their next releases, while Microsoft promises souped-up JavaScript in a future version of Internet Explorer.
Why? Surely the network is the main drag on performance, not the browser? Of course, the network is still a factor, but today most of the websites we use most often, from Trade Me to Twitter, are web applications. Many of the best rely on JavaScript to be as user-friendly as possible. Well-written sites also use JavaScript to fetch only the parts of a page that need changing, reducing the network load and reacting faster to user input.
Cloudy concepts
What is cloud computing?
Predictably, the term is the subject of endless bickering, but essentially cloud computing refers to on-demand, generic web hosting that can grow immediately as needed. Customers pay only for traffic and space that they use
Who offers cloud computing facilities?
Amazon, Google and Microsoft are the best-known cloud computing vendors, but there are other smaller operators too
What does a 'cloud' computer look like?
Most vendors use virtualisation to allow many different customers to operate across thousands of machines. Many buy their computers by the container-load—and never unpack them. Inside the container, the computers are already wired up; just add power and Internet, and each container becomes part of the cloud
What does it mean for creative Kiwis?
Cloud computing is a classic commodity product. It means companies can get access to world-class hosting and bandwidth without paying a cent upfront, pay only for the space and bandwidth they actually use, and cope with sudden traffic as soon as it arrives
These two factors—super-fast commodity services in the cloud and a rich, snappy experience in the browser—give software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies a ready advantage over traditional desktop vendors.
There's still a place for desktop software, but any company creating a software product from scratch now will ask if it can be delivered over the wire, and probably decide that it can. For every established, successful software vendor like MYOB, there's a nimble SaaS startup like Xero that's trying hard to eat its lunch.
Ask Xero's CEO, Rod Drury, whether he plans to move his Windows-based infrastructure into the cloud, and he's quick to say no. Xero, he points out, is not a typical Kiwi startup: it was funded from day one to employ 50 people for three years. By Xero standards, the servers, hosted at Rackspace in Texas, are not a big expense.
"We spend probably about US$12,000 a month on all of our hosting—it's about the same price as one-and-a-half people. The actual hosting and infrastructure cost is relatively small."
It's other essential things that cost the most, he says: marketing, customer service, feature improvements and user testing. "You won't just turn stuff on in the US and suddenly you get thousands of customers. You actually have to do the marketing as well, because it's very difficult to create noise. That's the challenge!"
Drury is no cloud sceptic though. "I think the credit crunch means it's going to be harder now for people to raise money. And there's this massive cloud computing opportunity. We don't have the infrastructure to connect us to the world, and we don't have the investment culture.
So at the moment I think there's this huge opportunity to use brains—rather than producing stuff, real stuff with carbon and that sort of thing. We're really missing the opportunity."
For Drury, a third factor comes into play: the desktop is losing its dominance. The iPhone is the first mobile phone that people actually enjoy using to surf the Internet (according to the AdMob Mobile Metrics Report, in February the iPhone generatedhalf of all smartphone traffic in the US). Google's Android promises to be a similarly web-savvy device. And the hottest computers this year are netbooks: tiny, lightweight, laptop computers, typically with a nine-inch screen, a reduced keyboard, no CD or floppy drive, and a very small hard disk.
They're designed to work wirelessly over wi-fi or mobile 3G and fit easily into a handbag, shoulder bag or even a pocket. The Dell Mini 9 I've been testing might run Microsoft Word okay; I've never tried. But it works very well with browsers like Apple Safari and Google Chrome and retails here for just $900; Vodafone will even give you one for free if you sign up to a data plan.
These machines aren't designed to run desktop apps; they're all about the Internet. "When Google Chrome comes out over Linux [on netbooks], that's going to completely change the market," says Drury. "It will mean that the price of computing is going to drop considerably when an operating system and productivity software isn't part of purchasing a computer. I don't think it means that Microsoft loses; it means they'll have to change their pricing model as well. That's when you're going to see the real acceleration of cloud-based services, because everything will be on the web."
So we have the generation tools, and we have the consumption devices. But what about the content? It seems that content, too, is destined to become ubiquitous, affordable and available. At this year's Webstock conference in Wellington, Everyblock.com founder Adrian Holovaty talked about how hishyperlocal news site was designed and deployed, but said they spend a great deal of their time sweet-talking the public and private bodies that hold the data he wants to share with users: police callouts, real estate listings, health inspections, photos and other local minutiae. There should be a special place in heaven for Holovaty and others who work to unlock and distribute public data: they're breaking down bureaucratic barriers and creating a true democracy of data. You could say they're fulfilling the promise of the Internet and the web to bring knowledge tools into the hands of everybody, everywhere, all the time.
Flickr, YouTube and other progressive sites have always made their users' content available for use on other sites. Unlocking public data is a next vital step. The final step will be when the owners of creative content make it broadly available for use elsewhere, perhaps with a charge involved but importantly without digital locks or crippled features. That's another political and commercial battle, but once it's done the barriers to creativity and knowledge will be greatly reduced.
Back in Auckland, Coup and Corkery are planning Koordinates' push offshore. Their relentless pursuit of map data continues, from rivers in the Chathams to railways in Texas. If they can get the data for free, they'll share it at no charge; if they have to pay, they'll clip the ticket and bank some of the proceeds. One thing they don't have to plan for is adding infrastructure to cope with all that extra data.
"You can do that," says Coup, "but then the question becomes: is your business about what Jeff Bezos at Amazon described as 'the muck', where you're making sure that disks don't fail and things are backed up, where data ends up everywhere all the time and whether the servers are even up, and that sort of stuff? Or is the business about actually creating some value and you can let somebody else take care of the muck?"
