Amazon EC2 running IBM now offers Amazon EC2 instances combined with popular IBM applications that you can pay for by the hour with no need for licenses or long term upfront commitments. You can now flexibly scale your IBM applications up and down and only pay for what you use. If you already have an existing IBM license, you may also have the ability to run that license in Amazon EC2 as well; you simply pay our normal Amazon EC2 hourly prices for On-Demand or Reserved Instances.

The hourly prices for Amazon EC2 running IBM are as follows:

* Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express – starting at $0.38/hour
* Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup – starting at $1.31/hour
* Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express – starting at $0.38/hour
* Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Workgroup – starting at $1.31/hour
* Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere sMash – starting at $0.50/hour
* Amazon EC2 running IBM Lotus Web Content Management – starting at $2.48/hour
* Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server – starting at $6.39/hour

Amazon EC2 running IBM requires no commitments or long-term contracts, and allows you to get up and running quickly with IBM’s proven technologies, paying only for the hours you use. To get started, you can find Amazon EC2 running IBM AMIs in the AWS Management Console or ElasticFox by searching for them with the keyword “ec2-paid-ibm-amis”.

For more details on pricing or using Amazon EC2 with IBM-based technologies please go to http://aws.amazon.com/ibm.

With:

• Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
• Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
• Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
• Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
• Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
• Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
• Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
• Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
• Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
• John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Examgeneral.com is dedicated to the creation of tests or exams online, whatever their field of activity. You can be a teacher, a school, a university, a business, an administration, in short any structure which needs to create tests or exams online and have taken by students, colleagues, employees , etc … examgeneral.com offers a platform dedicated to the creation and taken of these tests.

By default a easy mode allows you to do everything in one step: creating the exam, retrieving the URL and giving it to who will take the exam. You can also create public exams, which will feed the public database of examgeneral and will enable everyone to take public tests in english, mathematics, and any other idea that you will wish to make it public.

But there is also an expert mode, to be activated in the preferences of the “teacher”, which lets you manage classes, assign examinations for these classes, manage courses themselves divided into various examinations, etc… In short examgeneral.com provides a comprehensive management environment for online test and exam craation, where students and teachers will benefit from sophisticated dashboards to monitor their respective progress.

What’s the difference from the numerous already existing online test websites? First it is an open and free website, professional, and hence the mere creation of online testing, we come to the management of classes, students, statistics, deadlines taken examinations, comparison between results, friends social network, etc … All this for free in its public consumer version, without limits. Will only pay the organizations that manage large-scale multiple classes, professors, students, courses, etc … with specific management tools which will be dedicated to them. But it will be for the next version.

Feel free to visit the site and make it known around you. And if you have any feedback, you can share it with the community of users (it is emerging …).

From the original idea to the launch of the website

We obviously put our web 2.0 expertise in designing and implementing examgeneral.com. In the beginning, a simple idea from the founders. We worked together to brainstorm, formalize, evaluate the implications and how to make participatory the original idea. We have also worked together on the business model to make the project monetizable in the long term.

Then we set up a dedicated development team, led by one of our project managers and build from our high performance development center in China. The achievement has been based on our agile methodology that emphasizes the interactive relationship with the customer and the delivery of iterative versions (very short cycles between 1 and 3 weeks max) to promote the dynamic design and guarante a common vision from the beginning to the end of the project.

It is important also to note that hosting is made on the Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. It is a know-how we have developed very early at Kimind and that we make available to our customers. The scalability is guaranteed at all times and costs are 100% proportional to the actual consumption of CPU and bandwidth.

First, a private alpha was built, a necessary step because the original idea had no functional specifications and we had everything to build and demonstrate. Then the following versions, like this first beta version, can be realised like packages, now that the functional perimeter is fully well defined. This is one of the forces key points of Kimind to be able to engage in this way on projects from start to finish.

Feel free to contact us directly if you have any questions or needs similar achievements that you would like us to cover.