Amazon is bringing the Amazon Web Services (AWS) startup tour for the second year in a row to Boston and Pixily is invited to present at the conference. It will be held on September 22nd at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge.

If you are thinking of cloud computing or Amazon Web Services, you should attend this event. We attended this event same time last year and it helped us craft our infrastructure strategy. We learnt a lot from it and a year later we run 95% of infrastructure on Amazon Web Services.

Here is the agenda for the conference:

Event Schedule:

 2:00-2:20    Opening Statements – Andy Jassy, Sr. Vice President, Amazon Web Services

2:20-3:00    AWS Presentation – Jinesh Varia, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

3:00-3:15    Break

3:15-3:55    Customer Presentations:

Prasad Thammineni, CEO, Pixily

Ryan Angilly, Founder, MessageSling.com

Greg Arnette, Founder & CTO, Sonian Networks

3:55-4:25    Customer Q&A

4:25-4:45    Presentation – Mike Hirshland, Partner, Polaris Ventures

4:45-5:00    Closing Statements – Andy Jassy, Sr. Vice President, Amazon Web Services

5:00-7:00    Cocktail/Networking Reception sponsored by Polaris Ventures

 

I got a near surreal reminder of the power of usability yesterday. I was showing some recent pictures to my 3-year old son on my new iPhone 3G and he instinctively started advancing to the next picture using his fingers. This is really what user interface and human computer interaction ought to be about. A 3-year old with no other defined mental model should be able to just use it.

On the other hand, I wonder if the iPhone would pass the so-called Grandma Test, which we employ quite frequently at Pixily. The Grandma may have some mental models to unlearn before she can use the iPhone (or she may choose to just stick to her jitterbug). Around here, the user interaction related conversations evoke the most discussion, since we all care a lot about it. Our product’s usability reflects it loud and clear.

The snippet view is a stellar example of our extreme usability. The thumbnail (to the left) gives a telescopic/big-picture view of the page, and the snippet (to the right) anchors our vision to familiar logos, and patterns (such as Billing Date and Account number) mimicking what we do when we flip through stacks of paper. The labels and other metadata (below) provide the necessary context. All in all, they are discrete nuggets of information in perfect harmony. Our users love it.

So, what tests do you employ as you design your user interaction? Where do you draw the line between the toddler test and the grandma test?