Amahi Blog

The news is out – Amahi will be at Computex in Taiwan, in the Intel pavilion.

Amahi will be demonstrating the latest release of the Home Digital Assistant (HDA) home server running on an Intel Atom processor N270 series for embedded computing. The HDA is what Intel calls an “Open Consumer Applications Platform.” A new class of device  integrating a home server with home router functionality. The demonstration will take place in the Intel pavilion from June 2nd to 6th, 2009.

Above: Partial image of Intel Demo Brief with Amahi at Computex 2009

The demonstration will showcase an HDA operating in the booth at Computex as well as VPN access to a remote system (in California). The demo will cover:

• the basic platform functionality for user and share creation, and networking control
• one-click application installation
  • applications demonstrated will include media management, media serving, photo galleries, video surveillance applications and more!
• cross platform support for Linux, Windows and Apple client machines will be highlighted

We have heard from many new users that they had no idea Amahi exists (there has been little if any marketing to date). This show might be what just changes that perception.

This is an exciting time for the community and Amahi – enjoy it!

In this newsletter

• New Amahi Web Site
• Platform Improvemens
• News on Applications

New Amahi Web Site

In this newsletter, we’re happy to announce the launch of our fresh new web site!

http://www.amahi.org

As our user base expands rapidly to several hundred existing users and into the thousands, the web site has been enhanced for a better user experience and to help existing as well as prospective users quickly answer questions about Amahi. Here are some of the new features:

• Very handy custom search engine at the top to search for Amahi-only topics in the wiki, FAQ, blog and more, powered by Google
• New, two-level, menu structure, with easier navigation across the entire site
• Revamped features page, with a new features gallery, new technology overview and community sections
• New wizard to configure your own HDA(s) within seconds, and most importantly, without sending emails. How’s that for instant gratification!
• An area for latest news in the front page

We’re very excited about this new web site, as it provides us a way to start adding cool new features that our users want and we hope all users will find useful!

A number of people provided great help and feedback to get this new web site up and running, including Gerald, who did most of the work to get it going, Ash, Greg, Guy, Luke, Mayte, and a few others!

Many thanks to everyone!!

We continue to improve in the rankings for our area and keep on increasing our daily visitor traffic, which keeps driving new user adoption every day. We have great feedback all the time!

Platform Improvements

Amahi is based on Linux, and it provides a platform on which rich web applications can be deployed.

This platform has been improved tremendously in terms of performance, stability and features in recent times.

We are actively working on the API and recruiting developers to develop more applications. We have a theme engine, and we now have one theme deployed and two others in the making that fully utilize it!

The new theme, conceived by a designer, Alvin Lai, and implemented by cooperation of several Amahi enthusiasts can be seen in this link.

News on Applications

As most of you know, we believe applications are the cornerstone of the Amahi Linux Home Serever.

There are a few applications available, some of them demo apps designed to showcase what the platform can do and some of them already very useful.

The one application that has improved a lot is “slideshow”. This application now advertises Media RSS feeds along with the picture pages. Thanks to that, one can use the amazing browser plug-in called PicLens to see all your pictures in a truly amazing way.

PicLens is a browser plugin that lets you see your pictures in a 3-dimensional immersive “wall” that you can navigate with amazing ease. In fact it’s so immersive, some people get dizzy while browsing their picture collection!

In our family we found we have (somehow) accumulated over 10 _thousand_ pictures over the years. We had no idea we had so many. With PicLens, we were able to fly through all the pictures and enjoy them in a way we had not experienced before, not even with desktop apps!

PicLens can be used to see Flickr albums, Google images, YouTube videos and a host of other sites with the same experience!

More to Come

We have several other apps that have improved over time and have new features coming, one new theme coming this week (maybe more), and many other news in the pipeline …

We’d like to give thanks to our enthusiast users, who keep us going, with ideas, patches, themes, and some bits of patience as the platform comes together!

Lots of new things in the horizon for Amahi! You can see all that we have been up to in our blog. We’ll keep you posted of future news there also!

In this newsletter

• Great Amahi News
• Rise in Popularity
• New Release
• Finding out What Users Want

Great Amahi News

Time for an Amahi update, packed with news!

With these great news, you’d think we’re onto something!

• Since our last newsletter, our users and installs have more than doubled. Again.
• Our average daily web site traffic has increased more than 5-fold.
• We’ve had a couple of waves of over 500% and 2000% increase in traffic compared to average traffic. Yes, that’s 5-fold and 20-fold over the average, for those like me with rusty math
• Requests to join our beta program have increased dramatically, to the point that we cannot handle them efficiently. We’re very actively working to address this.
• We’re risen significantly in visbility, ranking about number 3 in most major search engines: Google. Yahoo! and Live
• … last, and most importantly, we released our best-ever Amahi Linux Home Server release to date!

Rise in Popularity

I know what you’re thinking. You think we probably got some bit of unexpected help from the perceived competition. That has certainly got us some interested users. However, we’re really not in competition for the same users. We’re complementary, not just in the typical users, but also in technical features.

Nevertheless, we welcome users interested in shaping our view of what a home server should be!

Part of the rising popularity since the last newsletter comes from being referenced in various well known and respected forums like ars technica, engadget, gigaom, clubic, in France, AVForums in the UK, DailyTech, TechWatch in Australia, and others. We have also been featured in popular sites like Newegg, and reviewed in various blogs in the home server space.

Our user mailing list is now gaining traction and we hope to get some rocking developers from it!

Not only that, we have been getting great feedback and even some praise in the form of great testimonials!

We are rotating a few of the testimonials at a time in our web page.

New Release, Fedora 8 Based

On the more concrete news front, we have done a big new release since our last newsletter.

After this release proved to be stable, we have been opening the beta program to more and more enthusiasts. We have more than tripled our user base and got more and more useful feedback than ever.

This release contains stability improvements, it is based on Fedora 8, it features Ruby on Rails 2.0, and it provides a solid base to add more components into the base system, like making it more of a media server, which is what our uses seem to be want the most.

Finding Out What Users Want – Pretty Pictures!

Now for some eye candy.

One of the great challenges we have, being small and community driven, is to understand what you, our users, really want, (not just what you say you want). This helps us prioritize what to work on, as opposed to guess. It’s basic customer satisfaction.

At the moment we are conducting research on what features people are interested in the most. Here is how we’re doing it. We have our list of the major features in the Amahi Linux Home Server home page.

We use heat maps to understand what users like the most, by correlating where visitors look at, in an aggregate manner. Hopefully this is a reliable indicator of user preferences. See the picture below!

In addition, we’re working towards getting feedback forms.

There are quite a few more things going on, as we continue building a team, make new releases and improve the user experience. We’ll keep you updated over time with details, however, that’s all for now!

In this newsletter

• Amahi Launch and Holiday Party!
• We’ve Doubled!
• More News
• Seeking Guest Bloggers

Launch and Holiday Party!

Amahi is throwing a Launch and Holiday party!

And you are invited!

We’d like to party with our team, our users, and all our friends. All the people who have helped us, with hard work, advice, sharing great connections, insights and encouragement!

Party is December 21st at 6pm, in Sunnyvale, California.

Please RSVP for headcount by email (contact us directly if you did not receive the email).

Come unwind and kick off the Holiday season at our Launch Party! We will have music, drinks, food and great company!

If you would like to bring stuff let us know to coordinate!

The party is generously co-sponsored by our startup friends at Acunote (a very useful, not to mention cool, Agile Project Management), FocalPower (Innovative Services for professional Photographers) and Marale (Top-notch Engineering Services for a Greener World). Thanks guys!

We’ve Doubled!

We have doubled our install base! And we are readying our web site to accelerate that. Thanks and welcome to all the new users!

We have a brand new site! This site is the home for remote management of HDAs, be it yours or others (like family ones, or friends, or small businesses). We have a brand new FAQ that we keep updating over time.

The site is in private beta and we will be expanding the beta for our launch!

We did a new full release which got received so very positively. We’re also working on the next one.

To promote the site, we did a bit of marketing. Through that and through user interest, we’re in the first page of search engines when searching for linux home server and similar queries! (though it fluctuates heavily week by week.)

We have also been working on a theme engine for the HDA dashboard (our very first feature request), and our friend Alvin, who is a great designer, has been working on our first theme, Agedashi (click the thumbnail to see the full screen). Thanks Alvin!!

More News

As some of you know, I have taken an interesting consulting job with a thriving startup founded by some friends to help finance Amahi. This has slowed development somewhat. We’re looking for ways to speed that up, including recruiting smart developers to work on some of our very coolest Ruby on Rails, Python or PHP plug-ins.

We have been busy putting together a management team, which remains our top priority. Although it’s a slow process at times, we hope to find a full-time CEO and/or VP of Marketing soon. If you know of someone interested in this space, get in touch with us!

While that proceeds its due course, we continue to be hard at work refining features, fixing bugs and more importantly doing more installs until it’s all fully automated through our web site.

Seeking Guest Bloggers!

One of the things we would like to do is chronicle home server and/or home theater PCs (HTPC) being installed, to get a better grasp on the crucial issues people face in home networking.

If you or someone you know is thinking of building an Amahi HDA, or an HTPC, and would like to guest blog, please get in touch! Similarly, if you would like to invite us to guest in your blog, let us know.

So, get ready and come on by to the Amahi Launch and Holiday party!

In this newsletter

• HDA Install Counter: 17 installs and counting!
• Backups with the HDA
• Microsoft Outlook Compatibility
• Application Ideas

Hello!

This newsletter focuses on some of the Amahi Linux Home Server applications that we’ve released over the past few weeks.

But before that we’d like to take a moment to celebrate that we have crossed past our recent target of 15 installs and we’re at 17 installs at the moment! We want to get to 20 for next week! To keep tabs on the number of installs, check out the automatic install counter!

A great deal of our time goes to ease installation – where the HDA comes up fully function at the first try. Our last three installs have been with virtually zero incidents! That means we’re going BETA!

Tell your friends! If you know of someone who would like the Amahi Linux Home Server, we’re entering a beta phase now, and we’d like to get more and more users. Thanks for making use of the HDA in your home network and for telling your friends!

We have received nearly a dozen logo submissions from the call in our previous newsletter! We will post them in our wiki soon! Logo submissions are always welcome!

Back to the HDA apps. While we’re working on new applications, we would like to highlight a few of our applications.

Backups

Have you ever had that dreaded feeling that you may have lost a hard drive that you haven’t backed up in a while or that the system may be infected with a virus? You may have your music collection, your financial information and files or worse, your precious family photos and videos.

You have two very simple ways to do backups in your HDA.

If you use Windows Vista, it comes with a straightforward way to backup your files (not the OS) regularly to the HDA. To use it, go to the Backup and restore Center (Start -> Control Panel -> Backup & Restore). In it, you can do configure settings to make Vista do backups to your HDA daily, weekly or monthly. All you have to specify is that you want to backup to the network, e.g. to \\hda\files\backups. The first time it will back up all your files. Subsequent backups are incremental: only what changed since last backup is saved. We’re looking into how to use the HDA as backup device for the Apple Mac.

The other simple backup method is the Personal Backup Assistant (or PBA). PBA helps solve some of the backup headaches – you can now backup any of the computers on your home network onto the Amahi Linux Home Server by simply booting over the network. It does full-disk backups, including OS and all! It’s not unlike Norton Ghost, but open source, and better

• No software to install. Comes preinstalled in your HDA.
• Fast: backing up and restoring entire drives at record speeds
• Complete: PBA saves your entire disk image, including operating systems and any data partitions
• Efficient: PBA makes use of on-the-fly compression to minimize the disk usage of backups in your HDA

For more details, explore the Amahi wiki and add your own comments, feature requests and notes and suggestions for other users.

Microsoft Outlook Calendar Support

Outlook is a pervasive email and scheduling application from Microsoft. Our users have requested the ability to sync their Outlook calendar with their Amahi Linux Home Server Calendar. With Outlook synchronization, users can now display their work calendar for everyone at home providing a true representation of their schedule. Our synchronization keeps the Outlook calendar titles and details private, for those majority of users that use it at work but like to share their schedule at home.

This feature also keeps with our motto of keeping things simple by not requiring any software at all. If you use outlook, you all ready have what you need to share your schedule with the HDA!

Get all the details about Outlook synchronization support in the Amahi wiki.

Amahi Home Server Application Ideas

The Amahi team would love to hear from you on your experiences with these new applications. If you have an idea for an application, please let us know and we’ll make it happen. We have received several ideas and at least two of them have made it to the HDA quickly!

For the latest and greatest, check out our home page, our blog and our wiki, with the latest technical details. For those with a day-to-day interest of Amahi Linux Home Server news, the mailing lists (the amahi-devel in particular) are the best resource.