On Wednesday at 12PM I’ll be giving a talk at Gangplank about product development in startups and what I feel are the ten milestones you’ll encounter that will help guide your way. If you’re in the Phoenix area and are developing a product or thinking about developing one in a startup environment I’m hoping it turns out to be a really good discussion. I don’t generally talk much in public so this is a rare occasion to hear me ramble.
Gangplank is located at 290 E. El Prado, Chandler, AZ, it’s on the second floor. Here’s a map.
Last week we announced that Six Apart and JumpBox have been working together to vastly simplify the deployment of Movable Type Pro. This new product called “Virtual Movable Type by JumpBox” is a JumpBox virtual appliance that bundles all the components required to run Movable Type together in a single module that deploys in minutes. For Movable Type this represents a vast simplification of their present install process and is a great confirmation of what we’ve been working on at JumpBox.
“The virtual appliance makes it radically easier to get started and allows anyone to quickly experience the flexibility, scalability and power of Movable Type,” said Ed Anuff, EVP and GM of the Movable Type Division at Six Apart. “You can get up and running immediately, while reducing the cost of configuration and maintenance. And it’s a snap for anyone who wants to evaluate the platform to get started, whether that’s on a desktop running VMWare or Parallels, a large-scale deployment on Amazon’s EC2 or anything in between.”
Distributing software in this way is a huge step forward for ISVs like Six Apart, it allows them to put their software into less technical people’s hands and to give them a good experience while doing it. That’s what JumpBox is all about.
Just wondering if anyone is heading to VMWorld in Las Vegas next week and would like to meet? I’ll be at VMWorld Tues-Thurs and would love to hear some experiences with JumpBox, virtual appliances and virtualization or cloud computing in general.
The next iteration of Desert Code Camp is going to be May 31 at University of Advancing Technology.
University of Advancing Technology
2625 W. Baseline Road
Tempe, Arizona 85283
This always draws a good crowd. It’s a pretty broad event though it tends to have a slant toward Microsoft technology. Ruby is also well represented, but really it’s a good way to get out and meet fellow geeks in Arizona. I’m going to be up in Portland for RailsConf, but JumpBox is sponsoring the event and Sean will be doing some kind of presentation.
Google recently announced a new cloud based application deployment system called Google App Engine. I’ve been playing around with App Engine for the last few days and it’s really interesting. If you build an app for it you’re REALLY locked into Google, but the benefits of the system are pretty compelling. Since the SDK they released is Open Source we decided to put together a JumpBox for it.
The JumpBox gives you a drop in place system for doing Google App Engine development that’s contained in an isolated environment within a virtual machine. It runs exactly the same on Mac, Windows or Linux and gives you a development environment that lets you take advantage of great virtualization features like snapshots. It will run from a single download on Parallels Desktop, any VMWare product, Virtual Iron, Microsoft Virtual PC/Server and Xen Open Source in fully virtualized mode.
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.
The JumpBox for Google App Engine Development is just something we put together because it looked interesting, if people find it useful we’ll continue developing it and tracking Google’s SDK releases. I think there are a lot of things we could add to it to make it a really useful tool for developing apps. If you have any suggestions definitely let me know.
We recently sent Sean off to be interviewed about JumpBox for the Scoble Show. The episode was posted last night and is included below. Check it out if you want to know a little more about what we’re doing.
After a quiet couple months, things are really cracking now with JumpBox. We had some great stuff queued up that took a lot longer to get out than I expected. The funny thing is that the product was ready, but it took a while to line up the rest of the pieces. So what have we been up to?
So what this means is that JumpBox now provides a single virtual machine download that will run the same on any VMWare product, Parallels, Microsoft Virtual PC/Virtual Server, Virtual Iron and Xen Open Source. Now that’s portability. One download, run it on Mac, Windows, Linux using the virtualization platform of your choice. It’s simple, quick, flexible and powerful, everything software should be.
That’s some pretty cool stuff, but we weren’t quite done yet, so today we announced the release of the JumpBox Proving Grounds and eight new JumpBoxes. The Proving Grounds is our beta user community which we are using to get new JumpBoxes into people’s hands much faster. We released eight beta JumpBoxes today, and here’s a secret, there’s seven more sitting in the queue. Want to check them out, then get your invite now.
Here’s what’s available today to people who join the Proving Grounds.
BTW, we’re also doing a joint Webinar with Virtual Iron on December 12 so if you want to learn more about JumpBox or Virtual Iron it’s a great opportunity. You can signup here.
Man, it’s getting harder and harder to blog any more. There’s a lot going on in my life that I should be writing about, but never do. Not sure why.
We launched JumpBox in July and it’s moving along nicely. We’ve since released two platform point releases and one new JumpBox for the Twiki Enterprise Wiki system. It was a scary thing to launch the company with no idea whether or not anyone would be willing to pay for what we were doing. Thankfully they were and we easily beat expectations for our first month. Now the challenge is just getting the growth we need to become profitable. We have some really interesting stuff in the pipeline for release in November which is pretty exciting.
Perhaps more important though, it looks like after 37 years I’m finally going to get married. Oct 27 is the date, exactly one year after Lisa and I met for the first time. I’ve tended to not share too much about my personal life, but this is a pretty important event and it’s amazing that I finally found someone who is as quirky as I am.
That about sums up my life right now, business and getting married. Could be worse I guess.
“Making it easy to throw away”, that sounds like a pretty odd benefit to a piece of software. But it’s a characteristic that is more desirable than we’d usually admit. Mac OS X has shown us how this can work for desktop software and it’s a great feature. It makes it really easy to try software without worrying about it mucking up your system, if you don’t like it just throw it away. Of course if you do like it, it’s also easy to just keep using it. This is what JumpBox brings to server software. Think of it as server software that doesn’t muck up your system and if you don’t like it you just throw it away.
This is what’s been occupying my time for the last year or so and today we released our first production builds based on the JumpBox Platform 1.0. Nine JumpBoxes are currently available (but if you catch us at OSCon or the TechCrunch party this week we’ll give you a DVD with all the apps plus an unreleased tenth JumpBox). Here’s the list of current applications
These things are really easy to get running. All you need is virtualization software from VMWare or Parallels and they work exactly the same whether you use them on Mac OS X, Windows or Linux. So maybe there are a few other benefits beyond being able to throw them away.
Anyway, it’s a big day for my little company. It’s been a year since we started it and it’s a strange feeling to move from being a venture into actually being a business. Now is where the real work begins though.
Just wanted to post a quick note to say I’m in Portland this week for the O’Reilly Open Source convention thru Thursday and will be at the TechCrunch party in San Jose Friday night. If you’re going to be at either of those events I’d love to meet some new people while we’re here. I can be contacted via email kstaken@xmldatabases.org.
Kimbro Staken exploring creative use of technology and whatever else happens to seem interesting.
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September 21st, 2008 by 
Kimbro Staken 
Last week we 
