October 30, 2009
This coming Sunday is the big Bay Area data mining “unconference“, and with more than 200 people already signed up, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
I’ll be presenting at some point during the day – since it’s an unconference, you don’t really know who’s going to be talking about what/when. My topic is “Elastic web mining using open source (Hadoop/Cascading/Bixo) in Amazon’s EC2 cloud“.
If you scan the list of attendees (click the “RSVPs” tab near the top of the LinkedIn event page) you’ll see a lot of high powered executives, consultants and researchers, so I’m looking forward to really great lobby conversations.
Many thanks to the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the ACM for helping out with the event, which is taking place from noon to 7:30pm at the Hacker’s Dojo in Mountain View. Greg Makowski is the organizer, so he’s probably going a little bit crazy right now 🙂
October 28, 2009
And that’s good news for our customers! In their official announcement, Amazon said:
Finally, we are also lowering prices on all Amazon EC2 On-Demand compute instances, effective on November 1st. Charges for Linux-based instances will drop 15% — a small Linux instance will now cost just 8.5 cents per hour of computing, compared to the previous price of 10 cents per hour.
Since your Bixolabs usage fee is based on AWS pricing, you directly benefit from this reduction, since Linux-based instances are what we use for web mining. Visit the EC2 pricing page for more details on the base price we use for calculating your usage fees.
October 27, 2009
It’s time to raise the curtain a bit on our new web mining platform.
We’re currently running test crawls for early partners, and tuning up the GUI for the Bixolabs admin console.
In the meantime, we’ll be adding more details to this site about web mining in general, and how Bixolabs deals with some of the very unusual issues you run into while crawling the web (video poker link farms in Korea, for example).