The New York Times used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to process 4TB of raw image TIFF data (stored in S3) into 1.1 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours at a computation cost of about $240 (not including bandwidth).

NY Times: Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!

The project was so easy, and so cheap, that the developers ran the process a second time after noticing  a minute error. Just another example of how cloud computing is changing the game.

Every time someone buys a server, a switch or a data center, I have failed.
Marc Benioff (CEO Salesforce.com)

I’m in the process of writing a tutorial on how to get up and running: Cloud Web Hosting: AWS

By having accessible/real time metrics for household power consumption consumers can make real attempts at saving power. Much like the MPG meters in newer vehicle:

Trying to use as little fuel as you can, by driving more smoothly and being a little less heavy on the accelerator, can even become a game of sorts. Nissan, a Japanese carmaker, has calculated that fuel-efficiency gauges can reduce fuel consumption by an average of 10%, so it has decided to put them in all its cars.

Similar effects would be seen in the home.

After you have set up the device you get the first shock: why is the house using so much electricity? Walking around and switching things off soon reveals where savings can be made: lights left on during the day, a television the children are not watching and a surprising number of power supplies keeping themselves warm while the things they are connected to are in “standby” mode.

Economist: Power Plays

Google’s efforts take it one (crucial) step further. By aggregating this data in the cloud and presenting it in a friendly manner, consumer’s can’t help but be curious. Hopefully this curiosity leads to a more energy conscious mentality, even if it is just a game.

This is a huge opportunity for Google. I’m curious how they plan to incorporate/monetize this data.