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Werner Vogels, the chief technical officer of amazon.com, has spent the last five years developing his company’s vision of technology.

Prior to joining Amazon, Vogels worked as a computer science researcher at Cornell University, where he investigated the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computer systems.

He was kind enough to answer us when we stopped by Thursday to ask him “What’s up?”

What brings you to PICNIC?
“First of all, it was great to get an invitation to speak here,” Werner says. His driving force is a deep-set curiosity in the Dutch start-up culture: “I want to get a better understanding of how this interesting mix of creativity and everything is working, because Amsterdam is unique in this sense.”

What do you hope to gain from PICNIC?
“I don’t know yet, I like to be surprised and I am really expecting to be wowed.” There are myriad innovative things going on here on the lawns of Picnic. To get a better understanding of the whole scene, Vogels is going to hold a brainstorming session with young students, who he finds to be “usually bursting with ideas.”

But Amazon’s chief technical officer also hopes to give something back and share some of his own ideas with the next generation.

Business is changing
The way businesses are created is changing radically: whereas you used to need a lots of money up front to become successful, entrepreneurs have increasing access to both expertise and a range of services to build up their idea. “Everyone is trying to be the next YouTube or Facebook”, Vogels says, but many companies fail to build a sustainable business. “I will be bringing some good start-ups on stage and talk to them,” he said, to highlight the challenges they faced and show what they did to create the so-called long tail.

A green(er) Amazon
When asked what Amazon is doing in terms of becoming a greener company, Vogels said that the world’s largest eTailer has been optimizing their fulfillment process a lot in recent years, moving away from plastic and toward better, more sustainable packaging as well as giving customers more insight into the carbon footprint of their order.

Also, Vogels notes, Amazon is making their data centers a lot more efficient, which has the welcome side effect of becoming more green.

This video interview was created in collaboration with Joitske Hulsebosch

Zarafa is a software package designed to allow you to share your email and calendars via Microsoft Outlook, your Windows Mobile (and Apple iPhone) device and also access your personal data right through your browser.

Although the official Zarafa page suggests that installing Zarafa is a piece of cake, I have found that said cake was a tad dry, hard to digest and generally: hard to get out of its packaging and it tooks us a number of tries to get Zarafa running with Plesk.

In order to keep others from pulling their hair out, getting mad at their servers, starting to doubt their technical skill and firing off angry emails and posting nasty threads in public forums, I decided to create this tutorial to help you install Zarafa 6.04 on a CentOS 5.2 server with Plesk 8.6.

Please note that the following steps worked for me and I was able to reproduce them on my home server and got the desired result. My main server runs CentOS 5.2 (32-bit version), with Plesk 8.6, Apache 2.2.3, PHP 5.2.6 and mySQL 5.0.58 and I have it set-up to use a dedicated IP for Zarafa Webaccess and also got myself a SSL certificate.

This tutorial assumes that you have a domain called domain.com where you are going to host Zarafa Webaccess and an email account at emaildomain.com - both domains can be the same, this does not alter the tutorial in any way.

It is further assumed that you have set-up domain.com with a dedicated IP and SSL certificate inside Plesk.

The SMS capabilities of Windows Mobile devices have come a long way since first being introduced as part of the Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PC Phone Edition, but power users like me find that a handful of nifty features are still missing.

Trinket Software’s first Windows Mobile application, PowerSMS, is bound to change this by giving you new tools to play with and making your life easier.

First impressions

When you first fire up PowerSMS, you will be greeted by its straight-to-the-point interface. You have exactly eight options (if you count the buttons) to choose from - and they are finger friendly!

I would like to believe that the options are sorted by usefulness, at least, I ended up texting myself more often (as a reminder) than scheduling a new message.

Post-It® - SMS style

PowerSMS includes a handy feature that lets you send yourself text messages with the tap of a button.

Especially for users with unlimited text messaging plans, this feature is a real godsend, allowing you to jot down your thoughts in the middle of the night,

For users with unlimited messaging packages, this is a real godsend, especially if you, like me, have the greatest ideas of the day in the middle of nowhere, with no WiFi or 3G available.

Advanced Herd Management

When you find yourself spending more and more time with your family, friends or colleagues and you want to inform them all at the same time that you wont be making it, you will love PowerSMS’ group SMS feature.

Start out by setting up your group: for example: your closest friends who you are planning to meet for a get-together on Friday, to discuss the recent wave of layoffs and how to combat unemployment amongst your group.

Then, after you have added their numbers, tap the group name and Pocket Outlook will open, with all the numbers already filled in, waiting for you to text away.

Text-based secretary

PowerSMS includes a feature that allows you to auto-reply to incoming calls with a text-message. You get to set-up who you want to reply to, how long you have to defuse the process and after that, your secretary takes over:

Superhero Memory

Let’s go into Dr. Phil mode here for a minute and evaluate the one thing our significant others complain about the most: attention. Sure, you were texting her / him lovely messages in the beginning of your relationship all the time, but as weeks, months and years went by, you scaled back - life got in the way and all.

Now, with PowerSMS, you can fire up your relationship again and pre-schedule small bits of love to be sent to your partner on, seemingly, random dates.

Set-up a few messages when you have a minute or two to spare and reap your rewards as time comes. Effective? Most certainly and it could even be considered morally just if you subscribe to the ideology that Everything is Fair in Love and War.

You can, also, use this feature to remind your colleagues that a certain meeting up is coming up or to tell your secretary to get a bottle of that really good wine for the boss’ birthday - the possibilities are really endless.

Statistical Resources

If there is one thing that most power-users love, it must be statistics, outlining how efficiently they work. PowerSMS answers this craving by including a large number of easy-to-digest statistics, telling you who you message the most, when your peak hours are and the likes:

And to quote Jason Langridge:

These aren’t my SMS stats BTW as mine are scarily higher and I’m embarrassed to put them on my blog :)

Import / Export business

Last but not least, PowerSMS includes a backup feature, allowing you to import and export your messages to a proprietary format as well as a comma-separated values file, thereby enabling you to do myriad things with it.

After you have completed your backup, you can import it on another device and either remove all current messages or combine them with the import and, best of all: PowerSMS offers you a possibility to instantly email the file to yourself, for safe keeping.

In closing:

At $9.95, PowerSMS is definitely worth it in the long run: True power-users will love the distribution lists as well as the scheduled messages feature and what’s more: you also get nifty statistics and the ability to export your messages to XML or CSV files (and possibly: import them again, on another device) or on Treasuremytext.

Two years and three months ago, a friend of mine and me decided that it would be moderately awesome to have access to our own Microsoft Exchange Server technology platform.

Being students, however, meant that we could not pony up the cash one needs to get the appropriate licenses and required hardware to actually run those tools, so we set out to find the best solution that would work for us, with the hardware (Linux servers) we have and, obviously: the lowest cost to us, in both the short and long run.

Looking back over the last two years and three months, I think it is a fair assessment to say that we have seen it all:

In the beginning, there was Zoho’s Virtual Office, which performed so sadly that it regularly crashed on our server with only one user actually using it and doing nothing but syncing a few calendar items.

We spent long evenings on doing our best to get it up and running and even managed to get a license for free, by translating the Virtual Office suite into Dutch but we still could not get the hardware to run.

Zoho realized that the Virtual Office platform would not work in its current form, so they rolled it up and created a new product from it: Zoho Mail, promising that there would be an on-premises version of Zoho within a couple of months.

It never happened, but we did not feel too sad about it, for we had discovered Mintersoft’s Truedesk, which, like Zoho Virtual Office, utilized a Java backend and managed to crash our server a number of times.

Once again, while testing it on different hardware, it turned out that the software was flawed and Mintersoft folded pretty quickly, too - another bit the dust.

Then came Scalix and PostPath, both of which we were not even able to install for whatever reason(s) I do not remember, so we had to skip those in their entirety.

@Mail, on the other hand, looked promising, but too expensive since there was no real entry-level license (and who can blame them?), but there was light at the end of the tunnel:

At one point, Jeroen discovered Zarafa, built by a Dutch company and, in our eyes, the most interesting contender of all, for Zarafa licensed the actual looks of Outlook Web Access and was able to re-create the original style.

Moreover, Zarafa offered something all the other tools did not: a PHP version. Both their Webaccess component and the Windows Mobile device syncing gateway utilize PHP and can be modified to your heart’s content.

At first, Zarafa, like the others, did not play well with our set-up: a CentOS 4.x server with Plesk 8.x running on it but we kept at it, mostly because we got a good price on a three user license for Zarafa and we did not want to waste our own money.

Try as we might, it would not work and at one point, we just gave up. Up until a year ago, when we moved to the CentOS 5.x branch and gave it another try, again, to no avail.

For one reason or another, we were always able to get one of the three main components working: we either had syncing with Outlook or syncing with Mobiles or access to our data via a browser, but never, had we access to all three of them.

Ever so often, mostly days after new Zarafa updates were released, we would give it another try. We knew that it worked, we had seen and experienced it first hand, we just never figured out the magical combination that would allow us to make all three components work at the same time.

We went from 5.x to the 6.x branch of Zarafa, we tried 32-bit and 64-bit solutions, but all of them, somehow, did not work the way we wanted them to work, so eventually, we stopped trying again and waited for the next release cycle.

A couple of days ago, I decided to give the whole thing another try. I had managed to get Zarafa working on my personal fileserver at home, which also runs on a 32-bit version of CentOS and I was able to sync contacts and Outlook with it, so I knew that there was a way.

Lo’ and behold: I have finally succeeded and created a working solution that encompasses Zarafa 6.04, Plesk 8.3, CentOS 5.2 (32-bit), mySQL 5.0.58 , PHP 5.2.6, Outlook 2007 and Windows Mobile 6 - all secured via SSL and not killing your CPU.

If you are interested in setting up a low-cost, high-yield Microsoft Exchange-compatible gateway, that utilizes your current (CentOS) Linux hardware, click here to read my tutorial on it.

Apparently, I am the kind of customer that manages to discover problems in bulletproof systems all the time: I have managed to break my former provider’s online payment solution in a way that any payment I did, would not go through (even though it was deducted from my bank account) and I have managed to get my PayPal account locked, more than once, because I sent a certain kind of transaction in a special way that would trigger alarms everywhere.

Last week, I managed to discover one such problem in Vodafone’s service: it turns out that, when you switch your subscription type (I am a prepaid user), your extras automatically are terminated.

Being a heavy SMS user, I pay Vodafone 10 EUROs up-front for a premium service called “Zorgeloos SMS BloX“, which basically translates into a free pass at text messaging - 1000 messages before you have to pay again.

I usually get anywhere between 250 and 400 messages out, every month and as such, the BloX subscription translates into huge savings for me and I was quite appalled when I was told by a CSR that I had already used up my allotted 1000 messages (which would have been a first) and was SOL and would have to wait until mid-September to get more messages.

Now, you see, the issue here was not that I had to invest additional money, or that Vodafone, supposedly ripped 10 EUROs from me, I could care less about the money, the issue, here, was that I did not like the way they did it - blaming me and not taking into account that their system had failed me, and by extension: them.

Having read about Patrick de Laive’s experiences with Vodafone last November, I knew that this would be troublesome to work out and I was prepared to switch to another provider, in the blink of an eye if Vodafone did not play ball.

Today, I received an email from a new CSR at Vodafone, responding to my query and explaining the situation: the representative offered the standard apologies you always get (which, let’s be honest: have to be included in any such communication, even though most customers do not care about them); he also reactivated my BloX subscription and gave me an additional 5 EUROs for “any trouble caused”.

All in all, I am glad that Vodafone handled this issue the way they did and not leave me with a feeling of unimportance and deceit.

Granted, the whole deal could have been avoided if their system was (even more) bulletproof, but since their system is built by humans, and humans are bound to make mistakes, this is a more than acceptable outcome.

So, to Vodafone and the represenative that followed up on this issue, I say: thank you for not screwing me over and taking care of me the right way.