North Hyde Park





South Tampa

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Who drives a Honda Civic, adamantly opposes SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, drinks Heizenweiner? Hint he is also co-founder of the largest startups in Florida with over 130 employees and over 35 million global active users, and yes they are profitable. If that wasn’t enough this startup is facing litigation from 3 major record labels placing them at a crossroads in terms of where to go from here. A lot folks seem to think the end is near for Grooveshark, I beg to differ. See figure (1).

There is in this world no such force as the force of a man determined to rise.”

- WEB Dubois -

Josh Greenberg a finalist for Bloomberg BusinessWeek best Young Entrepreneur in 2008 and one of Forbes top 30 under 30 for music in 2012. Co-Founder and CTO of Grooveshark  Josh is a St. Petersburg native and attended the University of Florida before dropping out of school launch Grooveshark, a project he noticed that was starting to take off. At the time he like so may entrepreneurs had a few side projects and no particular one had taken precedence before he decided to…

FOCUS.

We all know what happened to the founder of MegaUpload Kim Dotcom. There is a war going on between the internet companies that enable sharing of any materials and the entertainment industry. The Internet has transformed the music business and record labels haven’t figured out how to stop the bleeding and fully monetize it effectively. Here we have Grooveshark facing litigation from 3 of the 4 major labels, as they have a deal with EMI. Litigation over innovation seems to be the main the strategy of the music industry. This is rather unfortunate and may hasten their eventual demise. Artists no longer need record labels or production companies. Look at Louis C.K, the comedian who independently distributed his latest stand up special vastly exceeding his expectations and earning substantially more money than he ever would have by going the traditional route even as he acknowledged that he didn’t completely understand the internet and tormenting. He’s not alone in his efforts as a celebrity artist to independently produce and distribute digital content on the web.

STAY AGILE

There were a few times when Grooveshark had stop and examine their business model and put a finger in the air to check the wind. Listening to your users and having a robust feedback mechanism in place is key to growing your user base. Josh stressed the importance of giving your consumer the product and user experience they are looking for. One of the advantages of being a small startup was the fact that they could drastically change directions when needed. Josh described how they had to completely start from scratch on more than one occasion.

LOCATION DOESNT MATTER

Another big difference between Grooveshark and other startups is location. Josh emphasized how location became an advantage for Grooveshark when they were tight on cash sometimes coming down to only a week of operation cost. For instance your able to rent an apartment for $400 per month in living in Gainesville where as in Silicon Valley we know rents are much much higher. There is this persistent allure of Silicon Valley and the false belief that you need to reside there in order the attract the best talent. That may be true for Google or Facebook but chances are you will have no problem finding adequate talent if you remain in close proximity to a fairly decent university that offers a computer science curriculum. In this case the University of Florida was located literally next door and provided the talent Josh and his team needed to launch, build, and maintain Grooveshark.

HIRE THE RIGHT TALENT

Josh didn’t mention to many books but one he did mention was the book by Jim Collins….Good to Great. He suggested it as a read for all entrepreneurs. So how do you get the right talent? In order to quickly decipher a passionate coder from a hack job, Josh would start by asking him what type of side projects they were working on, particularly what they did over the weekend. If they do not have an answer, then they are not as passionate a coder as one may desire. Remember with a start up you need highly passionate and motivated individuals to help you build a company. The most important task facing any entrepreneur looking to build and grow a business involves building the right team of individuals that can help you achieve your goals.

MOTIVATE YOUR TALENT, STAY LEAN, and INNOVATE your way out of problems

Have you seen Dan Pink’s TED talk on motivation where people who have autonomy, mastery and purpose remain motivated, as contingent motivators (i.e. carrots and sticks) do not work with tasks that require cognitive function. After watching this TED talk you can really see the dichotomy in the startup culture and young entrepreneurs vs old school corporate America.

After receiving their first investment from a family member Josh and his team decided to finally get an office holding out as long as possible again saving funds by working out of home. One thing I have learned is that most of the most successful entrepreneurs I know agonize over large or redundant costs. Grooveshark received more funding throughout their existence although they were very careful about not raising and spending a lot of cash. Josh and his team watched competitors raise and burn through large amounts of cash as if they were already big successful companies, a mistake they were careful to avoid although they did receive just under a million in seed funding in 2009. Grooveshark hit their inflection point and became profitable in April of 2008. There exists a wall bearing all of the logos of competitors that have gone out of business in the offices of Grooveshark.

With the pending litigation against Grooveshark all investment opportunities have seen to dry up as the uncertainty of these pending lawsuits create the perception of increased risk. Despite all the IPO hype surrounding social media there are no plans to go pubic at this time. Another skill required for entrepreneurs is the ability to haggle as anything and everything in the business world is negotiable. As Grooveshark’s traffic began to increase they were able to pull more weight when negotiating with their different ad networks. The next step was to implement a smarter ad server, one that took into account various factors such as which ad will generate more revenue or be more relevant to a user.

When their app was removed from the Apple’s App Store and the Android Market Josh and his team didn’t give up. Instead they built a platform agnostic browser based HTML 5 version of the app. They also created a way for Android users who preferred a native app experience to download the app outside of the Android Market. Grooveshark has evolved from being produced via Adobe Flex framework to a complete rewrite from scratch with PHP and MySQL, making use of memcache and other database technologies that scale more efficiently than the originally developed website.

One of the ways Groveshark ensures a positive user experience is with web analytics and various tools. They quickly realized a mistake had been made when they offered to make then entire website look as if it had been destroyed in an ad campaign for GreenDay as it confused users visiting the website. A lot of times the pursuit of revenue can overshadow the mission and founders overlook user experience.

COULD FLORIDA BE THE IDEAL LOCATION FOR STARTUPS

There is a little known but rapidly growing tech hub in Gainesville, FL. When people talk about the tech scene in Florida. Orlando is often the city that people mention. The University of Florida research department has spun off an average of 13 new companies per year during the past eight years. In order to help retain some of these businesses and boost the local economy Innovation Square was unveiled in November of 2011. Utilizing 40 acres on unused land the University of Florida plans to construct between 1 million to 3.5 million square feet of office space along with a 120,000 square foot Infusion Technology Center. At a whopping 8 stories this will be one of the tallest buildings in Gainesville and will include space for research, product development, and office space for companies to grow. Also planned scheduled to open in Fall 13’ is a “Start Up Dorm” formally called the Entrepreneurial Housing building located within the Innovation Hub only entrepreneurs will be allowed to reside in this dorm which will include a special VIP area for visiting guests.

In closing I think one of the most important aspects of growing any business is to remain personable. In speaking with Josh he was very candid and offered real advice that any entrepreneur could take to heart. I have realized that the most successful individuals I have had the right mix of talent, smarts, persistence, and personality. You can check out random posts from Josh here.

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Just two years ago you would have never imagined al the things your cell phone would be capable of including acceptance of credit card payments. If you haven’t heard of Squareup.com a place where you can sign up to take credit cards you ought to check it out. In fact president Obama is using square to accept campaign donations, and the Salvation Army began taking donations via credit card with square this lat holiday season. I have been using square to take payments for my business and to take donations for VFC at events and I love a few things about it.

1 – No Contract

2 – I can key in OR swipe a credit card with the simple clean modern card reader.

3 – The fees are very reasonable when compared to traditional payment processors.

Keep in mind most solopreneurs are not going to process enough volume to get a competitive rate. With no monthly fees, or batch fees or different rates for different cards Squares pricing is straight up without the bullshit or 5 pages of fine print.

if you have an ipad you can easily set up a store with items that have set prices. The only drawback I can think of is the requirement that you be connected to a mobile network. But you can find a mobile network virally anywhere nowadays so that isn’t much of a drawback. After seeing the huge amount of success that square has had here come the copycats….

The large lumbering corporate sloths have finally awakened to a profitable market that they have been ignoring since the beginning of their time. Intuit I have a finger pointed at you. Then add into the mix paypal hideous looking contraption that they are pushing.

Lets start with Paypal. I can tell you no matter how much money they process a lot of folks HATE Paypal. I personally have been very lucky and yet have had to have any problems with them. Maybe it’s because I process enough to qualify for payola premier but I know in the developer community and in general a lot of individuals detest them. Mainly for freezing and holding up money. Some are also bitter at their decision to monopolize payment with regards to Ebay. I can tell you that I am satisfied with Square and have no incentive to switch to Paypal unless they plan to offer $100 or some attractive incentive to switch, and then I would only use it long enough to satisfy any incentive they offer. Lastly looking at the resources available to Paypal you would think that they would make a reader that is smaller or at least on par with Square’s reader. Unfortunately for them they failed to even accomplish this.

The last payment processor to enter the mobile processing space is Intuit, the company that makes Quickbooks. Their core business involves servicing the larger segment of small businesses. Business that usually are brick and mortar and may or may not have a reason to accept credit cards at a remote location like a tradeshow or such. My instinct tells me that these larger small businesses have either found a solution other than Intuit or have decided not to process any mobile payments.

Square was founded by Jack Dorsey founder of Twitter. SquareUp’s success is a perfect example of the young start up culture stealing corporate America’s lunch. Payment Processing is Intuit and Paypal’s core business and for some reason no one in their organization had though of this idea or if someone did someone in their senior leadership shot down the idea. Too bad for them as innovation trumps everything else. If you haven’t used Square to process payments yet and you are looking for a low cost solution with out any commitment I highly recommend them.

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Silicon Valley home to the most start ups in the world. Many who fade away silently, others who burn through investor cash only to fizzle. Some make it some don’t. Even when startups survive it usually takes a period of a few years before they are profitable. No one knows for sure but Pinterest could already be profitable with ~10 million users.

Its been revealed that Pinterest has been utilizing a service called SkimLink to replace outgoing links with affiliate links to products related to the items pinned. When I heard this I thought it was one of the most brilliant ideas I ever to monetize a website. No advertising means better rankings and an improved user experience. So far Google doesn’t seem to have any issues with these type of affiliate links and a “no-follow” link is used on any affiliate links by SkimLinks as a precaution.

Pinterest and SkimLinks have just created a new business model. 80% Percent of the users on Pinterest are women aged 24 – 54, and I would even guess that a good chunk of those women are stay at home moms and in general mothers. They make the buying decisions and are more likely to look for a deals and make purchase online. It’s already been established that Pinterest can be a huge referrer of web traffic. We have seen a nice spike in search traffic for our Pinterest Joomla Module.

It almost seems like some people are bothered by the lack of disclosure of this practice of using SkimLinks. Personally I feel that the longer this was secret the more of a competitive advantage Pinterest has. Why would they disclose a clever tactic for making money on the internet? The internet is full of copycats. Remember that Pinterst’s users are getting a free service that is in private beta. Facebook is making money from their users, McDonald’s isn’t telling you everything that is in that hamburger, and Apple doesn’t disclose their manufacturing practices. If anything I think the founders of Pinterest are brilliant entrepreneurs.

Overall the concept of the website alone is compelling and you will find that the users of Pinterest are very enthusiastic about the service. The user behavior on Pinterest is unlike that of Facebook or Twitte users spend over 15 minutes per visit on the website pinning and repining content of their own and people they follow. Users can pin interesting content they find on the web or pictures that they take. Currently recipes are the most shared content on Pinterest. With a unique design, exploding user base, and monetization plan in place Pinterest is poised to be a hugely successful start up. The real question is who will next to replicate this business model.

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Last week a lot of people were shocked to find out that mostly everything your doing on your smartphone is being tracked by a piece of software called Carrier IQ. I can say that once I found out about this I was neither shocked or angry although I promptly found a way to remove it from my Android device. I can merely say that I was surprised that this software wasn’t hidden better. I have come to realize that people seem to equate status with their devices and feel connected them in a way I feel that humans have never before personified objects. A hunter and his weapon are different than a hipster and his iphone yet through the social interactions we have through our devices and the feelings associated with those interactions have created an unnatural bond with some. As we sign up, check in, tweet, like, +1, search, surf the web, drive w/ OnStar, gmail, bb message, im, skype, tag, tumble or do anything with a fairly modern device we are being tracked. A plethora of information is being generated about our spending habits, social interactions, events we attend, places we go, web habits, etc.

Soon enough we will all be carrying around enough processing power to handle individual tasks related to creating, reading, updating, deleting and querying our own information in the form of a smartphone. A smartphone that will one day open your car door, adjust your seat if needed, and start the radio on your favorite Pandora station. You will make purchases with it and never worry about losing out on reward points. Soon there will be networks that are faster than 4g with four times the battery life. Humans have a natural tendency to trade up luxury for a little less privacy sorta like a evolutionary remnant of safety in numbers.

If we didn’t have open devices like the Android platform how long would have Carrier IQ existed unnoticed? If detected would you even have an option to remove it? The infrastructure for most of the advanced technology we use is not created by the end user. Although the software may not be as well there are always coders. Ultimately the battle for privacy has fallen solely into the hands of the coder/hacker/programmer. They are the ones who can expose breaches, leak information, and ultimately secure it up to a point as security procedures followed by the end user create a circumstance that any programmer has no control over. So I would remind those who are concerned to be very mindful of your privacy.

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Dennis Ritchie and Jobs

I crazy the world we live in these days and how we idolize certain individuals and ignore others. I can’t sit here and say that Steve jobs didn’t contribute to the tech world. He had an amazing mind and created some very thoughtful while overpriced products.

Unfortunately an even more important man with an even greater mind and contribution died last weekend. We didn’t see any iPad shrines, no tweets, and barley any mention in tech world and hardly a mention in mainstream media. As a matter of fact all of Steve’s gadgets ran on an operating system that was basically invented by this man. Who is this great man you ask…Dennis Ritchie, he was head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the creator of the operating systems Multics and more notably Unix. His most prized accomplishment was creating the C programming language at Bell Labs with Ken Thompson. C is arguably the second most used programming language in the world. The operating system you use on your Mac was derived from UNIX as we as all Linux distributions. The entire internet, all of your apps, mobile OS’s, search engines etc. are all thanks to Dennis Ritchie. He didn’t use cheap labor from China and no employees killed themselves while he orchestrated this profound feat almost single handedly. So please give credit where credit is due, without Dennis Ritchie there is no Steve Jobs, no Bill Gates, no Larry Paige, no Mark Zuckerberg, nothing.

Dennis Ritchie didn’t drop out of college either. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in physics and applied mathematics and later on received his Ph.D. He also co-authored The C Programming Language. During his lifetime he received the National Medal of Technology from Bill Clinton (the United States highest award for technology), the Japan Prize for Information and Communication, Turing Award, and the Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The wealth his contributions have generated for individuals is unimaginable.

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson working at Bell Labs

Rest in Peace September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011
UPDATE 3/5/2012

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A lot of times I hear clients, SEO consultants even Rand, and others talk about other search engines. Then I ask myself what other search engines. Google is top dog and has been for a while and when the day comes that Google is no longer the top search engine we wont be using search engines any more. Instead we’ll be asking SIRI because typing is soooo old school. I have yet to see a client get the top spot Google and not be happy. There is too much traffic on Google and too much effort involved in getting the top spot in order to focus on any other search engine. Yahoo is a carcass of the company it used to be and the latest comScore report shows that they are at their lowest level ever…15.5% There shareholders are sick of lackluster results as well but that’s another story. Who even uses Yahoo? Or AOL? or ASK.com? I would guess they are people who still use Windows ME and still have a Motorola Startec flip phone or no cell phone at all. There is nothing wrong with using older technology or inferior search engines if thats your style.

Here at Incept we focus on one search engine and thats google. 10 years later these search engines are still playing catch up to Google’s algorithm. If you want spammy search results head over to Bing or Yahoo. Bing is nothing more than a Yahoo’s results rebranded, I wonder how long that will last. If you want to rank on one of those search engines buy an exact match domain name. Don’t worry if the only one left is a .mobi, you can rank that on the first page of Yahoo or Bing. Seriously an algorithm that doesn’t even filter our non top level domains that are an exact match, it’s almost as if a 6 year old wrote that algo. Just realize that for every 1 customer you get on Yahoo or Bing you would have gotten 6 on Google.

Google Marketshare

You don’t have to take my word…head over to comScore and check out the latest market share numbers. Effective SEO will focus on Google as a search engine and nothing else for the foreseeable future.

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PRODUCTIVITY

Evernote – If you an idea person like me you would enjoy using Evernote. I use it for random ideas or long term thinking, goals, plans, snippets from the web. It’s great for note taking at conferences, or idesa I want to revisit but don’t have time for at the moment. Even future blog posts etc. My latest Evernote I created involved listing my biggest mistakes I have made since launching my business a sort of mind hack I got from lifehacker.

Square – You need to get paid! Paypal is cool but Square is cooler. You can take credit cards on your cell phone (Android or iPhone) or iPad and you even get a free credit card reader. You can swipe or key in the card number and you don’t need a merchant account, credit check, or contract. Squareup.com

Codeanywhere – This is a nice app although some may not like the fact that it requires you to enter FTP information for website that you want to work on. This app basically allow you to access web files and edit them inside of a nice web interface. It features an FTP client, Syntax Highlighting, and unlimited undo/redo in case you muck something up.

Trustfax – We all know that Fax machines will become obsolete some day. But occasionally you need to send or receive a fax. Sometimes more often if you have a lot of clients that aren’t close by. Trustfax lets you receive faxes through your email and send them via the web.

Google Voice – I like Google voice for many reasons. One you can track and have a history of all phone calls to your Google Voice number online. All messages are saved and transcribed. They are translated into text and sent to you via SMS (not sure if that is a Sprint or Android only feature). You don’t have to give out your personal phone number to clients. If you get annoying sales people calling you, there is a feature to block them or any number. If you setup websites for clients and want to track the number of call they receive you can by setting them up with a Google Voice number.

WorkEtc – I love the piece of software. It handles money, invoices and expense tracking. You get project management with Gantt charts. There’s lead tracking and embeddable forms to add on to your website that will feed in the leads contact information. It’s CRM + Billing + Project Management = Bad Ass. All for under $40/month for one user. Integrates with Google Apps and they even have an app for Android/iPhone.

Remember The Milk – After I setup a website and how do I remember to bill my clients at exactly 12 months afterwards for hosting? I don’t haha….that’s why I use remember the milk for long term to do’s that I need a reminder for via email or SMS.

Google Analytics – Not sure if you heard the news or not buy you can view real time web traffic in Google analytics as well as new social metrics like +1′s. Not that Google Analytics wasn’t already the cream of the crop when it comes to web analytics software. Unless you want to spent some coin on Ominture.

Google Apps – If you follow my blog or know me personally you may gather that I am a Google whore. I wear Google clothing, rock an Android, give my clients free Google AdWords cash, Plaster Google stickers on my Mac, sign up for every Google beta, think that Internet Marketing is synonymous with just being on Google. I even still use Google Wave (love the meeting templates) and the list goes on. Now be forewarned I have read an interesting blog post about how one company was locked out of their documents and was S.O.L. On Google’s Business App website it says that they offer support and I have never had and issue but redundancy and backups are key for any business and you have no one but yourself to blame if you lose data. With Google Apps you get 25gb of storage, the most robust web based email solution around with IMAP support. Google calendar (use syncmate to sync with iCal), Google Docs w/ real time collaboration, and Google Sites, great if you want to build an intranet with no coding skills, and it’s a lot cheaper than Microsoft Enterprise server. Did I mention Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook interoperability. I think this is how Google will break into the Enterprise and introduce the Android platform to execs.

STORAGE

Dropbox – Dropbox is great for syncing files across multiple platforms and computers. At one time I had a PC, Mac, and a Linux box that I was using for my business. The intern was stuck with the PC, and I was transitioning from my Linux computer to my Mac. Dropbox was great as it played nice with all the platforms.

Box.net w/ FedEx Office enabled – Usually I wouldn’t recommend more than one storage app but box.net doesn’t require any downloads and has a slick drag and drop web interface. If you were lucky enough to score an HP Touchpad just download the box.net app and you will have 50gb of storage which is a real nice deal. Another great feature of Box.net is the ability to add in apps for greater functionality. You can integrate with LinkedIn, Salesforce, Google Docs, Office, FedEx Office and a shit ton more. I also run a Land Surveying company and we can print Surveys directly to FedEx on half sheets (18” x 24” paper) from our box.net account. I like that.

SOCIAL

Summify – If you haven’t signed up for Summify I highly recommend it especially if you use twitter actively. What Summify does is help filter out the noise by looking at your twitter stream or Facebook account and showing you the top 5 news stories that were tweeted or shared by your followers. If your following the right people you will see some great information that you may have missed.

Google Plus – Google plus is a great social network despite what Steve Yegge says. It’s growing but with only 40 million users it’s mostly geeks and early adopters. Find the right people to follow and you can find some interesting reads in your stream. Finding the right peeps depends on your industry.
LinkedIn – The value in LinkedIn revolves around seeking out the right groups and discussions. It’s another great place to get social with like minded folks and avoid the personal chatter of Facebook.

SECURITY

Cloudflare – It’s a hackers world these days and you can never be too secure. Protect yourself and your cloud. Cloudflare is great for reducing bots and web scrapers. It speeds up your websites, reduces spam, and blocks threats. You can also view blocked threats and see how much bandwidth Cloudflare saved you.

BONUS

Google Music – This is still in beta but if you need an invite email me and can send you one. This is basically iCloud for Android. It works seamlessly in the background by syncing a folder that you specify and if your on a Mac you it will sync your iTunes folder. Now you have have access to your music anywhere you have internet. You can even specify the amount of bandwidth it can use. Perfect for coders who like to rock headphones and ignore everyone….can’t you see I’m in my zone : )

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There aren’t many industries that have as many shady professionals as our industry. Some industries that are similar in terms of shady people include pain clinics, casinos, investment bankers, and people on craigslist. Seriously I love what I do and the power of Google but I get discouraged more and more as I see some of the practices or sheer lack of knowledge in our industry. Not to mention blog posts like this. Shit all over SEO if you want. The truth of the matter is that it works. So much so that I have launched a new business in an industry that has been decimated by the housing crisis (Land Surveying) and SEO alone is keeping it slammed. The hardest part for any business owner is finding a good SEO consultant that knows their shit.

One rule to go by is never ever accept help from an SEO company that calls you. The whole point of SEO and organic search is to generate leads from users that are interested in your products or services. If an SEO company can not find leads form themselves they surely cant find any for you. It fact they had to find you somehow. The fact that they found you in the first place means they are looking for low hanging fruit, in other words they are looking for a website that is easy to rank so they can milk you for a monthly fee and with minimal work.

Second I would ask or referrals. A good SEO consultant will be slammed! Why? Because they generate a lot of business for their clients. In turn these clients are happy they made a good decision that directly impacted their bottom line. Especially in this shaky economy when a business owner makes a high impact decision that provides an robust ROI they are going to brag to their fellow business owners and that particular SEO consultant or company will be netting more and more word of mouth business.

Third I would do research to see if a particular company is doing SEO for more than one client within the same vertical. It is an inherent conflict of interest for an SEO company to optimize two different websites for the same keyword. A lawyer doesn’t represent the plaintiff and the defendant.

Secondly there will come a time when a good SEO consultant realizes he can do better for himself optimizing his own websites versus a website for someone else. This will ultimately depend on how entrepreneurial this individual is and if they work for themselves or a large company.

Lastly I would advise against hiring a large company that did not rank well for a large number of competitive keywords such as “SEO Company” “Internet Marketing” “Web Design” etc. The reason I say a large number of competitive terms is the fact that this type of intellectual capital is very hard to amass and scale up effectively. A smart SEO consultant doesn’t give out secrets and has to do a lot of research to stay up and ahead of the game. Recent changes to google’s algorithm a.k.a. Farmer/Panda update means that tactics that were effective a few months ago will now cause your rankings to decrease. An SEO Consultant at a large company with a large workload may not even be aware of these recent changes nor have ample time to adjust tactics.

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As you may know Amazon’s cloud is down…well at least one section of their cloud based on the east coast of the United States. This has impacted some big websites like Reddit, Hootsuite, Foursquare, Tumblr, Quora. I noticed first thing this morning since I am an avid reader of Reddit, and I like to jump on hootsuite right after that. It’s fascinating to see how one outage in on one datacenter can take down such a large swathe of the social web. And the reason that happened is because Amazon has built up a reputation as having the most fail proof datacenter available. They have been commonly known in the industry as being “Digg Proof” as their servers have the ability to expand capacity and bandwidth as needed so if you are on Oprah and everyone decides to jump on your website Amazon will stretch out your bandwidth so your site doesn’t go down with the overabundance of server requests and you don’t lose out on web visitors and sales. This type of datacenter architecture in very important to Amazon as they are one of the largest online retailers and their bandwidth usage during the normal year is only a fraction of the bandwidth that they use during the holiday season. The irony of the situation is vivid. Seems as of this post some of the more important websites that were affected by the outage have been restored.

Amazon has been tight lipped about their datacenter issues as they most likely don’t want to shed light on their vulnerabilities and give a leg up to the competition offering competing services. But it basically boils down to human error…check out their official statement below…

Just a short note to let you know that the team continues to be all-hands on deck trying to add capacity to the affected Availability Zone to re-mirror stuck volumes. It’s taking us longer than we anticipated to add capacity to this fleet. When we have an updated ETA or meaningful new update, we will make sure to post it here. But, we can assure you that the team is working this hard and will do so as long as it takes to get this resolved.

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