Via MARKETWIRE:

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This afternoon I was interviewed by Chris Heuer at the Blogtropolus Lounge @ Web 2.0 … we talked about Pulse and Something Simpler’s market-leading Relevance Engine. This should help the confused to understand what it is that we do.

The essay that I refer to in the interview is here: Relevance Engines and the Friendly Shopkeeper.

I keep forgetting to blog about this, or perhaps it’s because I’m ashamed of my wardrobe and bad hair day, but FindFindr did a far-ranging video interview with me on a rooftop in Gastown. I did my best to be interesting. They did their best in the editing room later. Enjoy!

Something Simpler will be trawling the aisles of Web 2.0 in San Francisco, and we’ll also be in situ at the Blogtropol.us Blogger Lounge for the first two days of the Expo. We’re giving away an Apple 23″ Cinema HD Display, and there are plenty of other fabulous prizes available, including a Nikon D80 Digital Camera and (rumour has it) a MacBook Air.

It’d be great to see you there… you can pre-register to join us at http://blogtropolus.eventbrite.com. There’s also a Ustream Channel for those of you who won’t be here in San Francisco. More info below…

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Google’s App Engine is, despite claims to the contrary, not a competitor to Amazon’s EC2 and S3.

As Silicon Insider correctly points out* the limitations in terms of a true “utility computing” service are simply too severe. We do a lot of our heavy lifting around here using EC2, SQS and S3, something we couldn’t possibly do with Google App Engine (and not because we don’t like Python, we do!).

What it is, is a beautifully played move against Facebook; it’s a simple way for developers to build applications that can harness the information that Google has about the end-user. How? Well, if Google are smart they are likely to expand the way in which Google App Engine applications can access other Google services (with the user’s permission of course).

This gives the applications an amazing amount of contextual information about each user, allowing developers to come up with the next generation of personalized, highly relevant and (with Open Social) social applications; all tied in with how end-users normally go about their online lives.

[* The Silicon Insider claim that “App Engine is designed for lightweight apps” is, however, plain wrong. Unless that is you consider applications like GMail and Google Reader “lightweight”]

… and the web application hosting business cowers in fear. Now, my friends, people are discovering what Google’s REAL differentiated IP is..

Application scaling is a real problem for the managed hosting business unless some software company comes up with a platform/solution that lets them leverage their existing computing infrastructure. This is allegorical to, and is probably as big an opportunity as, SAN and NAS a few years ago … big incumbents like EMC and Network Appliance with totally vertical solutions (Google and Amazon in this case) competing with guys using software and off-the-shelf hardware (the hosting companies licensing the wares of some as-yet-non-existent software company).

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