The Google App Engine is the talk of the town this week giving developers access to Google infrastructure and Google customers. If you haven’t heard about it you may be an ostrich and need to read some of these. If you didn’t get one of the 10k beta invites, no worries- you can still play with it. We just made it significantly easier to tinker by releasing a JumpBox for the Google App Engine SDK. This is a freebie and it comes pre-registered so you download it and fire it up and you’re playing with App Engine in minutes. You can leave comments/feedback on it here. And this is our “official” announcement:

Google recently announced a new cloud based application deployment system called Google App Engine. We found this to be a pretty interesting system and since the SDK they released is Open Source we decided to put together a JumpBox for it.
It’s a great solution if you want to play with the Google App Engine SDK without really installing it on your system. It’s also perfect as an integration point for a small team working together on a Google App Engine project.

Google made it possible to build applications for App Engine using several different mechanisms and the JumpBox comes with CGI, Google Webapp and Django environments setup and ready for development. It’s also a really great way to just kick the tires of the different frameworks before committing to development.

Also, since this is a JumpBox our backup system is included which allows you to backup your source code and development data to network shares or Amazon S3.

We recently launched a new subscription model for JumpBox that makes it essentially the Netflix of Open Source. JumpBox Open is a yearly subscription that gives the buyer access to every JumpBox in our Open Source collection for the next year. We’ve handpicked twenty-five of the most popular open source server apps including wikis, CRM systems, developer tools, bug trackers, CMS’s and made them super easy to use. They install in less than a minute on any OS and the experience is identical across all applications so it’s now trivial to try out five wiki’s back-to-back and use the one that’s most ideal for your situation.

I’ve been meaning to write more about what we’ve been up to but we’ve been wrapped up with this product launch and are finally coming up for air. We had the opportunity to announce JumpBox Open at the Under the Radar event in Mountain View, CA the other week. We were one of 32 startups that presented and it was great to meet a bunch of other founders. Julie from bub.blicio.us took a bunch of pictures and Vator.tv captured all the presos from the event. Here’s video of our five minutes of fame on stage:

I’m now digging into our google ads and landing pages and will have some thoughts to share shortly on what I’m learning from this process.

We’ve priced the JumpBox Open subscription at $199 introductory with the theory that the hours people save on just one application will justify purchasing access to the entire collection. We have some interesting infrastructure-type JumpBoxes in the pipeline that should make the collection make a lot of sense for people. Note: the pricing will be increasing as we build more value into the library, so if you like what’s in there now, lock in a subscription while it’s cheap.

I had the opportunity to appear as a guest on Robert Scoble’s show when I was up in Half Moon Bay last month. He just posted the interview this evening (~20min). In it we talk about virtual appliances, open source server applications and how our technology is eliminating days/hours of setup time and bringing an entire class of server software within reach of the average, non-technical user. Big thanks to Robert for having me on his show and to Francine Hardaway for the introduction!

Leave comments here if you have any.

We just launched what we call the “Proving Grounds” for JumpBox. It’s a private invite-only community that gets access to use unlocked, pre-release JumpBoxes. We added the following eight new open source server applications and have a bunch more on the way:

There’s already a decent velocity of member signups - we’ll probably throttle back membership at some point so grab an invite code while we’re handing them out freely.

Spigit is an interesting site that functions almost like a “fantasy league for startup ideas.” We’re on their homepage now featured as the “launch of the day.” I’m using this opportunity to market test this idea we have for offering “on-site Software as a Service.” The thinking is basically this:

How many people in big companies are currently precluded from using hosted services they’d like to use (like Basecamp for project management) simply because policy dictates that they can’t store sensitive company info outside the corporate firewall. What if it were possible to run Basecamp locally within the company with no additional hardware but have it continue to run as SaaS?

There’s a full explanation of OSaaS concept on our spigit listing. If you have any thoughts on this subject, I’d love to hear your take. Leave a comment here- or better yet, create a spigit account and chime in with your feedback there. The spigit market is a neat idea. I had the chance to interview their CEO in a podcast recently and they’re all about tapping wisdom of crowds knowledge using their pseudo stock market game - very interesting.

A couple people have asked me recently how we do our Grid7 podcast. We have a humble talk show we do with entrepreneurs and innovators bi-weekly over on Grid7.com and we just did our 24th episode. There may be more streamlined ways of doing things but these are the steps involved from my perspective:

Capture

“Garbage in, garbage out,” as they say. The idea is to capture the highest quality raw audio to start with. If the guest is local I try to conduct the interview in person because I think the face-to-face interaction is a better dynamic. I use the internal mic on my MacBook and record directly to a track in Garageband. If the guest is remote and I have a good internet connection, I’ll use my skype account with skypeout and capture using a great piece of software called Audio Hijack Pro. It’s nice because you can isolate the inbound and outbound audio to separate tracks and equalize the volume levels later. It generates an mp3 on your desktop and is straight forward. If I have a crappy connection I can record calls on my Treo using an app I have called CallRec. This captures the conversation as a wav file stored on the SD card. With a 2GB SD card, storage is a non-issue.

Produce

I use Garageband to refine the raw audio, add an intro/outro to the track and do the final mixdown. Provided the call quality was good, there should be no need to apply a noise filter. I have heard that Audacity is a good open source audio editor that’s available though I have not used it personally. Once I have things sounding right, I export the track to iTunes, right-click on the track -> “get info” and adjust the details in the ID3 tag. I then right-click and convert it to MP3. Once it creates the MP3, right-click-> “show in finder,” grab that file and ftp it to our server.

Publish

Last step is to publish the audio track to our site. We use Wordpress as a CMS for our website and it has an open source plugin called Podpress that makes it easy to serve a podcast. Provided you have the Podpress plugin installed and activated, you author a post as you would normally do for a text entry only you click the “Add Media” button under the textarea and tell Podpress the URL of your MP3. I like to add a paragraph or two on our guest explaining his/her background and the gist of the episode and also include a headshot. If you’re writing any type of extended entry, you want to author it in a text editor and then copy/paste it into the browser (I’ve had Firefox crash after authoring a long entry in the browser and it sucks). Podpress generates the proper RSS feed and even gives you a flash-based audio player that allows the visitor to listen directly from the browser. It handles stats and can syndicate your podcast via the iTunes Store.

Promote

You’ll probably want to list your podcast in the iTunes Store (and “store” may be a misnomer - it’s just a directory so you don’t have to charge $$ to be listed). There’s plenty of other podcast directories out there- google around. I added ours to Everyzing so that the audio itself is indexed and made searchable. Running your RSS through Feedburner allows you to get stats on the listeners that subscribe via RSS. Depending on the subject matter of each episode you can then submit them to various news sites as you go. We held the #1 slot all yesterday on news.ycombinator.com from an interview I just did with the Zenter founders.

Monetize

We have not actually tried to monetize our podcast yet. It currently serves more as a vessel of exposure for us and an in-roads to make connections and meet new people. There are various options for services that provide a simple way to splice in ads dynamically. I went though and researched a bunch at one point and found Kiptronic to be the most promising (plus it sounds like they now support video blogs as well if you’re into that). AdSense is always an option for the site itself. Feedburner lets you display ads in the RSS feed itself once you cross the 500 listener threshold. I experimented with Comission Junction but saw zero dollars ever come out of it. Amazon affiliate program was equally as dismal in terms of what it generated. We’re now in the Google PPA beta so that will be interesting to see how well it works. Short of having a program so popular that you can command a dedicated monthly sponsorship, a dynamically-inserted ad via a service like Kiptronic seems like the way to go.

Anyways, of the million ways of hosting a podcast, that’s how we do things with Grid7. If you have a podcast of your own, what tools do you use?