How to make money hosting picos

In the third note of an earlier post on Managing channels, we promised this post.

Basic economics

Buy low; sell high.

Running a pico engine in an AWS EC2 instance will cost a few dollars a month. Such a site could host thousands or probably even tens of thousands of picos. So, sell control of a pico for ten dollars a year and you should be able to make a profit.

You do the math. Buy for a hundred dollars a year; sell for tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Motivation aka marketing

Consider a couple of analogies.

Years ago, very few people had a car phone (available starting in 1946). Today, almost anyone can have a phone in their car.

Years ago, very few people owned a personal computer. When the author was an undergraduate in the 1970's, one of his professors owned a PDP-8. All of the other computers on campus (only a handful of them at that) were owned by the university. Today, almost anyone can own a personal computer.

Today, relatively few people own a personal computer in the cloud.

There is a pattern here. Early adopters generally have the means and the technical savvy to adopt a new possibility. Then innovators develop a new way of packaging that possibility and successfully market it to a much broader audience.

A pico is a personal cloud, and can serve in remarkable ways, many of which are yet to be imagined.

Customers aka sales

The author is not a salesman, and so has no advice to offer, beyond partnering with someone who has the skills you lack.

Technology aka product

This blog has pointers on installing and operating a pico engine. That will host your product, which is one pico per customer.

You'll also need some interesting rulesets, listening for some interesting events, and probably providing a notification service of some kind. While it's up to you to invent these, there are many ideas nestled in earlier blog posts.

Security

By design, picos are isolated from one another, so your customers needn't be aware of each other, let alone interfere with each other.

Each pico has an unbounded number of channels coming into it, and if/when one of these is compromised or abused, it can be deleted and replaced.

You'll need to be sure to use nginx to prevent your customers from directly accessing the developer UI of the pico engine.

Operations

You'll need to monitor the pico engine to be sure it is highly available. If/when the server it is running on goes down (say for routine patching), you'll need to be sure that the pico engine is restarted when it comes back.

Portability

In theory, a pico should be able to move from one pico engine to another. This can lead to competition in the space of pico engine providers.

Conclusion

This is merely the barest outline of the possibility. We wish you every success.

Notes

"not a salesman" This came to the author's attention during a job interview in 1974 with IBM for a sales position in Paris. Quite early in the conversation, the interviewer asked (loosely translated from the French he used), "you are not a salesman, are you?" The author ended up getting a technical job with a less known company in Paris.

"one pico per customer" Since every pico can create child picos, this would be difficult to enforce, so in practice you'd have to have some kind of sliding charge. When a pico becomes fully portable, it will have to take its children with it.