Google recently announced their Amazon EC2 killer, the Google Compute Engine or GCE. Google wasn’t messing around and went straight for the Amazon jugular releasing 4 instance types all of which appear cheaper than their Amazon counterparts. That being said the price comparison was done solely on the basis on a on-demand Amazon instance types–Amazons most expensive prices, if you compare for the Reserved instances, then prices become more competitive.

It’s exciting to finally see a Juggernaut big enough to take on Amazon in terms of price and scale. This is all around good news for everyone, especially since this report from Cisco estimates that revenues from IaaS providers are not only high right now, but will continue to grow over the next 5 years. There’s a lot of room at the IaaS space, and Google just wants to wet their beak here as well.

So it must have come as a pleasant surprise to Google when they heard ‘hurricane-like’ thunderstorms ripped across the US east coast taking down power to 3.5 million–and the Amazon East Data center as well. I was personally affected by this phenomena when my access to Netflix was abruptly halted, as you can imagine I wasn’t a happy camper.

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a cool card game based on Computer processes, in hindsight the only thing that post proved was that I’m a geek. The card game was funded through a crowdfunded initiative, and that was really what made it cool.

The instagram camera is cool on its own, and the fact that it’s currently  being crowdsourced through Indiegogo (a website similar to Kickstarter) makes the cool factor– cucumber cool.

In fact, as of now, it’s already reached $6,000 dollars from it’s $50,000 target in just one day. I’m willing to bet that this project will eventually reach it’s pretty low target of just $50,000 – easily.

There are however, some copyright concerns surrounding the camera, particularly since Facebook now own Instagram and they don’t even like wordpress developers building themes that ’look’ like facebook, much less an entire camera that is based on a trademark they own.

If you choose to fund the project, you’re promised a discount on the final item, which the creator hopes to price at under $350 (that’s in US Dollars). However, based on the specs, that may be a bit difficult, we’re talking about a:

A rather interesting take on Social Media courtesy of douglaswray via instagram.

Check out more cool stuff from Douglas [here]