I randomly stumbled across what has to be one of the coolest new websites around -- animoto. This site takes your pictures and whatever music you want and makes an amazing video from them. One of the coolest behind the scenes aspects of the site is that they’ve used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to scale their business. If only Google App Engine had a service for background processing. Here is one I created from my cruise last month:

 

Check out this quick 60 second explanation of how the system works. Oh, and let’s talk about how hot Tom Clifton (the guy in the below video) is… damn hipsters (check out this picture if you don’t think he is hipster enough.

 

Here is a video of Tom talking about the service at more length:

 

 

Finally, the guys that work there seem to be pretty geeky, and their blogs are totally worth reading, even if you do think Ruby is freakin strange.