Are You Accessible?
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I’m not talking about wether you have a cell phone, or a laptop computer. I’m talking about headspace. Do you have the headspace to having meaningful exchanges with people? Do those people feel like you contributed something to their experience? Or was the exchange solely superficial? Let me tell you a story..
As many of you know, I have been travelling now for several weeks telling the evangelizing for www.empressr.com. But this article is not about telling you how awesome empressr is. In this article, I am going to talk about internet rockstars. The term “internet rockstar” has many defintions by many sources that may or may not be credible. However, all internet rockstars have one thing in common. They are people. They are people that other people want to know and be around.
In my travels I have met many internet rockstars. Many of whom are legitament, and others who are self-titled rockstars.
Yesterday, Bryan Thatcher and I had lunch with a bona fide internet rockstar. In the Netherlands, he is larger than life. And no, I’m not talking about David Hasselhoff. I’m talking about Werner Vogels. When he’s not working, he can be found on twitter. Some might say he can be found on twitter WHILE working.
As CTO of Amazon, I’m sure Werner’s time is quite valuable. Then again, everyone’s time is valuable. But Bryan and I have been considering using Amazon Web Servicesfor a very long time. In fact, Empressr is currently using S3 services to store all of the presentations and stories that people tell using the Composr.
We had a LOT of questions, a culmination of months of research about the offering, reading blog posts, going to conferences, and experimentation. But still, we had questions. So we reached out to Werner on twitter and told him that we were going to be in Amsterdam. and If he had time to answer a few questions. Werner surprised us both, not only did he have time, but he suggested a time and a place to have lunch.
2 hours of dialogue later, he invited us to his birthday party (photos to be online soon) later that night.
The knowledge that Byran and i gained was invaluable, but the ability to have access to someone so knowledgeable was surprising. Later that night, it became clear that Werner has a lot of love for technology, technologies, and web 2.0. It’s not that surprising that Werner would take the time to have lunch with us.
As a result of our meeting, I have more confidence in the Amazon Web Services offering. In fact, over the next few weeks, I am going to start two projects. Both of these projects are intended to be step-by-step how to’s about using Amazon Web Services. I will be migrating www.globalcitizenexperiment.com to the cloud. Fully. And when AWS does launch the windows offering, www.empressr.com is going to move to the Amazon cloud as well. Exciting times ahead! But I have another source of motivation for these projects now. My friend Werner is behind this effort, and I’m going to do my small part to be another example of the power of the cloud. Amazon’s Cloud. My friend Werner’s cloud.
And you know what else, he paid for lunch. 
Stay tuned — more to come about Amazon Web Services.
