Author: Om Malik

Facebook engineers have come up with a way to turbo-charge PHP, a programming language preferred by web developers. And the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking and identity provider is now open sourcing this technology called HipHop for PHP, a source code transformer which programmatically transforms PHP into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop for PHP was developed internally to boost the performance of Facebook applications while also lowering hardware costs. From the Facebook blog:

With HipHop we’ve been able to reduce the CPU usage on our web servers on average by about fifty percent depending on the page.  Less CPU means fewer servers.  This project is incredible, has had a tremendous impact on Facebook and we are releasing it as open source in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP.

HipHop for PHP is the latest in a long list of products that were developed internally by Facebook and have been open sourced to the world. PHP -– aka Hypertext Preprocessor -– is a scripting language much like Perl, Python and Ruby that was created by Rasmus Ledorf in 1995. In terms of CPU and memory demands, scripting languages are less efficient than compiled languages such as C++. PHP is currently used by popular and large, dynamic web sites such as Facebook, WordPress.com and Digg.  It was viewed as one of the hottest new technologies in 2005, when venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and current Facebook board member, told the Wall Street Journal that “PHP is to 2005 what Java was to 1995.”

Of course, since then the web has scaled many times and as a result some severe shortcomings in PHP have been exposed. Many folks have subsequently looked for alternatives, opting for languages that have cleaner syntax, a more vibrant community and perhaps even better frameworks. Well-known PHP programmer Terry Chay in a blog post defending PHP recently noted:

Obviously, I think PHP is very frequently the right choice. The reason I choose PHP is that it is a web-based templating language that is simple, scalable, and pragmatic. Choices have consequences. Everyone knows what consequences are. If not, there’d be a One Language to rule them all. And, we’re not Java developers. 😉 One consequence of PHP is that it is now stuck between a rock and a hard place.

On one end, the ubiquity of rich, Ajax-driven, web sites means the inherent advantage of a templating language is no longer there, having been replaced by a much larger demand for design….On the other end, social networks have sped up demands of data, so that they live more in RAM in the form of memcached than on disk in the form of a relational database. When making a web page was tied to a disk-bound database, performance discussions are pushed to database performance discussions, which really is a discussion of disk performance. …web performance is now a complicated beast.

Facebook, which bet on PHP early on, has had that quandary for a long time. It had no option but to innovate around PHP and its resource hog-like habits. The reason PHP can be so resource-intensive is because it’s interpreted on the fly.

You can make it perform better by using tricks such as output caching, recycling the compiled code that’s generated at runtime (aka opcode caching) and writing extensions that are essentially bits compiled as C++. However, all these techniques have their own set of issues. Given than I am no programmer, here is my understanding of what Facebook has done: It came up with a way to analyze the PHP code and convert it to optimized C++ code, which is in turn compiled to a very speedy machine-specific code. HipHop benefits from the maturity of g++, a C++ compiler.

Scaling Facebook is particularly challenging because almost every page view is a logged-in user with a customized experience. When you view your home page we need to look up all of your friends, query their most relevant updates (from a custom service we’ve built called Multifeed), filter the results based on your privacy settings, then fill out the stories with comments, photos, likes, and all the rich data that people love about Facebook. All of this in just under a second. HipHop allows us to correct the logic that does the final page assembly in PHP and iterate it quickly while relying on custom back-end services in C++, Erlang, Java, or Python to service the News Feed, search, Chat, and other core parts of the site.

Earlier this week I spoke with Haiping Zhao, a Facebook senior software engineer; Scott MacVicar, the company’s open-source developer advocate; and David Recordon, a senior programs manager, who explained to me that the company first started working on solving the scaling problems in 2007 and tried to fix it using various methods before coming up with the current solution.

Recordon said that the company wasn’t done optimizing but wanted to open source its code mostly because it wants other people to use it and also help extend it. He was confident that there will be many takers for HipHop for PHP, especially among the enterprises looking to save on their hardware spending. “When you can slash your hardware costs by half, that is significant,” said Recordon.

In addition, Facebook’s engineers believe that performance gains should help PHP re-attract developers who might have opted for the more fashionable programming languages such as Ruby and Python. Any switchers would help solve Facebook’s more pressing problem: a desperate need for more and more developers in order to keep growing its web empire.

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

• Will the Real-Time Web Bring High Performance to a System Near You?
• Social Networks Need to Grin and Bear Infrastructure Costs
• Why the Hoopla About Hadoop?

Over the past four years, I have watched with amazement the rise of Amazon Web Services. What started out as a basic S3 storage service and now includes a content delivery network and virtual private clouds has disrupted — and transformed — the entire technology landscape. Wall Street doesn’t know what to make of AWS, but here in startupville, its utility is pretty clear.

While there is a lot of talk about lean startups and agile startups, had it not been for Amazon’s web services, Internet startups would still be stuck spending on infrastructure without knowing if their service was every going to be  a hit. What if San Francisco-based online storage service Dropbox had been forced to start by building its own infrastructure, like back in the old days? It never would have been able to grow and scale as quickly as it has. More importantly, it would have had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to just hang its proverbial shingle. Instead, it used Amazon’s S3 storage service.

At the DLD Conference in Munich last week, over a cup of tea, I sat down for a casual chat with Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer. I asked him about the company’s role as a catalyst for innovation. In classic Amazon style, he dismissed the notion, instead choosing to focus entirely on the “cloud.”

“With the cloud comes unconstrained thinking and willingness to tinker and experiment without worrying too much about cost,” Vogels said. I agree — success-based scaling is perhaps one of the biggest disruptions of our times. In the old days they used to call it getting your money’s worth. Today, it’s more commonly referred to as getting the most out of your startup capital.

“The cloud allows lot of businesses to scale aggressively, like Facebook apps,” he said. Indeed, it means makers of Facebook apps don’t have to invest huge upfront capital for what is a hit-driven business. After all, in this era of extremely fickle customers, a hot app of today is left to rot tomorrow.

“We are enabling a lot things in a way that will be long-term beneficial as it would help build more sustainable businesses using a lot less capital,” said Vogels. “The fact is that because of the cloud, today a young upstart can take market share without an incumbent having time to react.”

He cited San Francisco-based Twilio, whose platform offers a way to easily merge web and voice offerings, as one such company that is benefiting from the cloud. “Twilio excites me with their programmable voice platform and that is a company where you see the power of the cloud, of a startup becoming a platform to challenge any incumbent. The cloud is helping make an even playing field.”

Just like Twilio, Vogels said he was excited about the emergence of cloud-centric companies like Dropbox, Foursquare and Soundcloud. “Just imagine if you could combine Twilio with location and media and build a whole new mash-up of apps, all running off the cloud,” Vogels mused.

From the outside it is hard to quantify Amazon’s success in the cloud services — the company doesn’t break out AWS revenues and profits (or losses). It refuses to give guidance on how big this line of business is, often serving up somewhat ambiguous data sets such as “Amazon’s S3 now has 82 billion objects.” Such numbers are meaningless to me. What matters to me is how many developers — hundreds of thousands, according to Vogels — who are building on Amazon Web Services.

Just as developers help Microsoft dominate the PC era and more recently, helped Apple to reign with its iPhone, the endless army of developers working for startups that use Amazon’s web services are going to ensure two things. One, that AWS remains a platform of innovation for a long time to come. And two, that Amazon has an advantage over newer cloud providers — for the more such developers use AWS, the tougher it is to switch to another cloud platform.

A second installment of this post will appear later this week. In that post, I will focus on what Vogels had to say about the recent announcements made by Amazon, the impact of EC2 spot instances and his general views on the cloud computing landscape during 2010.

Location-based upstarts Foursquare and Gowalla may not have a lot of users, but they sure have the buzz (and millions in backing). Thanks to them, “checking in” is the new black — even Flixtser is jumping on the location-based bandwagon. Here are three news items from today:

• Gowalla is working with Alice Radio and others in an effort to raise funds for Haiti earthquake victims. As past of the “Hearts for Haiti” efforts, Gowalla is encouraging its users to contribute to relief efforts by checking in at two Bay Area Peet’s Coffee & Tea locations on Monday, Feb. 8, or at a special Barenaked Ladies concert that evening. As part of the campaign, for each person who checks in with Gowalla, $50 will be donated to the American Red Cross, with a goal of reaching a total of $20,000. Good work, Josh Williams and team!
• Foursquare, my favorite location app, has signed a deal with Bravo Media, the company behind kitschy pop-fashion TV channel whose intellectually bankrupt television offerings include reality shows such as “The Shear Genius,” “The Millionaire Matchmaker” and “The Real Housewives” series. As part of the deal, Foursquare will offer network-branded “badges” and special prizes for “check-ins” at Bravo-themed locations. For its part, Bravo will create on-air spots aimed at driving users to “check in” at Foursquare from various locations across the country that have been featured on Bravo series, as well as venues recommended by Bravo talent.
• Skyhook Wireless says it will help add more location-related information to Flixster’s “Movies” Android app. Flixster’s “Movies” iPhone mobile app is also Skyhook-enabled.

Microsoft, after talking about it endlessly, has finally opened up its cloud platform, Windows Azure, for business. Windows Azure and SQL Azure are now available in 21 countries worldwide, the company said. So today the rubber meets the road — and we get to see how Azure does in the marketplace.

What will Azure’s financial impact be? It’s hard to say, but I think it’s safe to assume that Microsoft, which has gotten used to the 50 percent (or higher) margins on its products, will see those margins shrivel in the face of the competition. Azure is joining a crowded marketplace, one dominated by Amazon and its web services, which now boasts of thousands of developers in addition to an entire ecosystem.

And if that wasn’t enough, Azure will be competing with offerings from IBM, Cisco Systems, EMC Corp. and VMware, Rackspace and other small players. Microsoft says it’s not worried, though and claims companies like 3M and GXS are already using the Azure cloud.

Not only are established partners and ISVs looking to the Windows Azure platform as a way to extend their revenue capabilities, but startups like Lokad are betting their businesses on it. Lokad has deployed a scalable forecasting cloud-based service to its retail and manufacturing customers that provides real-time forecasting data to allow for inventory optimization and ultimately bring them to profitability.

Notably, Microsoft’s Azure is part of Redmond’s “software-plus-services” strategy that also includes its Hyper-V server virtualization platform launched in October 2009. Microsoft also sells Windows Live, Microsoft Office Live, Business
Productivity Online Suite, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM as SaaS, making it part of the company’s larger cloud strategy.

Given how closely we at GigaOM have followed the Azure saga, I though it would be good to highlight some of our past coverage containing relevant details about Azure and Microsoft’s plans.

1. Windows Azure is a cloud operating system on which developers can build using .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Python and other languages. (From Everything You Need to Know About Microsoft’s Azure. )
2. Compared to infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as Amazon with Ec2 or Rackspace with its CloudServers products, Azure attempts to handle more of the actual management and provisioning of virtual machines for a user. (From Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line)
3. If we view the data center as akin to a machine, Microsoft wants folks to be able to create applications that can run on a Microsoft Azure cloud or internally on an in-house cloud. Newly launched AppFabric is the solution for that. AppFabric is software that folks can run in their own data center to create an internal cloud that can talk to and share information with the public Azure cloud if the client wants. (From Stacey’s Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line)
4. GigaOM Pro’s Derrick Harris thinks that AppFabric is the big edge for Microsoft. In a note he writes (subscription required): “Windows Server AppFabric will help users build application fabrics in their Windows environments to minimize the complexity of delivering enterprise applications as services. AppFabric achieves this through supporting RESTful or SOAP-based services, workflows and application-level monitoring. Additionally, AppFabric marks the first commercial presence of Microsoft’s distributed in-memory caching technology (codenamed ‘Velocity’). Its inclusion ensures that apps can scale at will without experiencing performance bottlenecks at the data layer.”

Here are the pricing plans for Azure:

Azure compute costs 12 cents per service hour, while storage service costs 15 cents per GB of data per month, with an additional penny for every 10,000 transactions. The .Net services platform costs 15 cents for every 100,000 times the applications built on .Net Services accesses a tool or chunk of code. Moving data costs 10 cents per GB of inbound data and 15 cents per GB of outbound data. SQL Azure is $9.99 for up to a 1 GB relational database, and $99.99 for up to a 10 GB relational database. (From Everything you need to know about Microsoft Azure)

Other related posts you might find worth reading:

• Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010?
• The Hidden Cost of the Cloud: Bandwidth Charges.
• The GigaOM Interview With Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Srchitect of Microsoft
• Can Microsoft (or Rackspace) Dethrone Cloud King Amazon? (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d)

At Apple’s iPad launch event last week, I spoke with uber venture capitalist John Doerr (of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), The New York Times media critic David Carr and my former boss, Josh Quittner (who is now helping Time Inc. figure out its devices strategy.) I wanted to know if they believed the device would have a far-reaching impact.

Last week, when down in Los Angeles, I had a chance to interview Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, onstage at the Twiistup conference. The conversation, which spanned a good 45 minutes, was wide-ranging but generally focused on Internet startups and entrepreneurship.

Given that I was on stage, it was hard to take notes. Nevertheless, I have re-constructed the conversation from memory, some of my own notes and with the help of tweets being sent out by the audience members. Only the comments that appear in parenthesis can be attributed to Paul, while rest is paraphrased. Some folks on Twitter are misconstruing these notes as an interview, which it is not. I hope I have made myself abundantly clear.

What should entrepreneurs think about to start company?

Think about finding the right co-founder. He compared co-founder of your company to location to your real estate property because once you buy your property, you’re stuck with the location. And similarly you can’t morph your co-founder. “The (startup) idea does not matter as much as having the right co-founder.”

What makes a startup successful?

Success of a start up is dependent upon whether co-founders want it enough.
People tend to over emphasize the brilliance of idea. For any successful start up idea, you can find 20 bitter losers who say “I had that idea 20 years ago.” This shows you that it’s the people, not really the idea that matter. “The most important thing is to be DETERMINED. Measure of determination is not quitting and not giving up.”

What is the biggest challenge for early stage startup?

The enemy is the “back button.” Once people leave they don’t come back. In order to get people to return and install your product or a service, “You got to understand what people need.” And you do that by finding out what people need, what you need need.You’ve got to create something that a real person needs.

Is starting a company easy these days?

The startups are cheap in the beginning, considering that founders don’t have to pay them selves. And everything you need to do a start up you already have. Computer, internet, and you can buy server per usage. So it doesn’t really cost anything more to do a start up than ordinary life.

What is the right time to start looking for money?

You should only start looking for money when you can convince investors to give it to you. In fact, raise money when you don’t particularly need it and not because you are broke.

Do you feel some start ups don’t think big enough?

Some startups don’t think big enough, while some do. Paul in an email later clarified:

“The point there was that I ask founders what huge thing is what you have now version 1 of?”  and a good way to come up with answers to that is to imagine themselves being interviewed 10 years from now when they are big successes, and telling the story of how they did it.  E.g. “The first thing we made was x, and then we expanded into y, and then we tried z, and that really took off.”  That implies the next thing to try after x is y.”

explained that he asks founders about “what huge thing is that you now have version one of?” One way of finding an answer to that question is to imagine themselves being interviewed 10 years from now when they are big successes, and telling the story of how they got there. In other words, “the first thing we made was x, and then we expanded into y and then we tried z, and that really took off.”

The following question was from the audience: What do you think about other incubators such as Techstars?

I checked with Paul and this is how he remembers it. “Partly annoyed, like JK Rowling would feel if someone wrote a
book about a boy wizard called Henry Porter.  But one good thing about them is that they tell us when we make mistakes.  If it weren’t for them, we’d be less likely to know if we turned down someone good.”

Slightly annoyed. It is like how JK Rowling would feel if someone wrote book called Henry Potter. One use is that it tells us when we have made mistakes and passed on good applicants. So if it was not for other incubators,  Y Combinator would never know that they turned down successful start up.

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

• Why Startups Aren’t Changing the World
• What the VC Industry Upheaval Means For Startups
• New Opportunities in the Smart Grid

Photo of Paul Graham by Jim Alden via Flickr.com/Techfrog

At Apple’s iPad release event, I met Dan Lyons, technology writer for Newsweek — also known as the man who writes as Fake Steve Jobs. We were discussing the iPad, with me being obviously impressed and him not so much. I caught his comments on video. Here, watch this video captured on my Flip. Apologies in advance for marginal sound quality.

From the moment Apple announced its new iPad mobile device, people have been wondering when (and if) Hulu was going to make a specialized application for it. But Hulu has so far tended towards public generalities and general inaction when it comes to developing for anything but the PC.

Earlier this week, and a day ahead of the iPad launch, I interviewed Hulu CEO Jason Kilar at the DLD Conference in Munich, spending a big portion of our conversation on the mobile web. Of course, Kilar, who graduated from the Jeff Bezos School of Management, and like his former boss plays his cards close to the vest, didn’t reveal anything specific.

However, his comments indicated that Hulu is very seriously thinking about the mobile web, including creating specialist applications for different platforms. More importantly, his brief comments indicate that the second-most popular online video service in the U.S. — YouTube being the first — is not ignoring the big shift to the mobile Internet. “The computer in your pocket is very important,” he said. “Mobile is a monster – we are very bullish. We will embrace any device.”

Of course, Kilar made similar statements way back in 2008, and there have been unsubstantiated rumors of an iPhone app since, but now, in light of the iPad, the rise of Android and the blowout success of the iTunes app store, the timing has never been better for Hulu to launch something for the mobile web.

When I asked Kilar if he was going to make a special version of a Hulu app for the iPad, Kilar said: “We are very big believers in mobile and we don’t think about (just) one device only.” My translation: Expect Hulu to be on multiple platforms such as the iPhone and Android. I would expect the Android version to show up first because it supports Flash, while Apple’s iPhone OS platform doesn’t. If Hulu has to support iPhone OS, it would need to re-encode its videos in order to make them work.

What’s more interesting is that he (and his cohorts at Hulu) think that the two mobile- and PC-centric versions of Hulu can not only coexist but thrive. He went on to add that while mobile is going to be a large component of its business, the company would still get a lot of its revenues and usage from the traditional web browser. “Mobile will always be like a snack channel but never will become the major (revenue) share of our business,” Kilar said.

While that might be true when it comes to the iPhone, the new iPad is a whole new ball of wax — one that Kilar can’t ignore for long. As I said earlier, the iPad is all about media consumption, including videos on Hulu.

Photo by Rodrigo Sepulveda courtesy of DLD Conference via Flickr

This spring will mark the one-year anniversary of the launch of our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro, which has not only met but exceeded our expectations and become an important part of our business. But as we moved to increase our focus on subscription offerings, we knew that we’d need help from a true specialist. To that end, today it gives me a great pleasure to announce the latest addition to our team: Dan Silmore, a veteran marketing executive who joins us as SVP of product marketing, bringing with him substantial business-focused experience.

Dan most recently worked as VP of marketing for AllBusiness.com, where he stayed on following its acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet. There, he was instrumental in creating D&B Digital, a combination of AllBusiness and Hoovers.com. Prior to that, Dan was VP of marketing for CBS MarketWatch, where he served briefly as general manager following its acquisition by Dow Jones. He has extensive experience in advancing and marketing business-centric subscription products and ad-supported sites, and one of Dan’s key roles at GigaOM will be helping to develop and advance our $79 annual GigaOM Pro subscription research service.

Of course, Dan will also be working with us to improve current offerings and develop new products as we look at opportunities offered beyond 2010. With his easy smile and visible energy, Dan has already rolled up his sleeves and begun to contribute. We have many new initiatives planned for this year, and are very excited that he will be by our sides as we pursue them. Please join us in welcoming him to our team.

Apple and AT&T have done their very best to keep the Google Voice service away from iPhone users. A big raging controversy, an FCC investigation and a lot of talk still didn’t bring Google’s much-hyped — and loved — service to the iPhone. But today all that changes — thanks to a brand new browser-based Google Voice app.

Using HTML 5 technologies, the browser-based version of Google Voice app works both on Palm webOS and iPhone OS 3.0 devices. The browser-based app allows you to access the voice mails easily. It also allows you to display your Google Voice number on outgoing calls and you can send and receive text messages. More than just Google Voice, this browser-based service truly showcases the power of HTML, especially in the context of mobile applications where working across different platform is fast becoming a challenge for developers.

On the Google Mobile blog, Marcus Foster and David Singleton write:

Delivering Google services via mobile browsers has worked well for the Gmail team, so we decided to follow the same approach with Google Voice. Today, we’re excited to introduce the Google Voice web app for the iPhone and Palm WebOS devices. This HTML5 application provides you with a fast and versatile mobile experience for Google Voice because it uses the latest advancements in web technologies. For example, AppCache lets you interact with web apps without a network connection and local databases allow you to store data locally on the device, so you don’t lose data even when you close the browser.

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

• Report: Google’s Mobile Strategy
• How Google Voice Could Change Communication

Cloudkick, a San Francisco-based startup, today is announcing its cloud server management and monitoring services. The company, which has raised $750,000 from Avalon Ventures and Nueva Ventures, is an alumnus of YCombinator. Started by Alex Polvi, Dan Di Spaltro and Logan Welliver, it was set up in order to solve the complexity of managing multiple servers, especially when bought from different service providers.

While in the past, many standalone tools have helped companies monitor and manage their infrastructure, now the trend is towards monitoring as a service. Cloudkick wants to leverage that trend. What Cloudkick has done is create a unified dashboard that helps end users monitor the workings of a panoply of cloud services – whether they buy them from Amazon’s EC2, Rackspace or other providers. The service currently works with EC2, Rackspace, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, Rimuhosting and VPS.net. This new tool will help Cloudkick’s clients monitor, for instance, CPU, bandwidth, memory and load.

The service, in addition to offering analytics, also offers the ability to send SMS and email alerts in case something goes wrong. At present the company is able to monitor the servers using two different methodologies: by having customers users their cloud provider API credentials or via a standalone agent that’s installed on the server.

Cloudkick is in direct competition with better-funded rivals such as Rightscale, enStratus and some other companies. For now, Rightscale dominates what is a new market. When I spoke with Di Spaltro last week, he acknowledged that it was a competitive market.

“We are essentially going after people who have been 10-to-100 servers,” he said. While the company has been offering some of its services for free since February 2009, as part of its official launch, Cloudkick is going to charge between $99 and $599 a month, depending on servers and offer bespoke plans. “We are geared more towards the startups and mid-market companies,” Di Spaltro said. Perhaps its YCombinator links will help the company get better traction in the marketplace.

Another big threat for Cloudkick (and others) is that the cloud service providers themselves start offering their own tools for free. Sure some may argue that for multiplatform cloud services you need a neutral monitoring service such as Cloudkick, but I think it’s way too premature to think in terms of people buying servers from multiple providers.

That said, there is no denying that there’s a need for such services and there’s a good chance some of the many players might break out. Let’s hope for the sake of Cloudkick’s co-founders their startup is one of them.

8×8 Inc., a Voice over Internet Protocol service provider, has released a new point-and-click VoIP calling application dubbed 8×8 Connect. It allows Facebook users to add a “Call Me” button to their home page, thereby enabling other users to call them without revealing their actual phone number.

“The application asks the person making the call to enter the phone number they wish to place the call from, calls that number and then automatically rings the Facebook user at a number they previously set as their preferred contact number,” the company explained in a press release.

Wanting to see if it worked as advertised, I installed the app, filled out the information and installed the Call Me button on my Facebook page. That done, I called myself. The call connected seamlessly. I would recommend it, mostly because you can control who can see your Facebook page.

I think this app could be especially helpful for small business owners and consultants, who could use it as a way to generate interest in the products/services they’re selling.

In the meantime, I hope 8X8 takes this app to the next level by making it more personal. I hate the random photo (see graphic) that’s now being displayed on my page, especially when it could easily customize it by picking one of my Facebook profile photos instead. Another bonus would be if one could place the Call Me button on fanpages as well.