AWS News Blog
Renkoo’s Booze Mail: EC2, and the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster
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My friends Adam Rifkin and Joyce Park are the co-founders of Renkoo. Renkoo simplifies the process of getting together with a bunch of friends for an event or simply for a tasty beverage or two.
Last month Adam told me that they were planning to launch a Facebook application and that they wanted to host it on Amazon EC2 in order to accommodate what they hoped would be a rapidly growing user base. I got him signed up for the beta and their application (Booze Mail) launched just a few days ago. Using this application you can send a virtual tasty beverage — anything from a simple glass of water to a throat-scorching Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster — to anyone on your Facebook friends list.
As Adam explains, “With the pressure of rejection removed from the situation, a sender can make offers to deepen friendships without trepidation.” This is where things get even more interesting. The recipient of the virtual drink can redeem it (by printing out an “IOU” style coupon) or by using Renkoo’s scheduling facility to organize an actual, face-to-face meeting.
People are sending around virtual drinks at an ever-increasing rate and they’ve been using EC2 to good advantage. Looking at the Appaholic traffic graph I see that the user base has grown from less than 100 at the end of June to over 13,500 as of this morning. I don’t know how many EC2 instances they are using, but I do know (because they told me) that they aren’t too nervous about growing. As Adam says:
“Thank goodness for EC2. Otherwise this would be making me very very nervous because we have no hardware, rackspace, or bandwidth that can handle where I think we’re going.”
Instead, they are able to focus on the features and functionality of their application.
Congratulations to Adam and to Joyce on the launch!
— Jeff;
PS – Feel free to add me to your friends list if we’ve met….