The Rackspace Cloud Gathers Velocity

// June 23rd, 2009 // Comments Off // Events

Striving to keep up with the sometimes blinding speed of the internet age?

Join Matt Tanase, Slicehost Founder, for a 5-minute keynote at the Velocity conference, June 22-24 in San Jose, where industry leaders will study and learn from sites like Flickr and Facebook, discuss the latest performance tools that make pages load faster, explore the benefits of automation, and chat with developers on their feelings about the cloud.

Check out the details, come by and visit Mike and Jeff at the Booth #8, or give us a shout on Twitter @mosso or hit Matt up directly @zenmatt – we’d love to hear from you!

The Rackspace Cloud at Structure 09

// June 19th, 2009 // Comments Off // Community, Events

Join The Rackspace Cloud, Om Malik, and The GigaOM Network this June 25th in San Francisco for an exploration of the future of the cloud. Lew Moorman, President of Cloud and Chief Strategy Officer for Rackspace Hosting, will be participating in a panel titled “Building the Perfect Host for Web Apps” starting at 9:00 a.m. at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

Developed by the GigaOm Network, Structure 09 is an event dedicated to Cloud Computing and Internet infrastructure that “brings together the customers, entrepreneurs, and early influencers that drive the tech industry,” and focuses on specific tech categories that are poised for dramatic growth. Meet industry-leading vendors and VCs, walk away with strategies and actionable best practices, learn specifics in workshops, convert fixed costs into marginal costs, interact with peers, and network with thought leaders.

Topics of discussion will range from the potential profitability of specialized clouds and other economics of cloud systems, to managing things like broadband and IP address depletion, from 4G wireless infrastructure, to valuing risk in the cloud.

As Om points out, “With the economic challenges facing companies today, there’s never been a better time to figure out how the cloud paradigm can help you find new competitive advantages.” This idea is one among many of the cloud items being discussed, and, with the noise increasing around cloud computing, Structure 09 promises to be your filter with their single-day, focused event.

Want to see it all for yourself? Check out the details and register to attend here. And if you end up there, stop by the booth to say hello to Mike Welsh or direct message Lew @lewmoorman to say hello!

Musopen and The Rackspace Cloud Make Music

// June 18th, 2009 // Comments Off // Announcements, Community

Let Freedom Ring! Musopen.com opens the doors to music lovers everywhere. Aiming to “set music free,” and to become “the largest online repository of music in the public domain,” Musopen provides both sheet and audio versions of copyright-free music for fans around the world. And with this large collection of readily available music, Musopen has to be prepared for the moment when listeners around the world logon and begin to share and download music all at once.

Based on this need for scalability, Musopen turned to The Rackspace Cloud’s Cloud Files to store and deliver their inventory; “We were looking for a scalable file hosting solution that would adapt as traffic spiked,” explains Aaron Dunn, founder of Musopen.com.

While it was this scalability that led Musopen.com to The Rackspace Cloud, it was internal upload tools and CDN that enticed Aaron and team to store their stuff on Cloud Files. “I didn’t trust relying on 3^rd party tools to access files on Amazon S3 – I wanted my solution to provide upload tools themselves. Even better, The Rackspace Cloud comes with a content distribution network with each file. Not only was it easier to use than Amazon’s cloud front, but I found it to be much faster.”

At the end of the day, what about The Rackspace Cloud makes Aaron and the team at Musopen.com smile? “We love how easy it is to get files in the cloud – not to mention how inexpensive the offering is.”

Thanks so much for your kind words, Aaron! We have to admit that we see Musopen as somewhat of a kindred spirit – our former name, Mosso, is also an Italian musical term meaning, “fast, passionate.”

Want to learn more about The Rackspace Cloud? Hop on Live Chat or give us a ring at 1-877-934-0409 – we’re here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and we love to talk about this stuff.

Already floating on The Rackspace Cloud and want to share your story? Drop us a line at Spotlight@rackspacecloud.com.

Either way – be sure to drop by Musopen.com to browse their music, listen to their radio, check out the open source Music Theory Textbook, or contribute to their catalogue.

Share Your Fortune with FortuneKookie.com

// June 16th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Announcements, Community

While these little slips of paper may not be the type of fortune to pull you out of the economic recession, they do stand a chance to make you smile. How often have you been to a Chinese restaurant and gotten a cool fortune that you wanted to save? There aren’t many sensible options for keeping those little slips of paper – you can stash them in your wallet or purse, but we all know that they will eventually disappear.

FortuneKookie.com solves this problem for fortune collectors everywhere. FortuneKookie is a website that makes storing and viewing fortunes simple and fun. FortuneKookie.com allows users to save and share their fortune cookie fortunes in a personalized account.

Since FortuneKookie is optimized for mobile browsing, people can also store their fortunes directly from their table at the restaurant. Or, if they want to wait until they get home, they can visit FortuneKookie.com. On this fully-featured site, fortune fanatics can extend beyond their own destiny by also reading the fortunes of their friends.

There’s even a FortuneKookie Facebook app that allows users to store their fortunes without ever leaving their Facebook page – and, if their friend has the app in their box, they can check out each other’s fortunes. The Facebook app box leads the user to an interactive Flash fortune cookie. Fortune finders can break open these cookies to see their own fortunes, their friend’s fortunes, or seek out new fortunes altogether.

Additionally, FortuneKookie.com continues to ramp-up its marketing efforts, including: printing FortuneKookie.com on the back of fortune cookie messages, expanding its ability to message its 17,000 followers on Twitter, and having articles published on MakeUseOf.com.

Since Facebook, mobile phones, and other miscellaneous marketing efforts can be the bearers of excessive traffic, FortuneKookie.com was wise to plan ahead. “Though our previous server was (mostly) solid,” explains Timothy Laurent co-founder of FortuneKookie.com, “we were fearful of explosive growth and our ability to upscale our architecture with that growth. The last thing we want is a digg-effect situation where 10,000’s of potential users are bouncing off of an error page thrown up by our server. A downed server means lost revenue. The Rackspace Cloud’s Cloud Sites offering has given us the opportunity to add the next five million users without a second thought to the capacity of our servers,” says Laurent. “And, any questions or concerns that have come up, have been quickly answered by The Rackspace Cloud’s fantastic customer service folks.”

Want to experience some of this “fantastic customer service” for yourself? Give us a shout at 1-877-934-0409 or drop us a line on Live Chat. We’re here 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and we love to talk about The Cloud.

Or maybe you have your own story that you’d like to share. Give us a shout at twitter@mosso.com.

Whatever you do, just be sure to swing by and get your fortune first – who knows what words of wisdom that little slip of digital paper holds for you…

Earn Up to $2k with Web Designs for Clouds and Open Source Communities with The Rackspace Cloud

// June 10th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Community, Development

Help us design the website that will serve as the vortex of Cloud Development.

All of us over here at The Rackspace Cloud have the benefit of being able to see how cloud computing effects both partner companies and open source communities. Partners like RightScale and Jungle Disk are working to help developers manage the cloud and utilize the cloud, and the open source community is also developing tools and software to better the cloud – all of this industrious creativity, however, is scattered throughout the internet. We think that – forces combined – these two entities could harness some incredible creative power.

Of course, web design isn’t our forte, and so we are calling on the crowd for a little bit of help. Help us design a stellar website by submitting a storyboard layout of your idea. To facilitate this, we are utilizing a competitive development web service called TopCoder - see this website for more details. The best design takes $2,000, second $1,000, and third $500. We’ll keep an eye out for your designs until 8:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Tuesday, June 16, 2009.

Partners interested in learning more about our cloud development outreach efforts are encouraged to contact Jim Curry, VP of Corporate Development, directly at jim.curry@rackspace.com.

We can’t wait to see what you brew up.