DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at New York City interviewing Digital Ocean. Ben, who are you and what do you do?Ben: I am Ben Uretsky and I am CEO of Digital Ocean.Martin: Great. When did you start this company and what is your background?Ben: I started DigitalOcean in 2011 and my background; I have a Bachelor’s Degree here from Pace University in information systems which I basically got to show my dad that I can finish college but I have been working since I was 15 years old in high school. So my background is I thought myself Linux and networking and servers and then ultimately joined a bunch of Tech Companies starting out into the voice over IP space, and then transitioning to hosting, and then ultimately starting my own company.Martin: Okay and in parallel you did study.Ben: Oh, yes. I did study, I finished. So when I started working in high school, I graduated from there and then went to University and was able to actually start my first business at 21 before graduating from University.Martin: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the similarities of those business models because most entrepreneurs have some area which are very like, and they tweak around and have some different business model in that kind of area.Ben: Yes, that’s definitely true. The business model that we use is a recurring subscription is really the heart of the engine. So the first company that I started in 2003 was called ServerStack and it managed hosting, just taking care of customer environment online. So let’s say you generate some revenue because you are a retailer, so e-commerce or you drive some sort of a subscription network maybe it’s video ads or advertising in general, in other words you are generating revenue online, you want to make sure that your website stays active. And so we monitored and took care of that entire environment, provided a 100% uptime SLA, took care of back up security, capacity planning, network expansion, just everything that falls within IT management and helped our customers grow their business. And so what was great about that business was that as you sign up that first customer, more often than not, they continued to grow their business, so each month, each account produces more revenue and the goal is to get as many more accounts as you can.BUSINESS MODELMartin: And how is the current business model of Digital Ocean working?Ben: It’s similar. It’s interesting because we are a utility cloud provider. So customers can use as much or as little as they want. Our billing today works on hourly basis but the majority of our customers run what we call sticky infrastructure. So once they set it up, they won’t tear it down, it will continue to exist for months and essentially even for years. Although they have the luxury if the demand changes or they need to make a modification, they can pay by the hour and make those changes in real time. Nonetheless, each customer continues to spend more money every single month because they create a business which finds traction and attracts new users and so they need to grow the server foot print to keep up with demand. And so even though it’s not a traditional subscription model, based on that sticky usage, they wind up paying more every single month but that’s tied directly to their success and usage.Martin: And did you transition DigitalOcean directly from your former company because the business model is quite similar but you are coming from managed hosting to cloud hosting?Ben: Yeah. We had an opportunity to step back in 2011 and really think about where our first business was headed. And we had some concerns about dedicated servers, many other providers came out with virtualized solutions where you can purchase these systems online. Some of them sold the fraction of the server, so it seemed like price was substantially less but that’s also because you’ve got substantially less resources. Nonetheless, a consumer, the person who†™s actually going to use those recourse, didn’t pay as much attention to the unit economics, they just thought, ‘Oh wow, I can spend $20 bucks a month, instead of two or three hundred. So in general customers really began to adopt cloud based servers and wanted to make sure that we stayed relevant within the market place. We had a good grasp on business operations as well as the technical sides, so the servers and the networks. Where the first business didn’t find traction was actually in its unique value proposition. So we were selling support like many other companies and it was hard to differentiate ourselves and stand out in that crowd of market.So as we began to analyze what the new business would be all about. We started reading a lot of books on marketing, on positioning, there is actually a book literally called, ‘Positioning’. I think it’s Al Ries and Jack Trout if I remember correctly. It talks about finding a unique value proposition that fits within the custo mer’s mindset. So if you have to re educate them, it’ll be a very difficult proposition and you also can’t compete against any of the existing values or opinions that they have. So you have to try to find a way to squeeze into all of that and still stay relevant.And so as we started thinking about building Digital Ocean the other concept that we really kept in mind is brand extension. And sometimes that works for example, perhaps you make a toothbrush and you decide to extend into the tooth paste business. It could work but it could also create some confusion. And what we see so many times in our industry is companies create brand extensions and so first they are dedicated server provider, then they become a managed service provider and then the cloud comes and around and all of a sound they offer virtually cloud offerings. But as the customer evaluates that front home page, they are confused, it’s like, ‘Can I buy this server or that server’? It’s a mixed message. So what we realize is, we could not extend our original business to provide cloud servers.So we decided to start a company from the ground up with a single laser focus on providing the best cloud server experience that we could, that levered on nearly a decade of running the first business, going through a lot of growing pains in helping our customers achieve scale. So we took that operational experience and we created a product. And that’s another huge distinction between the first company which was a services based business and essentially there, I like to say you tell the customer, ‘Yes’ and you then you go home or you go back to your office and you try to figure out how to deliver that service. In a product based business it’s the exact opposite. You build a product that has certain characteristics and that’s all that you can actually deliver because product developing takes a much longer time to actually achieve that new product version.So that really was the basis for D igital Oceans, all of these ideas floating around in our heads. We had access to couple hundred customers in our first company but we also did survey the market. And what we recognized is that no one was really focused on the developer. Everyone was focusing on larger scale businesses and the way that they thought about their companies was through technology lens. So they said, ‘Hey, we can deliver and build these features and this is what you guys will use’. And for a larger size business that actually works well because they understand their requirements, they have the necessary teams to manage that complexity and so access to this scalable infinite infrastructure is a great way for many companies to build their business. But if you take a look at the opposite end of that spectrum it’s an individual user, a developer who is just getting started, maybe they are learning a new language or they are pushing their application for the first time into a beta phase, trying to find t hat initial traction, create a start up that’s ultimately going to scale, that user was neglected. We decided to focus digital ocean on providing the simplest cloud infrastructure experience possible catered to the developer rather than to a scaling business.Martin: Ben when somebody is thinking about ‘what type of server hosting I am using?’, you said that it’s quite hard to distinguish the unit economics, can you walk us through the unit economics for the different type of segments like dedicated, managed, cloud hosting?Ben: Yes. So dedicated servers are fairly straight forward because you can a la carte pick and choose your processors, memory, storage and all of that gets bundled into a monthly price tag. And then typically you also pay extra for bandwidth and you have a lot of customization on dedicated server side. So anything that fits into the chassis you can probably get from a provider.Once you go into a cloud environment, it becomes a little different. Most cloud p roviders bundle a specific set of resources together, so you will receive one or two CPUs with a couple of Giga bytes of memory and some storage space. Now, some providers charge separately for bandwidth. We actually include an allotment of network transferred bandwidth with that original plan as well, so that customers don’t have to worry about, how much will I actually pay at the end of the month. The majority of our users fit within the allocated bundle and so they know exactly how much they are going to pay in advance. And with cloud, the business unit economics have become much more granular. So we see companies nowadays that are doing not only hourly billing but even per minute and I think we are even starting to see some come out that are gauging by the second. So that’s great from environments where you have high volatility. A great example would be a news website, some event happens, everyone rushes to the website, you get 10x or 20x of traffic and then a day later you need to return back to that original amount. So in those cases the elasticity of cloud is a great fit for that use case.Martin: Okay great. What experiments did you do in order to understand how best to reach your customers? So what marketing channels did you test, and what have been your hypothesis, and how did you test them?Ben: The hypothesis for the most part we developed behind closed doors because we had almost a decade worth of experience working in this industry and understanding what our customers wanted. So in some regards it’s almost 10 years of continual customer development that gave us a really good foundation to work from. But as we created that initially hypothesis we then ran some very focused user groups. So we brought in one person at a time so that you don’t create a group think environment and sat them down behind an alpha version of our product and ask them to use it. And we were looking for two things:Can they successful launch a virtual server?What are th e adjectives or how would they describe the experience of using our product?And I think every single person successfully created a server which is not the case with all providers. Sometimes people get stuck in that creation process, so we hit simplicity there. And two is the experience, they were actually quite pleased with what they say. So very intuitive straight forward control panel language that isn’t confusing, keywords that resonate with their understanding of the market, and they also pointed out a bunch of mistakes or oversights on our part. Like you can only log in and sign up from the home page none of the other pages that we had provided those links. They helped us with a little bit of the user navigation to create a smoother flow. But that I think is actually very important. And we felt extremely challenged when we first said, ‘How are we going to get people to come into our office and actually provide this feedback?’Because you don’t want to take a stranger fro m the street who might be doing grocery shopping to evaluate a cloud server business. So we placed an Ad on Craigslist and decided to pay $100 for this 1 hour session and the criteria was that you would need to use a competitor service to prove that you are a potential customer for our product. And I think that that experiment thought us a lot about where our customer’s heads were at, but the fundamental framework was really developed over that decade working in the first company.Martin: How did you evaluate whether the customer will use your service? How did you try to estimate the willingness to pay for example?Ben: I don’t think we really estimated that, it wasâ€"Martin: Just taking competitive prices, or so?Ben: Yes. Although our pricing we actually developed in a very interesting way, we are a price leader in the industry today and we approached it bottoms up. So we calculated how much it would cost to deliver this basic unit of compute and we created a healthy margin with which we could run the business successfully. It just turned out that price point was substantially less than our competitors. And that’s a great question because why are we able to offer such a different price compared to the industry veterans?We do have a late comer advantage.We are extremely focused, so we only provide cloud servers.That means we don’t have to worry about legacy business or competing interests when we are able to really optimize the entire operation to deliver that as cost efficiently as possible, plus we have the industry of experience from the first business to understand the right relationships that we should build with vendors and the proper financing terms to makes all of this happen, so it was an unfair advantage.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: When I am look at this business model from the outside, I see mainly three steps:the one customer acquisition,then this type of technology which means hosting, infrastructure, etc., andthen the last part this kind of c ustomer service.In what parts do you think is your completive advantage?Ben: Yes, I mean our competitive advantage stems from the actual customer. Most infrastructure providers care more about the infrastructure more than the customer. So you see them leading with the what, like we sell this amount of resources with these features at this price. We like to lead with why. Why are we doing this is to create a simple infrastructure experience that developers love and who do we focus on, we focus on people rather than the technology. Everyone has access to virtualization, to the same silicon that is used to build the microprocessor, RAM, storage, network, we are all plugged into the same internet. Those are the commodity components. But what we try to do is create an experience based around the actual needs of a person to empower them with these tools so that they can build and easily manage their infrastructure and dedicate it and really focus their attention on the application. Becaus e that’s what creates their business, it’s not the server underneath. It’s like if you turn on the light switch, you expect the electricity to work so the only time you actually think about the infrastructure is when it doesn’t work. We try to really keep that analogy. We want to get out of the way our customers so that they don’t have to think about us and can actually focus on their business building heir applications, getting user tractions and growing their companies on top our cloud.Martin: Imagine a young developer is currently hosting a Bluehost or somewhere else. Now you want to target this kind of person in using your service. How do you minimize the switching cost, is there some kind of automated process where he can just say I’ve got a blue host account or Go Daddy account, whatever and then just click this button, you take care of the rest, etc.?Ben: Well we are working on the easy button, it’s not ready just yet. What we do is slightly different, we lead w ith the education approach. So we have written almost a thousand tutorials to date that talks about how to use the latest and best open source technology, but also educate users on best practices in the industry. So a portion of topics go towards migration, so how do you take a database and move it from one server to another? How do you migrate a web server? Or how do you actually migrate an entire configuration across multiple machines. And a savvy developer will recognize, ‘Hey I can actually use this information to migrate my service from Bluehost or any other host to DigitalOcean’ what’s great is, it’s not proprietary, it’s not locked information it will be applicable to any provider on any server. And that’s really something that we see lacking in the industry today.We have some great community sites like Stack Overflow but they limit the conversation to, here is a problem that I encountered and the community will provide solutions or answers but there is no open en ded conversation around, if I want to build a highly available low balanced, fault tolerant website, what are the technologies? How do I go about actually building this environment and then maintaining it? So you would have to dive deep into Google, find a couple of blog posts and use the spare piece of information to try to glue this together. And that’s what we are trying to create with our DigitalOcean Community, is to be seen as the place where developers can go to conversate about these topics, to accelerate and improve their infrastructure, whether they are a host with us or not.Martin: And by doing this you do two great things:one thing, you generate trust between your potential customers, customers and you andsecond thing is I assume you lower you customer acquisition cost because there is some kind of network effect and SEO as well.Ben: Yes, absolutely. We are ranking in the top 5 or 6 results across many different terms on Google. But what’s great about it is it’s va lidation from our customers because they succeed at deploying those applications and installing that software, it is also validationâ€"what does Google try to do? They try to surface the best content and we fall into the top 5 or 6 because we do invest a lot of dollars into making sure that the content that we produce is top notch. That it is both technically accurate but then it’s also written in a way that, someone new to the technology perhaps they are coming from a shared environment where they did not need to install all these different software packages, they can actually make the switch relatively easily based on the information they find in our community.But yes, it also attracts a lot of people to our website that learn about DigitalOcean, Ultimately go on to try it but the community is just one part to our success. The real reason why we have this phenomenal rate of growth is when customers use DigitalOcean for the first time, they truly encounter a unique experience tha t they can’t get anywhere else. And it’s exactly what they expect. It’s really quick and easy to use. And ultimately it leaves them with the feeling of satisfaction that they want to go and share it with someone else, whether it’s a friend, another developer or even just write a blog post about their experience using DigitalOcean. And that speaks to the original mission that we set out on, it’s to delight our customers, to simplify infrastructure because it’s not complex, at the same time it is growing more complex everyday. And that’s where we really want to use the community, as new projects come out, 4 west being a great example, a new product release that we just did last month. We are able to talk about it, educate our user base, and teach the best practices on how to deploy that in the cloud.Martin: When you are looking at your product and every entrepreneur that has some kind of vision and says ‘Okay’ this is where I want to go’. What do you think is still missing in your product that you say, ‘I want to do that!’Ben: Quite a few features are not present in the product just yet. So the challenge that we have is, we decided to write the software in house and that has created the experience that we have been able to deliver to our customers. Without writing it and owning the code there is just no way that we would have been able to deliver the intuitive interphase that we have. The other side of that sword is that we are responsible to develop the rest of the features as well. So I know our customers desperately want additional storage capacity. So it could be something like an object store, especially if you have a user generated content so someone that uploads pictures or media. You need a place to store that data and we provide only a limited amount with the droplet which is our virtual machine today. So there is no easy way to scale out storage. And the other component, I think that a lot of customers are asking for is more adv anced network services related to high availability. So as you develop a production website and want to ensure as close to 100% uptime as possible, taking advantage of low balance and to create full tolerance, or truly private and secure networking with access list and firewall policies. Those are the features that our customers would love to see us develop as quickly as we can. And a lot of where our investment dollars are going is into the engineering team and the efforts behind pushing those features to market.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Ben, let’s talk about the market development and the hosting segment. Imagine some kind of matrix where you have on one side the small companies and the larger companies. You are one of I would say the smaller companies, then you have something like Go Daddy or so on the larger spectrum. And then on the other hand you have the different kinds of hosting products that we talked about before like managed hosting, cloud, etc. What kind of trends can you identify in this? Is there some kind of migration from a lot of hosting users from the big ones to the small ones or the other way around? Is the hosting market in general growing in terms of total sales or is it more constant and just migration between the different services, what trends can you identify?Ben: Well, I think definitely the market is growing every single year, more users are coming online, more businesses are being built online and you might start out and host it from your apartment but as you gain revenue you quickly realize that’s not reliable. So you look to a data centre so that your application can live in a true 24/7 uptime environment. So there is no doubt that the market is growing.I think that the cloud providers probably represent thisâ€"one of the newer trends that we are starting to see is: before 2010 we may have only had one or two people in the space, today as we look around we have nearly 10 cloud providers that are trying to compete for busines s. And the majority of them are not able to differentiate clearly and I think that customers at that point then begin to look at things like price and convenience. The other trend that we are also seeing is the tools that are becoming available are actually starting to become much more complex, that complexity is really hitting away. So you have these frameworks for how to deploy larger applications so things like Docker. Platforms that are being open sourced so how do you run a Heroku inside of your own environment that allows you a quick and easy way to deploy a reels application.And I think in general we are starting to see that users care less and less about infrastructure and servers and more about the application that lies on top of it. So how can I really deliver my application as quickly as possible to the market and then ultimately maintain it with the least amount of resources and management that goes into it. So that’s certainly a trend that we picked up on and are tryi ng hard to stay ahead of. You can almost phrase it like: ‘By using DigitalOcean, you can delay the need for people that work in the developer operations segment, the SREs to ensure that your infrastructure is online. So we pour a lot of dollars into building a highly redundant environment from the start. Other cloud providers take a slightly different approach and say, these instances are ephemeral and they are here today, they could be gone tomorrow, so you really have to architect and application that can withstand a high level of failure. And we are not immune to issues and so we would always encourage customers to build availability into their applications, but we also have a better basis from which for them to get started. So in the early days when they are still relatively small they don’t experience that issue as much, obviously when you scale to thousands of nodes failure rates, even if it stays at relatively small percentage still creates a lot of issues.So I think that ’s another trend in general is that the software is finally beginning to catch up to these much larger distributing environments. The database has always been one of the biggest issues there with running a huge monolithic application on a single server that you scale horizontally. First you start out with two CPUs and then your business grows and you need a new chassis with 4 CPUs, and then it gets tricky after that. And some companies have actually been forced to re-write their application for months or a year to get out of that dependency and now what we are seeing is distribution and availability built into the software from the start so. NoSQL is a great example of that and many distributed Databases that have come as a result of it which inherently are a great fit for cloud providers because of the large number of nodes over disparate machines and resiliency to failure.The last thing on the trends, I think as a result of, I don’t want to take too much credit here, but Digit alOcean coming in with a great price point, an easy to use interphase and the education. I think we have enabled a whole new set of users to come online, so people from countries that are really developing nations and are beginning just to have their people get on the internet from Asia, within Europe, south America as well, are able to take advantage of DigitalOcean because of it’ price point and ease of use and finally start building something online. Whereas in the past they would need to wait much longer, develop on their home computer or laptop and perhaps never even take the step to publish their application live. And I am very proud of the tens of thousands people worldwide that have access to the server resources as a result of our company. We have also enabled thousands of students whether it’s through hackathons orâ€"we even sponsor our high school that I attended here in New York City so we provide them with a ton of resources every year for students to do their final term project and we do that across the nation and even internationally. These education facilities can actually request resources and sponsorship from DigitalOcean. We want to enable the next generation of developers and we don’t think there is any better way than getting your hands dirty, partially that’s how I learned, so I would love to see other students start out the same way.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In New York (NY), we meet DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky. He shares how he came up with the idea for his fast-growing company, how the current business model works, as well as provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcription of the interview is provided below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at New York City interviewing Digital Ocean. Ben, who are you and what do you do?Ben: I am Ben Uretsky and I am CEO of Digital Ocean.Martin: Great. When did you start this company and what is your background?Ben: I started DigitalOcean in 2011 and my background; I have a Bachelor’s Degree here from Pace University in information systems which I basically got to show my dad that I can finish college but I have been working since I was 15 years old in high school. So my background is I thought myself Linux and networking and servers and then ultimately joined a bunch of Tech Companies starting out into the voice over IP space, and then transitioning to hosting, and then ultimately starting my own company.Martin: Okay and in parallel you did study.Ben: Oh, yes. I did study, I finished. So when I started working in high school, I graduated from there and then went to University and was able to actually start my first business at 21 before graduating from University.Martin: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the similarities of those business models because most entrepreneurs have some area which are very like, and they tweak around and have some different business model in that kind of area.Ben: Yes, that’s definitely true. The business model that we use is a recurring subscription is really the heart of the engine. So the first company that I started in 2003 was called ServerStack and it managed hosting, just taking care of customer environment online. So let’s say you generate some revenue because you are a retailer, so e-commerce or you drive some sort of a subscription network maybe it’s video ads or advertising in general, in other wo rds you are generating revenue online, you want to make sure that your website stays active. And so we monitored and took care of that entire environment, provided a 100% uptime SLA, took care of back up security, capacity planning, network expansion, just everything that falls within IT management and helped our customers grow their business. And so what was great about that business was that as you sign up that first customer, more often than not, they continued to grow their business, so each month, each account produces more revenue and the goal is to get as many more accounts as you can.BUSINESS MODELMartin: And how is the current business model of Digital Ocean working?Ben: It’s similar. It’s interesting because we are a utility cloud provider. So customers can use as much or as little as they want. Our billing today works on hourly basis but the majority of our customers run what we call sticky infrastructure. So once they set it up, they won’t tear it down, it will con tinue to exist for months and essentially even for years. Although they have the luxury if the demand changes or they need to make a modification, they can pay by the hour and make those changes in real time. Nonetheless, each customer continues to spend more money every single month because they create a business which finds traction and attracts new users and so they need to grow the server foot print to keep up with demand. And so even though it’s not a traditional subscription model, based on that sticky usage, they wind up paying more every single month but that’s tied directly to their success and usage.Martin: And did you transition DigitalOcean directly from your former company because the business model is quite similar but you are coming from managed hosting to cloud hosting?Ben: Yeah. We had an opportunity to step back in 2011 and really think about where our first business was headed. And we had some concerns about dedicated servers, many other providers came out wit h virtualized solutions where you can purchase these systems online. Some of them sold the fraction of the server, so it seemed like price was substantially less but that’s also because you’ve got substantially less resources. Nonetheless, a consumer, the person who’s actually going to use those recourse, didn’t pay as much attention to the unit economics, they just thought, ‘Oh wow, I can spend $20 bucks a month, instead of two or three hundred. So in general customers really began to adopt cloud based servers and wanted to make sure that we stayed relevant within the market place. We had a good grasp on business operations as well as the technical sides, so the servers and the networks. Where the first business didn’t find traction was actually in its unique value proposition. So we were selling support like many other companies and it was hard to differentiate ourselves and stand out in that crowd of market.So as we began to analyze what the new business would be all about. We started reading a lot of books on marketing, on positioning, there is actually a book literally called, ‘Positioning’. I think it’s Al Ries and Jack Trout if I remember correctly. It talks about finding a unique value proposition that fits within the customer’s mindset. So if you have to re educate them, it’ll be a very difficult proposition and you also can’t compete against any of the existing values or opinions that they have. So you have to try to find a way to squeeze into all of that and still stay relevant.And so as we started thinking about building Digital Ocean the other concept that we really kept in mind is brand extension. And sometimes that works for example, perhaps you make a toothbrush and you decide to extend into the tooth paste business. It could work but it could also create some confusion. And what we see so many times in our industry is companies create brand extensions and so first they are dedicated server provider, then they become a m anaged service provider and then the cloud comes and around and all of a sound they offer virtually cloud offerings. But as the customer evaluates that front home page, they are confused, it’s like, ‘Can I buy this server or that server’? It’s a mixed message. So what we realize is, we could not extend our original business to provide cloud servers.So we decided to start a company from the ground up with a single laser focus on providing the best cloud server experience that we could, that levered on nearly a decade of running the first business, going through a lot of growing pains in helping our customers achieve scale. So we took that operational experience and we created a product. And that’s another huge distinction between the first company which was a services based business and essentially there, I like to say you tell the customer, ‘Yes’ and you then you go home or you go back to your office and you try to figure out how to deliver that service. In a product b ased business it’s the exact opposite. You build a product that has certain characteristics and that’s all that you can actually deliver because product developing takes a much longer time to actually achieve that new product version.So that really was the basis for Digital Oceans, all of these ideas floating around in our heads. We had access to couple hundred customers in our first company but we also did survey the market. And what we recognized is that no one was really focused on the developer. Everyone was focusing on larger scale businesses and the way that they thought about their companies was through technology lens. So they said, ‘Hey, we can deliver and build these features and this is what you guys will use’. And for a larger size business that actually works well because they understand their requirements, they have the necessary teams to manage that complexity and so access to this scalable infinite infrastructure is a great way for many companies to build the ir business. But if you take a look at the opposite end of that spectrum it’s an individual user, a developer who is just getting started, maybe they are learning a new language or they are pushing their application for the first time into a beta phase, trying to find that initial traction, create a start up that’s ultimately going to scale, that user was neglected. We decided to focus digital ocean on providing the simplest cloud infrastructure experience possible catered to the developer rather than to a scaling business.Martin: Ben when somebody is thinking about ‘what type of server hosting I am using?’, you said that it’s quite hard to distinguish the unit economics, can you walk us through the unit economics for the different type of segments like dedicated, managed, cloud hosting?Ben: Yes. So dedicated servers are fairly straight forward because you can a la carte pick and choose your processors, memory, storage and all of that gets bundled into a monthly price tag. And then typically you also pay extra for bandwidth and you have a lot of customization on dedicated server side. So anything that fits into the chassis you can probably get from a provider.Once you go into a cloud environment, it becomes a little different. Most cloud providers bundle a specific set of resources together, so you will receive one or two CPUs with a couple of Giga bytes of memory and some storage space. Now, some providers charge separately for bandwidth. We actually include an allotment of network transferred bandwidth with that original plan as well, so that customers don’t have to worry about, how much will I actually pay at the end of the month. The majority of our users fit within the allocated bundle and so they know exactly how much they are going to pay in advance. And with cloud, the business unit economics have become much more granular. So we see companies nowadays that are doing not only hourly billing but even per minute and I think we are even starti ng to see some come out that are gauging by the second. So that’s great from environments where you have high volatility. A great example would be a news website, some event happens, everyone rushes to the website, you get 10x or 20x of traffic and then a day later you need to return back to that original amount. So in those cases the elasticity of cloud is a great fit for that use case.Martin: Okay great. What experiments did you do in order to understand how best to reach your customers? So what marketing channels did you test, and what have been your hypothesis, and how did you test them?Ben: The hypothesis for the most part we developed behind closed doors because we had almost a decade worth of experience working in this industry and understanding what our customers wanted. So in some regards it’s almost 10 years of continual customer development that gave us a really good foundation to work from. But as we created that initially hypothesis we then ran some very focused use r groups. So we brought in one person at a time so that you don’t create a group think environment and sat them down behind an alpha version of our product and ask them to use it. And we were looking for two things:Can they successful launch a virtual server?What are the adjectives or how would they describe the experience of using our product?And I think every single person successfully created a server which is not the case with all providers. Sometimes people get stuck in that creation process, so we hit simplicity there. And two is the experience, they were actually quite pleased with what they say. So very intuitive straight forward control panel language that isn’t confusing, keywords that resonate with their understanding of the market, and they also pointed out a bunch of mistakes or oversights on our part. Like you can only log in and sign up from the home page none of the other pages that we had provided those links. They helped us with a little bit of the user navigat ion to create a smoother flow. But that I think is actually very important. And we felt extremely challenged when we first said, ‘How are we going to get people to come into our office and actually provide this feedback?’Because you don’t want to take a stranger from the street who might be doing grocery shopping to evaluate a cloud server business. So we placed an Ad on Craigslist and decided to pay $100 for this 1 hour session and the criteria was that you would need to use a competitor service to prove that you are a potential customer for our product. And I think that that experiment thought us a lot about where our customer’s heads were at, but the fundamental framework was really developed over that decade working in the first company.Martin: How did you evaluate whether the customer will use your service? How did you try to estimate the willingness to pay for example?Ben: I don’t think we really estimated that, it wasâ€"Martin: Just taking competitive prices, or so? Ben: Yes. Although our pricing we actually developed in a very interesting way, we are a price leader in the industry today and we approached it bottoms up. So we calculated how much it would cost to deliver this basic unit of compute and we created a healthy margin with which we could run the business successfully. It just turned out that price point was substantially less than our competitors. And that’s a great question because why are we able to offer such a different price compared to the industry veterans?We do have a late comer advantage.We are extremely focused, so we only provide cloud servers.That means we don’t have to worry about legacy business or competing interests when we are able to really optimize the entire operation to deliver that as cost efficiently as possible, plus we have the industry of experience from the first business to understand the right relationships that we should build with vendors and the proper financing terms to makes all of this happen, so it was an unfair advantage.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: When I am look at this business model from the outside, I see mainly three steps:the one customer acquisition,then this type of technology which means hosting, infrastructure, etc., andthen the last part this kind of customer service.In what parts do you think is your completive advantage?Ben: Yes, I mean our competitive advantage stems from the actual customer. Most infrastructure providers care more about the infrastructure more than the customer. So you see them leading with the what, like we sell this amount of resources with these features at this price. We like to lead with why. Why are we doing this is to create a simple infrastructure experience that developers love and who do we focus on, we focus on people rather than the technology. Everyone has access to virtualization, to the same silicon that is used to build the microprocessor, RAM, storage, network, we are all plugged into the same internet. Those are the commodit y components. But what we try to do is create an experience based around the actual needs of a person to empower them with these tools so that they can build and easily manage their infrastructure and dedicate it and really focus their attention on the application. Because that’s what creates their business, it’s not the server underneath. It’s like if you turn on the light switch, you expect the electricity to work so the only time you actually think about the infrastructure is when it doesn’t work. We try to really keep that analogy. We want to get out of the way our customers so that they don’t have to think about us and can actually focus on their business building heir applications, getting user tractions and growing their companies on top our cloud.Martin: Imagine a young developer is currently hosting a Bluehost or somewhere else. Now you want to target this kind of person in using your service. How do you minimize the switching cost, is there some kind of automated process where he can just say I’ve got a blue host account or Go Daddy account, whatever and then just click this button, you take care of the rest, etc.?Ben: Well we are working on the easy button, it’s not ready just yet. What we do is slightly different, we lead with the education approach. So we have written almost a thousand tutorials to date that talks about how to use the latest and best open source technology, but also educate users on best practices in the industry. So a portion of topics go towards migration, so how do you take a database and move it from one server to another? How do you migrate a web server? Or how do you actually migrate an entire configuration across multiple machines. And a savvy developer will recognize, ‘Hey I can actually use this information to migrate my service from Bluehost or any other host to DigitalOcean’ what’s great is, it’s not proprietary, it’s not locked information it will be applicable to any provider on any server. And that’s really something that we see lacking in the industry today.We have some great community sites like Stack Overflow but they limit the conversation to, here is a problem that I encountered and the community will provide solutions or answers but there is no open ended conversation around, if I want to build a highly available low balanced, fault tolerant website, what are the technologies? How do I go about actually building this environment and then maintaining it? So you would have to dive deep into Google, find a couple of blog posts and use the spare piece of information to try to glue this together. And that’s what we are trying to create with our DigitalOcean Community, is to be seen as the place where developers can go to conversate about these topics, to accelerate and improve their infrastructure, whether they are a host with us or not.Martin: And by doing this you do two great things:one thing, you generate trust between your potential customers, customers and you andsecond thing is I assume you lower you customer acquisition cost because there is some kind of network effect and SEO as well.Ben: Yes, absolutely. We are ranking in the top 5 or 6 results across many different terms on Google. But what’s great about it is it’s validation from our customers because they succeed at deploying those applications and installing that software, it is also validationâ€"what does Google try to do? They try to surface the best content and we fall into the top 5 or 6 because we do invest a lot of dollars into making sure that the content that we produce is top notch. That it is both technically accurate but then it’s also written in a way that, someone new to the technology perhaps they are coming from a shared environment where they did not need to install all these different software packages, they can actually make the switch relatively easily based on the information they find in our community.But yes, it also attracts a lot of people to our web site that learn about DigitalOcean, Ultimately go on to try it but the community is just one part to our success. The real reason why we have this phenomenal rate of growth is when customers use DigitalOcean for the first time, they truly encounter a unique experience that they can’t get anywhere else. And it’s exactly what they expect. It’s really quick and easy to use. And ultimately it leaves them with the feeling of satisfaction that they want to go and share it with someone else, whether it’s a friend, another developer or even just write a blog post about their experience using DigitalOcean. And that speaks to the original mission that we set out on, it’s to delight our customers, to simplify infrastructure because it’s not complex, at the same time it is growing more complex everyday. And that’s where we really want to use the community, as new projects come out, 4 west being a great example, a new product release that we just did last month. We are able to talk about it, educate our user base, and teach the best practices on how to deploy that in the cloud.Martin: When you are looking at your product and every entrepreneur that has some kind of vision and says ‘Okay’ this is where I want to go’. What do you think is still missing in your product that you say, ‘I want to do that!’Ben: Quite a few features are not present in the product just yet. So the challenge that we have is, we decided to write the software in house and that has created the experience that we have been able to deliver to our customers. Without writing it and owning the code there is just no way that we would have been able to deliver the intuitive interphase that we have. The other side of that sword is that we are responsible to develop the rest of the features as well. So I know our customers desperately want additional storage capacity. So it could be something like an object store, especially if you have a user generated content so someone that uploads pi ctures or media. You need a place to store that data and we provide only a limited amount with the droplet which is our virtual machine today. So there is no easy way to scale out storage. And the other component, I think that a lot of customers are asking for is more advanced network services related to high availability. So as you develop a production website and want to ensure as close to 100% uptime as possible, taking advantage of low balance and to create full tolerance, or truly private and secure networking with access list and firewall policies. Those are the features that our customers would love to see us develop as quickly as we can. And a lot of where our investment dollars are going is into the engineering team and the efforts behind pushing those features to market.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Ben, let’s talk about the market development and the hosting segment. Imagine some kind of matrix where you have on one side the small companies and the larger companies. You are one of I would say the smaller companies, then you have something like Go Daddy or so on the larger spectrum. And then on the other hand you have the different kinds of hosting products that we talked about before like managed hosting, cloud, etc. What kind of trends can you identify in this? Is there some kind of migration from a lot of hosting users from the big ones to the small ones or the other way around? Is the hosting market in general growing in terms of total sales or is it more constant and just migration between the different services, what trends can you identify?Ben: Well, I think definitely the market is growing every single year, more users are coming online, more businesses are being built online and you might start out and host it from your apartment but as you gain revenue you quickly realize that’s not reliable. So you look to a data centre so that your application can live in a true 24/7 uptime environment. So there is no doubt that the market is growing.I th ink that the cloud providers probably represent thisâ€"one of the newer trends that we are starting to see is: before 2010 we may have only had one or two people in the space, today as we look around we have nearly 10 cloud providers that are trying to compete for business. And the majority of them are not able to differentiate clearly and I think that customers at that point then begin to look at things like price and convenience. The other trend that we are also seeing is the tools that are becoming available are actually starting to become much more complex, that complexity is really hitting away. So you have these frameworks for how to deploy larger applications so things like Docker. Platforms that are being open sourced so how do you run a Heroku inside of your own environment that allows you a quick and easy way to deploy a reels application.And I think in general we are starting to see that users care less and less about infrastructure and servers and more about the applicat ion that lies on top of it. So how can I really deliver my application as quickly as possible to the market and then ultimately maintain it with the least amount of resources and management that goes into it. So that’s certainly a trend that we picked up on and are trying hard to stay ahead of. You can almost phrase it like: ‘By using DigitalOcean, you can delay the need for people that work in the developer operations segment, the SREs to ensure that your infrastructure is online. So we pour a lot of dollars into building a highly redundant environment from the start. Other cloud providers take a slightly different approach and say, these instances are ephemeral and they are here today, they could be gone tomorrow, so you really have to architect and application that can withstand a high level of failure. And we are not immune to issues and so we would always encourage customers to build availability into their applications, but we also have a better basis from which for them t o get started. So in the early days when they are still relatively small they don’t experience that issue as much, obviously when you scale to thousands of nodes failure rates, even if it stays at relatively small percentage still creates a lot of issues.So I think that’s another trend in general is that the software is finally beginning to catch up to these much larger distributing environments. The database has always been one of the biggest issues there with running a huge monolithic application on a single server that you scale horizontally. First you start out with two CPUs and then your business grows and you need a new chassis with 4 CPUs, and then it gets tricky after that. And some companies have actually been forced to re-write their application for months or a year to get out of that dependency and now what we are seeing is distribution and availability built into the software from the start so. NoSQL is a great example of that and many distributed Databases that have come as a result of it which inherently are a great fit for cloud providers because of the large number of nodes over disparate machines and resiliency to failure.The last thing on the trends, I think as a result of, I don’t want to take too much credit here, but DigitalOcean coming in with a great price point, an easy to use interphase and the education. I think we have enabled a whole new set of users to come online, so people from countries that are really developing nations and are beginning just to have their people get on the internet from Asia, within Europe, south America as well, are able to take advantage of DigitalOcean because of it’ price point and ease of use and finally start building something online. Whereas in the past they would need to wait much longer, develop on their home computer or laptop and perhaps never even take the step to publish their application live. And I am very proud of the tens of thousands people worldwide that have access to the server re sources as a result of our company. We have also enabled thousands of students whether it’s through hackathons orâ€"we even sponsor our high school that I attended here in New York City so we provide them with a ton of resources every year for students to do their final term project and we do that across the nation and even internationally. These education facilities can actually request resources and sponsorship from DigitalOcean. We want to enable the next generation of developers and we don’t think there is any better way than getting your hands dirty, partially that’s how I learned, so I would love to see other students start out the same way.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: Ben over the last 15 years can you share what things have you learnt about how to start a company and what’s better not to do?Ben: Yes. I chased lucrative opportunities, so I started when I was 15. My first job was in a appliance store and I worked there for two weeks before I quit. But at that point I had saved enough money that I could buy a server online and from that server I started to generate revenue online, initially with advertising then obviously in the infrastructure space and today in the cloud space. So I think these opportunities present themselves and that’s what I love about New York City is the exposure to different industries. You should follow your passion and surround yourself with people, join a company or business that you are really interested in and let the business create itself. An opportunity will strike you, you will recognize that this is something that you feel passionate about and chase that dream. But I would say don’t quit your day job. How can you use a lean model to interate quickly? Try to build a business on the side. When that responsibility becomes too great for you to manage as side project you know you have something that’s worth investing into and I would recommend making the transition at that time. I have had a number of employees though out the years look up us as role models and say, ‘Wow, it’s fantastic that you are able to start this business, I am going to quit and I am going to go ahead and start my own company’. And I always tell them the same thing, I’m like, ‘Are you going to quit and disappear into a vacuum to try to create something or you are leaving because you have an idea that you want to pursue?’. And unfortunately so far those businesses haven’t survived. So I would say surround yourself with the right environment, learn from it, see what you become passion about.Martin: Great. Thank you very much for your time, Ben.Ben: Yes. Definitely.Martin: And the next time you think about starting a company, you should think about whether you need some external funding and if that’s the case maybe then you should quit the company and then start your business, or if you don’t need very much money and you don’t need to talk to clients all the time but having an online business then yo u can think about bootstrapping in parallel to your employment. Thank you very much.Ben: Yes. Thank you, nice to meet you.Martin: Thanks.

Camelot Then and Now - Literature Essay Samples

How has the timeless story of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot changed over the years to reflect the time period(s) that they are recreated in? From the Medieval period to the 1960’s, the legend of Camelot has been repurposed to push agendas or teach morals that the populous of the world needs to hear. While the 1967 film, Camelot, is a retelling of one of history and literature’s most famous love triangles, it has to do with so much more than love. It also has to do with love and loyalty to country, what justice is, the roles of females in society, and so many other important questions that we still think about today. A lot of the Arthurian texts of the Medieval Ages also touch on these subjects. I chose to do the project on this film and musical because it is a great retelling of the Arthurian legend that keeps intact some of the most important points that the original Arthurian texts brought up. The film was released in 1967 and starred Richard Harris as King Arthur, Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Guinevere, and Franco Nero as Sir Lancelot. It was received with mixed reviews around the world. A critic from Film Quarterly named William Johnson said â€Å"Camelot is Hollywood at its worst and best.† All of the actors in the film and the script were praised and celebrated for their performances, though the lavish costumes and settings discredited a lot of the work they did. The movie even got the nickname â€Å"costalot† for how much money was spent on silly things, like the dress Guinevere wore for the wedding scene costing $12,000. The film focuses on the creation of the Round Table and the expansion of Camelot and its Golden Age. The main things the Round Table is created for is to promote justice and doing the right things. Arthur is trying to redefine chivalry and the code of chivalry. He wants to move away from the notion that the power should use their power to only benefit themselves. He believes that knights should use their power to help others and bring peace to all the land. He tells Guinevere that he wants â€Å"Might for right.† She tells him that it is a very original idea and supports his quest to create a brotherhood of knights who congregate to discuss the world’s problems. The movie’s other focus is on the love between King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot. Arthur and Guinevere are married and when Lancelot comes to Camelot, Guinevere falls in love with him as well. There is also a very deep fraternal love between Arthur and Lancelot, with Lancelot being Arthurâ₠¬â„¢s right hand man and best knight. This causes strain in all of their relationships with each other, as Arthur is aware of the affair, but does nothing about it. When Arthur’s illegitimate son, Mordred, comes to Camelot he wants to see the downfall of Camelot. He catches Guinevere and Lancelot in an intimate moment and, while Lancelot escapes, Guinevere is captured and is put on trial for treason against the King. The whole time Arthur is aware of the affair, but he cannot stop the trial or the guilty verdict because he has spent so long building the justice system. Everyone’s only hope is for Lancelot to save Guinevere, which he does, but all of this leads to Camelot’s downfall and the end of the Knights of the Round Table. The movie ends with Arthur proclaiming to remember what they stood for mainly â€Å"Might for right. Right for right. Justice for all.† He realizes that though Camelot may fall, what they created and stood for will live on in history forever. This film was based off of the stage musical with the same title. The plot and characters are basically the same with a few minor changes. The original broadway cast starred Richard Burton as King Arthur, Julie Andrews as Queen Guinevere, and Robert Goulet as Sir Lancelot. One of the main differences from stage to screen is the character of Merlyn. In the film, while he is there, he doesn’t play a huge role and we aren’t sure what happened to him. In the stage musical he is lured into a Nimue’s cave for eternal sleep. There are a few songs that were cut from the film, but the plot is basically the same as the film. The musical was inspired by T.H White’s novel The Once and Future King, which was inspired by Malory’s Morte DArthur. White’s novel is considered to be one of the most influential modern day pieces of Arthurian literature. Though heavily influenced by Malory, he takes a lot of new ideas and puts them in the four part novel. His novel, though mainly meant for young audiences, can also be read as a critique on the first half of the twentieth century in the Western world. Through a lot of the Arthurian literature the themes of chivalry and justice. One of the best examples of this is in the story of Sir Launfal which is a retelling of the story of Lanval told by Marie de France. In this story, Launfal is accused of proposing an affair between Queen Guinevere and himself by Guinevere. This is a false accusation, but because she is the queen he has to be tried. Instead of Arthur just choosing his fate, essentially acting as the sole judge, he calls on all of his knights to decide Launfal’s fate, so they act as a rudimentary form of a jury. There is a search for and an attempt at justice. One of Arthur’s biggest challenges in the film is creating a justice system because he is unhappy with the one, or lack of one, in place. One of the best scenes in the movie that supports this is when he is trying to explain how the system to work to King Pellinore and Pellinore just isn’t comprehending it. Pellinore represents the old ways and though he doesn’t really understand it, he trusts and supports Arthur. Of course because of the justice system, there is no way Arthur can save Guinevere when she is put on trial because he worked so hard to create it and he can’t go against what he believes is right. It’s interesting to see how something so morally right, can basically lead to the downfall of the whole kingdom. The term Camelot has become synonymous with the Kennedy presidency in the United States. Peter L. Hays in his article The Classical and Current Tragedy of Camelot discusses how The Original Cast Recording of Camelot was one of JFK’s favorite things to listen to and how that was publicized after his death. He states that his favorite lines were these from the final number, â€Å"Don’t let it be forgot. That once there was a spot. For one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot.† Hays states â€Å"It was obviously Kennedy’s wish that he could create a Camelot that would live on in history as a shining moment.† While the musical wasn’t made because of the Kennedy presidency, it reflects a lot of Western ideals during the time. It was written not long after World War Two and during the Vietnam War. Wanting a peaceful land that promotes justice and doing what is right was the goal of a lot of the world at the time. When Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte DArthur, he was also writing in the context of history, like Lerner and Lowe. Malory probably wrote this as social commentary on The War of the Roses in England. It was the English Civil War that took place from 1455-1485 between the House of York and House of Lancaster. Malory’s Le Morte DArthur is probably the most famous and influential piece of Arthurian legend, and it was also the first comprehensive piece of Arthurian literature that was written in prose. It is the basis for almost all of the Arthurian literature and legend that is created today. It’s really interesting to think of the parallels that these pieces that were written almost 500 years apart from each other have in common. This proves that the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is one of the most important and relatable in history. In the depths of tragedy and war, it provides a beacon of hope that one day there will be another time of peace an d prosperity. One of the most prominent changes from the Medieval Ages to the 1960’s is women’s roles in society. This is seen obviously in the portrayal of Queen Guinevere. In Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s review of Ulrike Bethlehem’s Guinevere: A Medieval Puzzle: Images of Arthurs Queen in the Medieval Literature of England and France she states â€Å"scholars who attempt to create a coherent picture of Guinevere cannot succeed.† She goes on to say that a lot of Arthurian literature contradicts what Guinevere was used for in terms of literary tools. A lot of scholars can’t pinpoint her purpose in literature. In some earlier Arthurian legend she is pretty horrible. She causes trouble for a lot of people, is dishonest and disloyal to Arthur, and is just a spoiled queen. In Camelot, though still entitled, is no longer the annoyance she is in the earlier writings. She has a pretty substantial character arch in the film that she doesn’t get in any other Arthu rian literature. She starts off as a maiden who is being forced into an arranged with King Arthur, not knowing anything about him she laments in her song â€Å"The Simple Joys of Maidenhood† that because she is getting married there is no longer going to be any excitement for her and men will not fight over her. When she meets Arthur everything changes. She becomes the Queen he needs. She supports him and his ideas, she puts the kingdom first, and loves Arthur and helps him think through all of his revolutionary ideas. She is loyal to him and loves him deeply. The only thing that ever comes between them is Lancelot, and even he doesn’t come between them in a way that makes them love each other less. Malory’s Le Morte DArthur is the first to introduce Lancelot and Guinevere’s love affair. In his version, though, Guinevere is still pretty terrible like the earlier writings of her, though she has a few redeeming qualities and moments. She is very tempermental in Malory’s version, she frequently throws Lancelot out when he does something that angers her. She is also very hostile up to the point when she needs him for something. Like the film, their relationship is the downfall of Camelot. In Le Morte Mordred and Agravaine (who was cut from the film) trap Lancelot and Guinevere in the same fashion that Mordred does in the film. Again, Lancelot escapes and has to save Guinevere. Unlike the film, many more characters are involved in the fight and many people end up dead, which is more of the reason the Round Table falls in the story. Many knights are killed in the rescuing of Guinevere. In both the film and book, Guinevere goes to live in a convent after being resc ued by Arthur rather than living with Lancelot because she feels so guilty and sinful for her actions. This redeems her a lot, even though maybe she didn’t need to be as redeemed as people thought she needed to be during those times. The only time she was unloyal to Arthur was with Lancelot because she loved him. She is human, had it not been the King, she would have never caused this much turmoil. All told, the portrayal of her over the centuries has made her more of a dimensional character than in the past. Sir Lancelot has also developed a lot from the beginning of Arthurian literature considering he really wasn’t a character at all until Malory. In most Arthurian literature before Malory, Sir Gawain was Arthur’s right hand man. Interestingly enough, Sir Gawain wasn’t included in the film, even though he was a character in both Malory and White’s story. Malory, though, makes Lancelot the most accomplished knight in Camelot and starts the affair between he and Guinevere. Lancelot is still a little bit clueless like he is for Malory. He is praised for how physically dominant he is, but not for his common sense. In the film he is introduced in the song â€Å"C’est Moi† where he is singing about how virtuous he is. Before she falls for him, Guinevere makes fun of him and how innocent he is. Asking him if anything has changed with chivalry while she was napping is a great example of this. Though, for all of his virtue, he still commits treason by ha ving an affair with Guinevere. He seems to face the least amount of consequences at the end of the film, though. He is one of the reasons for the fall of the kingdom, but all that happens to him is that he gives up Guinevere and then goes home to France. Arthur dies and Guinevere goes into a convent as well as having to live with the guilt of bringing everything she loves down with her. Lancelot also has to live with the guilt, but nothing really happens to him. Irene Morra in her article Constructing Camelot: Britain and the New World Musical says about Lancelot â€Å"By the end, the musical has endorsed Lancelots self-valuation; he is a romantic hero whose overwhelming loyalty to the king is challenged by a tragic passion for the beautiful Guinevere.† In a lot of Arthurian literature after Malory, Lancelot is written as the best knight in Camelot and Arthur’s best friend. Malory’s interpretation of Lancelot’s armor is discussed in Disarming Lancelot by Elizabeth Scala. Scala’s article is about how arming scenes in literature symbolize a hero. Putting on armor is a sign that someone is going into battle to, presumably, fight the good fight. Malory puts a twist on this convention with Lancelot. â€Å"It is the way Lancelot is disarmed in the Morte DArthur, I will argue, that should be read for its â€Å"heroic† signification.† Making Lancelot a fearsome opponent, even without armor, is a very bold statement in a kingdom that is known for having such excellent knights. Through all of his adventures, in all of Arthurian lure, Lancelot never gets defeated. That is one thing that stays consistent over time. One character who stays pretty consistent over the centuries is King Arthur. He is always noble, always a good king, always a great person. He wants what is best for Camelot and wants his people to be happy and safe and prosperous. Since he is the main character of all Arthurian literature, it is harder to change his character arch. Arthur is a very compelling leader. In the film, Richard Harris does a remarkable job at characterizing this. In a film critique by Roger Ebert from 1967 he says â€Å" Harris is a convincing king. Better still, hes a human king.† He isn’t good because he is brilliant, or strong, or powerful, but because he is a genuinely good human being. He wants to do the right thing for people and that is the best quality a leader can have. His one downfall is trusting people too much. He trusts Lancelot and Guinevere and that destroys his kingdom, and he trusts Mordred who wants to bring down the kingdom. It also adds a layer of tragedy to the downfall of Camelot because Arthur never did anything wrong. He just wanted to better the world around him and because of hate or love for and by other people, he loses that. That, to me, is the most tragic part of the whole story. King Arthur is the kind of leader that every leader should strive to be. To create ideals that outlast your life, to create a legacy that goes on to change the world is quite a feat. Arthur’s ideals and character are immortalized in the stories we tell of him from the past five hundred years to now.

The Advantage Over Its Competitors by Studying the SWOT Free Essay Example, 2500 words

Strategic planning in the company provides a framework to conduct business in the rapidly changing and competitive global market and provides a vision for the future. Large companies like Thomas Cook have more products in the market and the greater is the need to have an effective planning process and to understand any future fluctuations in the market. The recent years of growth in the travel and tourism industry obscure the perceived need for strategic planning, though the unpredicted economic recessions and discontinuities in the market have brought the matters of planning into focus. The recent developments surrounding mergers, strategic alliances, globalization and investments have also heightened the focus into strategic planning (Middleton et al. , 2009). The strategic decisions should focus on long-run decisions that involve the development of new technology and major investments. This is because Thomas Cook has multiple markets and requires strategic planning to attain effe ctive allocation of resources between all components of the business and efficient relationships. Strategic planning is an effective part of the process through which organizations convince the stakeholders and investors about the vision of the business and the direction they wish to take. We will write a custom essay sample on The Advantage Over Its Competitors by Studying the SWOT or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now It comprises of a statement of objectives and goals, a program activity to attain the goals and an outline of resources needed. Middleton et al. (2009) stipulate that it requires market research and analysis and programs undertaken are analyzed and constantly monitored to assess how well targets are being achieved. It is conducted on the assumption that the effort in resources and time is required to produce quantifiable results and an increasing recognition that future development must be considered. Effective strategic planning involves an analysis of the industry and the current market position occupied by the company, the emerging opportunities in the dynamic world, future prospects of the organization and the measures to be undertaken to achieve set goals and objectives.

Argentavis - Facts and Figures

Name: Argentavis (Greek for Argentina bird); pronounced ARE-jen-TAY-viss Habitat: Skies of South America Historical Epoch: Late Miocene (6 million years ago) Size and Weight: 23-foot wingspan and up to 200 pounds Diet: Meat Distinguishing Characteristics: Enormous wingspan; long legs and feet About Argentavis Just how big was Argentavis? To put things in perspective, one of the largest flying birds alive today is the Andean Condor, which has a wingspan of nine feet and weighs about 25 pounds. By comparison, the wingspan of Argentavis was comparable to that of a small plane--close to 25 feet from tip to tip--and it weighed anywhere between 150 and 250 pounds. By these tokens, Argentavis is best compared not to other prehistoric birds, which tended to be much more modestly scaled, but to the huge pterosaurs that preceded it by 60 million years, notably the giant Quetzalcoatlus  (which had a wingspan of up to 35 feet). Given its enormous size, you might assume that Argentavis was the top bird of Miocene South America, about six million years ago. However, at this time, terror birds were still thick on the ground, including descendants of the slightly earlier Phorusrhacos and Kelenken. These flightless birds were built like meat-eating dinosaurs, complete with long legs, grasping hands, and sharp beaks that they wielded on their prey like hatchets. Argentavis probably kept a wary distance from these terror birds (and vice-versa), but it may well have raided their hard-won kill from above, like some kind of oversized flying hyena. A flying animal the size of Argentavis presents some difficult issues, chief of which is how this prehistoric bird managed to a) launch itself off the ground and b) keep itself in the air once launched. Its now believed that Argentavis took off and flew like a pterosaur, unfurling its wings (but only rarely flapping them) in order to catch the high-altitude air currents above its South American habitat. Its still unknown if Argentavis was an active predator of the huge mammals of late Miocene South America, or if, like a vulture, it contented itself with scavenging already-dead corpses; all we can say for sure is that it was definitely not a pelagic (sea-flying) bird like modern seagulls, since its fossils were discovered in the interior of Argentina. As with its style of flight, paleontologists have made a lot of educated guesses about Argentavis, most of which, unfortunately, are not supported by direct fossil evidence. For example, analogy with similarly built modern birds suggests that Argentavis laid very few eggs (perhaps an average of only one or two per year), which were carefully brooded by both parents, and presumably not subject to frequent predation by hungry mammals. Hatchlings probably left the nest after about 16 months, and were only fully grown by the age of 10 or 12; most controversially, some naturalists have suggested that Argentavis could attain a maximum age of 100 years, about the same as modern (and much smaller) parrots, which are already among the longest-lived vertebrates on earth.

Hunger And Undernourishment Positioning Wild Edible...

Hunger and undernourishment: Positioning Wild Edible Plants in food security and nutrition debates in forest areas in the Congo Basin By Tata-Ngome Precillia Ijang1,25, Charlie Shackleton2, Ann Degrande3, Julius Chupezi Tieguhong4 1 Institute of Agricultural Research for Development (IRAD) - Cameroon 2 Department of Environmental Science, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa 3 World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Yaounde, Cameroon 4 Bioversity International, Yaounde, Cameroon 5 2014 McNamara fellow, Rhodes University Abstract Wild Edible Plants (WEPs) are often relegated in measuring household nutrition because no suitable food group categories exist that simplify their appraisal in conducting food consumption surveys. This paper is a theoretical article that triggers the positioning of WEPs in food security discussions so that programmes and policies can be more targeted. It discusses the diverging approaches adopted by food systems policies and nutrition programs to address malnutrition; and without considering WEPs. Among others, three food categories and 12 sub-groups are engendered to develop an understanding on how WEPs could be mainstreamed into food security and nutrition debates. Key words: Food groups, Food security, Nutrition, Wild Edible Plants Introduction Progress in achieving dietary adequacy for the world’s population is challenging (FAO, IFAD and WFP, 2013; FAO, 2013; Termont et al., 2010). First, feeding the world’s increasing population is

The Relationship Between Porcine And Human Cysticercosis

Some of the other risk factors are linked to both porcine and human cysticercosis. According to Bhutta et al (2012) ,Garrett et al (2015) and Assana et al (2010), low level hygiene environment such as dirty contaminated soil and lack of latrine may rise opportunities to access Taeniid ova because dirty soil can increase the possibility of exposure to taeniid ova for both human and pig and taeniid ova can flow to water resource like wells in rainy season. Certainly, according to many of these articles including WHO, the installment of a large number of latrines can control the risk factor because it can prevent the contamination(WHO 2015), However, there is the article reporting that public(community) latrine can bring weaker effect and all†¦show more content†¦Interestingly, more than 10 members decreased the risk in the result. Although Mwape infer this is because such large size family cannot consume pork frequently due to the costs, a stronger evidence would be necessary to prove this. Therefore,a more large-scale observation such as cohort study is highly recommendable to identify the necessity of latrines in the future. Each of the resources examines other risk factors why such transmission situation between pig and human occur from various points of view in detail. Carabin et al(2015) and Edia-Asukeet al(2014) maintain that the older people, the higher infection rate it is. They infer that the frequency of the exposure is related to the infection. Interestingly, the change point analysis which determine the number of people with active infections (cysticercosis)increases from at 30 years old in Zambia. This result is quite younger than the result in Ecuador under the same analysis (Mwape et al, 2015). This result could imply that sub-saharan Africa is at higher risk for T. solium infection than Latin America. As an interesting site as a possible risk factor, slaughterhouse situations are referred in some articles. For example, in Nigeria, there is an existing abattoir law to do proper management. However, various problem is identified from the actual situations. Especially, unregistered and private home pig slaughter slabs may cause more

Public Key Cryptography Free Essays

string(201) " might encrypt a piece of information using the site’s public key and ask the web server to decrypt it, thereby demonstrating that the server has the right private key, and proving its identity\." Abstract- Public-key cryptography is a key technology for e-commerce, intranets, extranets and other web-enabled applications. However, to garner the benefits of public-key cryptography, a supporting infrastructure is needed. The Microsoft ® Windows ® 2000 operating system includes a native public-key infrastructure (PKI) that is designed from the ground up to take full advantage of the Windows 2000 security architecture. We will write a custom essay sample on Public Key Cryptography or any similar topic only for you Order Now This paper describes the fundamentals of public-key security systems, including what benefits they offer and what components are required to implement them. It also describes how the Windows 2000 PKI components deliver the needed services while providing interoperability, security, flexibility, and ease of use. I. Overview Public-key cryptography offers significant security benefits when it’s properly implemented. Like other enabling technologies, public-key cryptography requires an infrastructure to deliver its benefits. However, the public-key infrastructure, or PKI, isn’t a physical object or software process; instead, it’s a set of useful services provided by a collection of interconnected components These components work together to provide public-key-based security services to applications and users. This white paper has two goals: to explain public-key technology and its uses, and to describe the features and benefits provided by the native PKI in the Microsoft ® Windows ® 2000 operating system. Understanding both of these topics will help you to decide where you can use PKI technology to improve your business processes and increase your ability to securely handle transactions with others. In this paper, you’ll learn what a public key infrastructure is, what desirable benefits it can offer your operations, and how the Windows 2000 PKI delivers interoperability, security, flexibility, and ease of use. II. History During the early history of cryptography, two parties would agree upon a key using a secure, but non-cryptographic, method; for example, a face-to-face meeting or an exchange via a trusted courier. This key, which both parties kept absolutely secret, could then be used to exchange encrypted messages. A number of significant practical difficulties arise in this approach to distributing keys. Public-key cryptography addresses these drawbacks so that users can communicate securely over a public channel without having to agree upon a shared key beforehand. In 1874, a book by William Stanley Jevons[1] described the relationship of one-way functions to cryptography and went on to discuss specifically the factorization problem used to create the trapdoor function in theRSA system. Since the 1970s, a large number and variety of encryption, digital signature, key agreement, and other techniques have been developed in the field of public-key cryptography. The ElGamal cryptosystem (invented by Taher ElGamal) relies on the (similar, and related) difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem, as does the closely related DSA developed at the US National Security Agency (NSA) and published by NIST as a proposed standard. The introduction of elliptic curve cryptography by Neal Koblitz and Victor Miller independently and simultaneously in the mid-1980s has yielded new public-key algorithms based on the discrete logarithm problem. Although mathematically more complex, elliptic curves provide smaller key sizes and faster operations for equivalent estimated security. III. What is public key cryptography? When most people hear the words encrypt or cryptography, they immediately think of secret-key cryptography, wherein two parties share a single secret key that’s used both to encrypt and decrypt data. Loss or compromise of the secret key makes the data it encrypts vulnerable. By contrast, public-key systems use two keys: a public key, designed to be shared, and a private key, which must be closely held. These keys are complementary: if you encrypt something with the public key, it can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key, and vice versa. Public-key systems depend on the mathematical relationship between the public and private keys. It’s not feasible to derive one from the other. There are two fundamental operations associated with public key cryptography: encryption and signing. The goal of encryption is to obscure data in such a way that it can only be read by the intended party. In public-key cryptography, if Bob wants to send Alice some private data, he uses her public key to encrypt it, then sends it to her. Upon receiving the encrypted data, Alice uses her private key to decrypt it. The important concept here is that Alice can freely distribute her public key in order to allow anyone in the world to encrypt data that only she can decrypt. If Bob and Chuck both have copies of her public key, and Chuck intercepts an encrypted message from Bob to Alice, he will not be able to decrypt it; only Alice’s private key can do that, and she is the only person who holds it. These two operations can be used to provide three capabilities A Privacy Privacy is a necessity for businesses of all kinds, but it’s of vital importance for ones that use the Internet. The Internet allows anyone in the world to communicate with anyone else, but it doesn’t provide security. Even within your company’s internal network, if someone can gain physical access to your network media, they can eavesdrop on any data that traverses it. Public-key cryptography provides privacy via data encryption, whether the data is in the form of e-mail messages, credit card numbers sent over the Internet, or network traffic. Because public keys can be posted freely, complete strangers can establish private communications simply by retrieving each other’s public keys and encrypting the data. B. Authentication Any transaction involves two parties, whether they’re a client and a server or a customer and a vendor. For many transactions, it’s desirable for one or both sides to be able to authenticate, or verify the identity of, the other. For instance, before a customer provides their credit card number to an e-commerce web site, they will want to know that they are not talking to an imposter. One way that a customer can do this is by making the web site prove that it holds the right private key. For example, a web browser might encrypt a piece of information using the site’s public key and ask the web server to decrypt it, thereby demonstrating that the server has the right private key, and proving its identity. You read "Public Key Cryptography" in category "Papers" Authentication can also take the form of assuring your customers that you produced a particular piece of data and that it has not been tampered with. Public-key cryptography enables you to do this by means of a digital signature, a concept which is an extension of the public-key signing operation discussed above. If Bob wants to digitally sign his company’s annual report, he first generates a unique fingerprint of the report using an algorithm called a hash algorithm. Hash algorithms are specially designed to guarantee that even a single changed byte in the document will generate a completely different hash. Next, he encrypts the report and the hash using his private key. Alice (or anyone else) can verify the origin and authenticity of the signed report by first decrypting it using Bob’s public key, then calculating her own version of the fingerprint and comparing it to the fingerprint she received. If the two match, it proves two things: that the report has not been tampered with, and it came from Bob. C. Non-repudiation Businesses require the ability to enter into binding agreements, whether in the physical world or on the Internet. Suppliers and buyers need the assurance that if they enter into an agreement, the other party will not be able to repudiate the agreement at some later point. Digital signatures on electronic purchase orders, contracts, and other agreements are legally binding in several countries and in many U. S. states, and legal acceptance is rapidly growing. D. infrastructure Manage keys: a PKI makes it easy to issue new keys, review or revoke existing keys, and manage the trust level attached to keys from different issuers. Publish keys: a PKI offers a well-defined way for clients to locate and retrieve public keys and information about whether a specific key is valid or not. Without the ability to retrieve keys and know that they are valid, your users can’t make use of public key services. Use keys: a PKI provides an easy-to-use way for users to use keys—not just by moving keys around where they’re needed, but also by providing easy-to-use applications that perform public-key cryptographic operations, making it possible to provide security for e-mail, e-commerce, and networks. E. A capability,not a thing A common misperception is that a PKI is a thing. In fact, it’s a capability—the capability to easily publish, manage, and use public keys. Think of a PKI like a municipal water system. A water system is made up of purification plants, storage towers, pumps, water mains, and so on, as well as the pipes and faucets in your house. All of the disparate service-providing objects work together to provide a capability for users to obtain water on demand. In a similar way, a PKI consists of a group of discrete components that work together to allow you to use public keys, and public-key cryptography, seamlessly and transparently. The best place to implement a PKI is in the operating system. Operating systems already provide a number of other infrastructures, like the printing infrastructure that moves documents to printers and the file service infrastructure that retrieves files from shared storage. In both cases, the operating system provides a capability to transparently and easily use a network service, just as a PKI does. F. Digital certificates:packaging for public key So far, this paper has mentioned public keys when talking about the objects that a PKI uses. While public keys are required for PKI-based security, they’re usually packaged as digital certificates. (It’s important to stress that only public keys are packaged into certificates. The private key is never shared, so it doesn’t require packaging—it’s simply stored securely). The certificate contains the public key and a set of attributes, like the key holder’s name. These attributes may be related to the holder’s identity, what they’re allowed to do, or under what conditions the certificate is valid. The binding between attributes and the public key is present because the certificate is digitally signed by the entity that issued it; the issuer’s signature on the certificate vouches for its authenticity and correctness. For a real-world analogy, look in your wallet. If you have a drivers’ license, you have the equivalent of a digital certificate. Your license contains a unique key (your license number) and some attributes (an expiration date, your name, address, hair color, and so on). It’s issued by a trusted agency and laminated to prevent it from being tampered with. Anyone who trusts the agency that issued your license and verifies that the lamination is intact can rely on its authenticity. At that point, though, the analogy breaks down—in the real world, only the government can issue a driver’s license, so everyone knows that a license issued by Joe’s Really Good DMV isn’t valid. How do you make the same determination with a digital certificate? The answer lies in the concept of a certificate hierarchy. In a hierarchy, as shown in Figure 1, each issuer, or certificate authority, signs (using its own private key) the certificates it issues. The public half of the CA’s keypair is itself packaged in a certificate—one that was issued by a higher-level CA. This pattern can continue through as many levels as desired, with each CA certifying the authenticity of the certificates it has issued. Eventually, though, there must be a top-level CA, called a root certificate authority. Since there’s nobody above the root CA in the hierarchy, there’s nobody to vouch for the authenticity and origin of its certificate. Instead, the root CA signs its own certificate—it simply asserts that it is the root. Figure 1: What a certificate hierarchy looks like Clearly, it’s not secure to accept a root CA’s assertion of its own identity. To verify a root CA’s certificate, a trusted copy of its public key is obtained via an out-of-band method-—that is, it’s delivered by a third party instead of over the network—and the key is used to verify that the root certificate is bona fide. Microsoft provides the public keys for many popular root CAs in PK-enabled products like Internet Explorer, allowing users to verify those roots transparently. Root CAs can also provide copies of their public keys for downloading from public web sites. Once the root key has been delivered via an out-of-band means, the user can verify the root certificate, and hence the entire certificate chain. Even better, because each certificate’s digital signature protects it from tampering, certificate chains can be freely passed over insecure media like the Internet. G. Public key enabled application Once your PKI can issue, publish, and control certificates, the next step is to deploy applications that can use them. A well-written application that is tightly integrated with the rest of the PKI can make the use of public-key cryptography all but transparent to the user. The user should not need to know how cryptography works, where certificates are stored, or any of the other details—they should simply indicate what they want done, and leave it to the applications and the PKI to make it happen. Applications can use digital certificates to deliver the benefits of public-key cryptography, and they can combine cryptographic functions like signing and encryption to make possible e-commerce, secure network access, or other desirable services. All Microsoft applications that use public-key cryptography are natively public-key enabled. For example, the Microsoft Outlook ® messaging and collaboration client offers built-in signing and encryption support, combined with the ability to use certificate publishers and root certificates from a number of sources. Internet Explorer, Microsoft Money, and Internet Information Server provide the ability to set up encrypted web sessions. PKI-enabled applications can build on industry-standard protocols to speed development and allow easy interoperability with other organizations, too. H. Hardware support The increasing market demand for PKI implementations has spurred hardware vendors to develop cryptographic hardware, including smart cards, PC cards, and PCI cards that offer onboard cryptographic processing. These hardware devices offer a wide range of capabilities. On the low end, smartcards offer limited cryptographic processing combined with secure key storage; on the high end, multiprocessor crypto-accelerators allow high-volume web services to secure data without suffering from bottlenecks caused by software cryptographic modules. The best thing about PKI hardware devices is that they’re optional—if your application requires additional performance or security, you can add hardware to provide it as necessary, but you can still build a completely functional PKI in software. I. Models The standalone CA model The standalone CA model (see Figure 2) is probably familiar to you if you’ve used SSL-protected web sites. In the standalone model, some third-party entity holds the root key and certificate for your organization, and it issues and revokes all certificates for your users. This third party might be a commercial CA like VeriSign, Thawte, Belsign, or GTE Cybertrust; it could also be a bank, a law firm, a trade association, or any other organization that you trust to issue certificates on your behalf. Figure 2: The standalone CA model This model allows trust both within and outside your organization, so you can exchange secure e-mail and e-commerce transactions with outsiders. Standalone CAs also free you from the complexities of issuing, revoking, and tracking certificates. However, it requires you to trust some outside entity with your certificate management, and many third-party CAs levy an individual charge for each issued certificate. The enterprise CA model In this model (see Figure 3), your enterprise acts as its own CA, issuing and revoking certificates subject to your business requirements. Because no outsourcing provider is involved, your organization maintains complete control over its PKI. In addition to that control, though, you can guarantee that no one outside the enterprise can obtain a certificate unless you issue it to them. This model works well for controlling access to internal resources, or for generating certificates whose attributes would be meaningless to an outside entity. For example, you could issue certificates to managers that would allow them to make electronic travel reservations through the company travel office. Figure 3: The enterprise CA model Enterprise CAs with subordinates You can expand the flexibility of the enterprise CA model by adding subordinate CAs for individual departments, business units, or subdivisions of the organization. Most organizations already delegate some amount of administrative control to their subunits. For example, individual managers at most companies have some level of purchasing authority; higher-ranking managers can write bigger checks. Even though there’s a centralized purchasing department that does much of the enterprise-wide buying, individual units still have the ability to perform day-to-day purchasing tasks. Choose your trust model If the choice of a CA model is the most important one you face when implementing a PKI, choosing a trust model comes in a very close second. When you trust a root, you’re making an implicit statement that you trust them to be careful about who they issue certificates to. In this case, careful isn’t quite the right word; what you’re really saying is that you trust them to follow their prescribed policies and procedures to verify the identity of a certificate holder when they issue the certificate. When you choose to trust a root certificate, you’re also choosing to trust certificates signed by that root. Depending on the CA model you use, the practical impact of this choice could be large (as when you choose to trust a large, widely used commercial root CA) or small (like deciding to trust your own accounting department). Normally these decisions are made for the enterprise as a whole; however, the Windows 2000 PKI allows individual users (or their administrators) to make their own trust decisions. In addition, administrators may override or augment user trust decisions with group policies. You also have to choose what you trust certificates to be used for. The X. 509 v3 certificate standard allows you to specify whether certificates can be used for signing, encryption, or both. For example, you might want to give everyone signature certificates but restrict the use of encryption-capable certificates to certain departments or individuals. Microsoft has extended this feature to allow you to specify additional uses, including signing software components, logging on using a smart card, or recovering an encrypted file. When using the Windows 2000 PKI, the issuer has total control over what the certificate can be used for. IV Conclusion Public key cryptography offers critical business advantages, including the ability to conduct e-commerce and normal business operations with increased privacy, security, and assurance. To deliver these benefits, a public-key infrastructure is necessary that makes it easy to manage, publish and use public keys. Windows 2000 offers a PKI that is completely integrated with the operating system and provides flexible, secure, interoperable services that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and easy to manage. References N. Ferguson; B. Schneier (2003). Practical Cryptography. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-22357-3. J. Katz; Y. Lindell (2007). Introduction to Modern Cryptography. CRC Press. ISBN 1-58488-551-3. J. Menezes; P. C. van Oorschot; S. A. Vanstone (1997). Handbook of Applied Cryptography. ISBN 0-8493-8523-7. IEEE 1363: Standard Specifications for Public-Key Cryptography Single Sign-On Technology for SAP Enterprises: What does SAP have to say? [1] ^ Ed Gerck, Overview of Certification Systems: x. 509, CA, PGP and SKIP, in The Black Hat Briefings ’99, http://www. securitytechnet. com/resource/rsc-center/presentation/black/vegas99/certover. pdf andhttp://mcwg. org/mcg-mirror/cert. htm ^ Stephen Wilson, Dec 2005, â€Å"The importance of PKI today†, China Communications, Retrieved on 2010-12-13 ^ Mark Gasson, Martin Meints, Kevin Warwick (2005), D3. 2: A study on PKI and biometrics, FIDIS deliverable (3)2, July 2005 How to cite Public Key Cryptography, Papers