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:
Pau for now…
Posted by Barton George 
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