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What really drives tech entrepreneurs? What makes them tick? What drew the great disruptors to technology? Rackspace On Startups is a video series that explores insights from tech evangelists and founders – from Woz to Graham Weston.

Building mobile apps that include a large amount of photo and video content yet still perform and download quickly can be challenging. But by integrating Trigger.io Reload and Rackspace Cloud Files, it’s possible to achieve fast performance by storing media locally within the app, while also allowing fast updates from the cloud.

What really drives tech entrepreneurs? What makes them tick? What drew the great disruptors to technology? Rackspace On Startups is a video series that explores insights from tech evangelists and founders – from Woz to Graham Weston.

When you host your app in the cloud, you want to make sure that the infrastructure that runs it is up and available. Cloud Monitoring is an easy way to monitor your servers to ensure they are performing properly. In particular, there are two methods of monitoring my app’s servers that I always set up: ping checks and HTTP checks.

As a developer who has worked both at a startup and for Rackspace, I know the importance of monitoring. The worst thing is finding out that your app is down from a tweet or email from your end user. In addition to the performance of the app, it is also helpful to know the cost that you are incurring. While the pay-as-you-go utility pricing of the cloud has enabled many entrepreneurs to get their app up and running, forgetting to spin down servers that you put online for a short burst of time can end up biting you. That is why it is important to monitor these three things: physical infrastructure, application health and spend.

A book in a week? Yes, a book in a week. It can be done! It’s called a book sprint, and it’s intense. As the documentation coordinator for OpenStack, I knew we’d find the right book to write with this technique. In February, it all came together thanks to generous funding from the OpenStack Foundation for $10,000 to fly the team into our Austin Rackspace location.

During SXSW Interactive 2013, Rackspace has been spreading the word on the open cloud to the masses. And among our team of open cloud evangelists is the Rackspace Open Cloud Community. You can find the community team at Champions Sports Bar & Restaurant throughout SXSW. They’re here signing people up to join the community, answering question on open and cloud and handing out some really sweet t-shirts.

Over the weekend, there was everything from the new Leap Motion Controller to the Chicken Dance as teams from Rackspace and other companies competed in the Drone Games, a competition to hack Parrot AR Drones held in conjunction with SXSW Interactive.

A team of Rackers has put its programming skills to work on a super-secret project to get ready for the Drone Games tomorrow as part of SXSW Interactive.

Seven teams that created startups in just 72 hours while on a bus headed to San Antonio pitched their ideas yesterday to a panel of celebrity tech judges at Rackspace’s Castle headquarters. The top two StartupBus Buspreneur Battle finalists will compete tonight at the StartupBus All-Star Finals against two teams from the StartupBus Alumni bus and two teams selected by an online audience. The final competition is tonight at Champions Sports Bar & Restaurant in Austin, which is Rackspace’s headquarters during SXSW Interactive.