A True Bollywood Tale

One of my favorite parts of my job is meeting people and watching them innovate with Cloud technology. So I want to tell you about a recent weekend trip to the Bay Area.

Last weekend I was in Mountain View, CA to attend OpenSocials WeekendApps event. This was held at the Googleplex, and was designed for people to build social networking applications in a weekend. The event began Friday evening with proposals for various projects, and teams were formed around the most popular ones. Then it was time to work non-stop until Sunday, when applications were judged and a winner was picked. The ground rules were that applications had to use the OpenSocial framework, had to be completed and in production by Sunday.

It was quite an experience even as an observer! To begin with, Twitter was humming with updates from all corners, while others streamed the event on the Net, and still others created drawings or documented the action with photos.

One of the participants summed the weekend up as follows:
Day 1. Wow, I’m at Google.
Day 2. Wow, I’m at Google.
Day 3. Wow, I’m tired!

Sunday evenings winner was a really cool Orkut application, Bollywood Music, built by the Dhingana.com team. Bollywood Music was built to allow users to discover music with their friends, send musical scraps to their friends, dedicate songs or playlists to their friends, and create and share playlists. One of the most interesting social features — at least in my opinion — is that Bollywood Music mines musical data from all Orkut users and then displays the most popular songs and playlists on the application home page.

The team built the application using Amazon S3 to store their static data (images, JavaScript, and style sheets), as well as real-time data about songs. Moving forward they are hope to use Amazon EC2 and SimpleDB as well. (The initial version did not leverage the entire Amazon Web Services platform for other reasons.)

If you have an interesting website or application built using Amazon Web Services, we’d love to hear about it!

— Mike

Modified 6/2/2022 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, non-working links and images in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.