UnConference in Singapore on Saturday was a really good event. I took several things away from it and saw some interesting start-ups. The most important thing I got out of it though was an “oh yeah” moment when Scott Rafer the keynote speaker made a very important point about cloud computing.

Recently I have been looking at cloud computing in the form of Google App Engine and see a lot of potential in it. The advantages I am attracted to being ease of deployment, scalability, not having to manage the server and low hosting costs. At the same time my main worry is being at the mercy of the platform provider, in this case Google who could potentially suspend an account and so any revenue stream for any product running on it at whim.

The additional point Scott Rafer made in favour of cloud computer though was that cloud computing changes the business model for web start-ups in terms of their need for VC funding. What he said was that in the past if your start-up is building a web application you need to have a decent set of servers in case your app gets very popular very quickly and you need capacity to cope. This type of infrastructure is a considerable capital expenditure and one for which you would often need VC investment in order to fund.

However, cloud computing such as App Engine changes this situation because if you app gets very popular very quickly the capacity is there instantly. Most importantly you don’t need to pay for the capacity until you need to use it. You only pay for the capacity you use and if your business model is correct you should have the extra revenue to pay for the extra capacity. This could remove the need for VC funding which is obviously very attractive to a start-up in so many ways.

I was pleased to read today that a new version of GWT (Google Web Toolkit) has been released. I have been working with GWT for the past 18 months or so and really like it as a platform particually when coupled to a Spring backend. It looks like 1.6 represents another step to GWT becoming a serious mainstream platform and now includes a proper plugin for Eclipse and the ability to publish to the Google App Engine. I am sure I will be taking a proper look over the next few weeks. A good start to understand what is going on with App Engine however are these videos: