Amazon Web Services Blog

Earlier this year I blogged about the VholdR, a wearable camera combined with a video sharing system. VholdR is designed for people who participate in action sports such as mountain biking, snowboarding, or skiing.

As noted previously, the hardware component is a small and rugged video camera suitable for use in extreme conditions -- ski slopes, competitive cycling, and so forth. The camera can record 2 full hours of video on an embedded MicroSD card. Once mounted, leveled (using a pair of lasers, no less) and aimed, a single, glove-friendly switch controls the recording process. There's also a microphone built-in.

Marc Barros, CEO of VholdR, stopped by Amazon headquarters last month and brought me up to speed on their progress. They are now in full production and now has users in 57 countries sharing videos on the site.

I am firmly in the "none of the above" category, with respect to action sports, but Marc was kind enough to leave a VholdR for me so I spent some time wandering around my house. If you watch the video embedded in this post you can see my dog, my backyard, my home office, and my bird feeders. You can also go here to see the video on the VholdR site.

Marc told me that the site stores the customer's raw, high-quality video in Amazon S3. They also do flexible, on-demand video transcoding on Amazon EC2 and store the finished files back in S3 for delivery via the website.

Of course, if you want to buy one of these devices for yourself or as a gift, you can get one at your favorite online retailer.

-- Jeff;

PS - They have some job openings too.

Some interesting webinars and training sessions are scheduled to take place in the very near future:

• On November 18th, GigaSpaces and CohesiveFT will join forces to present a webinar titled Cloud Enablement with Security and Control. Intended for IT executives, developers, and administrators the webinar will address some perceived barriers to adoption of cloud computing including security, control, and portability. Again, pre-registration is a must. Attendees will get to learn more about VPN-Cubed from CohesiveFT and XAP from GigaSpaces.
• The AWS Developer Bootcamp will be held in Redwood City, California on December 2nd and in Boston on December 4th. This hands-on course will walk developers through the AWS infrastructure services and show them how to deploy their applications in the cloud. Developers should have some experience using Java to build web applications. They will create a fully functioning video application with storage, queueing, transcoding, cataloging, and hosting functions. The course costs $175 per person and registration is a must.
• On December 10th through 12th, rPath will conduct a three day training class in Redwood City, California. The course, Enabling Applications for Cloud Computing Featuring Amazon EC2, will introduce the concept of cloud computing, present the features and benefits of current commercial cloud computing solutions, and guids participants through creating an example infrastructure within a cloud, employing rBuilder Online and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in hands-on labs. Once again, you'll need to register!

If you are planning an event which belongs on this page, drop me a note.

-- Jeff;