Barton's Blog

At SXSW interactive I came across the booth for the cloud-based app Animoto.  I was intrigued since I have seen a couple of Amazon Web Services presentations and both held up Animoto as a great example of an application that would have been impossible to deliver any other way.

Animoto, which creates videos for consumers and corporations, relies on a huge amount of processing power and has had gigantic spikes in usage (e.g. going from 70 servers to 8,500 servers in 5 days).   You can say they put the “elastic” in Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud.”

Here is an interview I did with Animoto co-founder and President Jason Hsiao.

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Some of the things Jason talks about:

• Total number of servers owned by Animoto = 0
• The most expensive piece of equipment in the office is the espresso machine.
• How the enterprise side of the business has taken off.
• Why they’re based in New York and where the founders came from.
• How their extreme processor intensiveness allows them to work extra closely with Amazon.
• See how he deftly avoids the question about what feature he is looking forward to seeing from Amazon, they must be working on something 😉

Extra-credit reading:

• Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos on Animoto

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 8:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.