My name is Konstantin Budnik, I joined Vandiske about six weeks ago from Karmasphere and before that, I was doing Hadoop development at Yahoo and Cloudera. And in Vandiske, I'm in charge of Hadoop distribution, Vandiske Hadoop distribution, which is not simply yet another Hadoop distribution, but an engine that allows us to deliver a very interesting bleeding edge, I would say, technologies to the Hadoop market. And these technologies are namely non-stop name-node, but my colleague Konstantin will talk about a little bit later, and technology that allows you to use Hadoop clusters for private clouds. So basically the applications that are run on S3 technology, S3 file system from Amazon, could be seamlessly transferred to Vandiske distribution using our proprietary S3 HDFS bridge. Among the other advancements we put into the Hadoop distribution is a much better user experience for cluster users. And the main thing is that we are the first pretty much commercial company that provides Hadoop 2 support and Hadoop 2-based distribution of the full Hadoop stack. So we are fully committed to open source servers. We are using another Apache project called Big Top that I am one of the co-authors actually to build a distribution. And as a shameless plug, we've built the full distribution from ground zero to the working commercial product in just 28 days using open source technologies, Big Top particularly. Thank you, Jeff. So what we have here is the industry's first multiple active name-node solution for HDFS. And we have three name-nodes serving the entire data space. So what we're going to do is start Terasort. The clients are going to connect to all three of the name-nodes. Then we're going to kill one of the name-nodes. We'll see Terasort continue. Fine. No interruptions. We'll see the other two name-nodes pick up the load and we'll see the dead name-node flatline basically. That's the demo. Okay, what we have here are three graphics applications showing the activity in each of the name-nodes. They're showing RPC bytes in and bytes out. I've prepped it so we already have Terogen data in the HDFS. I'm going to run Terasort now and we'll see the activity pickup. In the next few minutes, we'll see activity on the name-nodes pickup. There we go. The orange lines indicate bytes sent and the green lines are bytes received by the name-nodes. Let's give it a few minutes to get really active. Then we'll go and do the unthinkable, which is to kill one of the name-nodes. That's a catastrophic failure in most HDFS. In our solution, we simply switch to the other two name-nodes and life goes on. Terasort is uninterrupted. So obviously you guys have been putting a lot of hard work into this. As we kind of look forward through the rest of the year, what's on your roadmap in terms of additional development you're looking at to the product? We have planned for a world-file system. This is HDFS that runs across multiple data centers. The result is a single namespace that's spread across multiple data centers and you can run your jobs on whichever data center is near your data. The result is something if you have a data center go down or multiple data centers go down, you can still have access to your data and you can still run your jobs. That's coming up next. We also have plans to use our active-active replication technology for the YAN resource manager and for the HBASE master. Excellent. All right, great. Well, guys, obviously a lot more coming from WinDisco this year, so keep your eyes peeled for what they're doing. Thanks for joining us. Signing off.


We are a prospect of widespread violence in the United States. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. This is American Issues Take Two. And we have a special group today, aside from our regular contributors, Stephanie Stulldalton. We have Cynthia Sinclair. Hi, Cynthia. So nice to see you. And Chuck Crumpton. Thank you very much. We really appreciate you coming around. So let's talk about, let's get current on the news, okay? Let's get current on Merrick Garland. Chuck, why don't you talk about what's going on with Merrick Garland and the material that was seized at Mar-a-Lago? Well, thanks, Stephanie and Cynthia, I'm more completely up to date. But basically, in a situation where there's been a Republican right-wing backlash against the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The only people who have the inventory of what was taken and the search warrant and underlying affidavit without any legal restrictions against disclosing those are Trump and his lawyers. They've chosen not to do that. So Merrick Garland has gone public today to say, we, the Department of Justice, are moving for the court to make those records of what was taken and the affidavit and subpoena that were issued public so that we can be transparent about exactly what's going on here. It sure sounds like there's something that Merrick Garland feels the public ought to know in those materials. And it makes me all the more curious as to what was seized and how very, very important it is to the national interest. And Cynthia, of course, in Cincinnati there was a Trumper motivated by Trump's comments about violence who attacked the FBI office in Cincinnati. Can you talk about that? Well, it isn't just Trump talking about violence. It's across the Republican conservative line. They are all talking about violence. Is this the next, you know, civil war? And everybody says, okay, what's next civil war? And you hear it across the board from sitting congressmen just horrifying. And they're all going after the FBI. So funny thing now we've got some guy with a AR-15 style weapon and this nail gun goes into the FBI headquarters and starts shooting. Once they realize that he's in trouble, he and he's going to get caught because there's a lot of armed FBI agents inside. Of course, he runs. It's sort of like some people say he was wounded in the process. Some people say no, he has got away clean. So that's kind of up in the air. One thing that is an official statement is that they've got him cornered. As of 9.30 this morning anyway, they didn't have him in custody yet, but he was cornered. But this is just a start. I mean, when we've got handfuls of Republican sitting congressmen and women saying that we need to defund the FBI, we need to get rid of the FBI completely. We know that this isn't just Trump saying, oh, everybody go fight for me. This is every conservative that toes the Trump line saying that.  Oh, look, it's a partisan witch hunt. How many times have we heard that out of those idiots? Partisan witch hunt. Yeah, right. It's not a partisan witch hunt. And I love seeing Merrick Garland come out this morning and say, listen, my guys don't do that. They're being trumped up to be something they're not. They were doing their job and I signed off on the warrant. So I'm not the warrant, but the search. So. Okay, Stephanie. Try to hold your dander down and give us your comment on how things have going, how things have gone since the Mar-a-Lago teaser. Well, as we've found more information, we've been given more information, which we've been given very little information. We know that Merrick Garland was willing to remain silent on this as the Chuck has informed us that there's a procedure of the DOJ to not talk about these moves to the public when there's an investigation ongoing. But what Merrick Garland has taken advantage of the situation for is to put Trump on the chessboard, move him around on the chessboard to get him in position to have to reveal whether he wants to show us what's in there, what was taken, what really is on the list and what is on the list that the FBI left that they took. So I think that's a brilliant move. My esteem for Merrick Garland has been restored and amplified after our months and months here of concern that nothing much is happening. So I think we have an interesting rest of the week or certainly tomorrow to find out how the Trump people are going to play this back to Merrick Garland. And it could be that they refuse to open it. That's another way to continue the grift and to continue the conspiracy and all of that. I mean, maybe my chip is on now that they might want to continue the grift by not allowing it because, as Chuck said also, he has to approve this. It is the search E that has to approve the sharing of the document publicly. So we have that coming soon, hopefully tomorrow. But if not, then maybe we will know more about the wizard behind the curtain if they're going to reveal the curtain. But it might be so bad for Trump and he will understand that what will be the effect on his his gang will his gang be strong enough to continue to ignore miscreants, misdemeanors, felonies, whatever. Will they do that? Let's see what he's got a lot on his mind right now about what to do. But the point is that Merrick Garland has set him into this situation. He's in this niche and he can't get out of it without declaring himself. But, you know, somehow it's somehow Trump is the fulcrum of all of this right now, yet again, all the all the interest is pointed. What is what is Donald Trump going to do? The world wonders about Donald Trump every day. He's sort of taking over our consciousness, sucking all the air out of the room as usual. So, you know, if we take a differential on this, Chuck, make yourself a right wing Republican just for a moment. I know that may be hard for you. What do you do if in this circumstance? And let's assume for this discussion, and I think it's a reasonable assumption, that there's some really incendiary material in what was seized. You know, Merrick Garland had to know there was an important material there, secret or top secret material, what have you, or plans about the conspiracy. It would be, you know, pretty, pretty dynamite to have that out there.  Well, what we've seen in a lot of Republicans, including many of the great deal of seniority in the Congress, is they've looked at Trump and the right wing position on rule of law issues, constitutional issues, and they've decided they have two choices. Quit, don't run again, which many of them have. Or if you are going to run again, the great majority say, you know, you got to throw your lot in with Trump because that's where the money and the support is. And for those who have stood up against Trump, either an impeachment or any other proceedings, most of those have not done well in the primaries. So we need to put this into a context. And again, right wing Republican or not, we're seeing a situation where people at the heads of government law enforcement, Homeland Security, many other Secret Service, have basically gone directly against black letter rule of law principles in destroying evidence, in deleting evidence, in failing to stand up to the constitutional requirements that their oaths of office impose. So the fact that this is widespread among not only elected officials, but appointed officials, it brings home to us that you've got a few people who are standing up to this. Christopher Ray was not appointed by Biden. He was appointed by Trump. Trump fired Comey because he was investigating improper influence over the 2016 elections. And he fired McCabe the same way? Yeah. Well, you know, Cynthia, I'm sorry, just to the rule of law itself. Cynthia, what I don't understand is the attack on the FBI. This really hasn't before. You know, in the movie, the Comey rule, and in Comey's book, you see Trump trying to corrupt and make the FBI belong to him. And when he is unable to corrupt the leaders of the FBI, in the case of Comey and McCabe and at least half of us and others that he tried to corrupt and failed to corrupt, then he wrote them off. He was trying to undermine the entire American intelligence system. And now it's open war. So have we crossed the Rubicon here when a Trump walks into the office in Cincinnati? Have we crossed the Rubicon where where the right wing Republicans are essentially declaring war against the FBI, which is, you know, I mean, any reasonable rational person would say the FBI is as Merrick Garland indicated, doing its job. But now we have an open confrontation between the Trump team and the FBI itself. They're getting about corruption. Well, January 6th, you know, we crossed the Rubicon on January 6th, not today or yesterday or Monday or whatever the day the search was. But we know that January 6th was the most important day that showed us the level of violence that is percolating in American society, not just, you know, in the military or in the government. Or this is just regular Joe Blow likes to play army man out in the back field. And they got six guns to go do it with because we know they're not hunting deer with assault rifles, they're just not. And so we know all these things. That's what makes this so dangerous. When we've got these dog whistles going on from every Trump, you know, sycophant and every Fox News person, that's what they're doing. They're just saying, listen, we got to fight back. Now the FBI is partisan.  Whatever they accuse the other person of doing, it's the thing that they are doing themselves and we have to remember that I have been looking through a lens of projection in every single thing that I look at that they do. And nine times out of ten, just a little bit down the road, we find out, sure enough, it's what they were doing. And it's narcissistic stuff. That's what narcissists do. They blame the other person so they don't have to have any blame on themselves. And that's what we're looking at. And it's not just his sycophants, but it's, well, unless you count 40 million people, his sycophants and they kind of maybe are. So we have to be careful. It's dangerous times, very dangerous times. Well, you know, Stephanie, we have this second amendment issue going on at the same time and and that's largely connected with the with the massacres around the country. And PBS did a little report on it and pointed out there were virtually hundreds of them where groups of people, not just one person, but groups of school children and the like have been killed over the past year or so, hundreds and hundreds of them around the country. They don't all get reported. And so we have these innocent children being killed by people with guns. And the question I put to you is what Cynthia was talking about with the boys with the guns in the Capitol, this guy who attacked the FBI office because he was aggravated over, you know, the FBI's search warrant in Mar-a-Lago. Is there is there a kind of conflation here? Is the line being blurred between these people who walk into a school and shoot children and the guy who walks into the Cincinnati office and wants to attack the FBI, children are not the government, right? And now the FBI is government. So are we are those two things coming together here? The children is not necessarily a political act. It's something else. It's something other than a political act. Maybe it's a statement of support for assault weapons. I don't know, but are these things becoming conflated? Well, I think that they're taking us back or reminding us that we're not all out of pro-magnet yet. If we get here on Think Tech, the metaphor, the metaphor of 2001, the movie, the black obelisk is discovered by the whoever they were, the Neanderthals or the whatever people they were, and all of them pick up their stick and their bat and their rock and they just start attacking it. OK, so we've come a long way from that as the movie showed us. So I think the movie probably overstated where we might be. If that theme is acceptable to you, I'm sure there are many interpretations but that was one I have when it's just that we all haven't come along yet. And until recently, maybe 20th century, or maybe that that that festival you described of people go to Woodstock 99, you create Woodstock, you can't do it again because all of the social compact has been fractured.  So everything has been pulled away and we're really down now to there are no expectations, there's you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. This is America. And I think this is why the Europeans and the Australians are really kind of fed up with it and don't welcome it and talk about who are the tourists that they're getting, are they us or are they getting nice tourists like Japanese people and those who have courtesies and have conventions for how to act and relate. And so I think there's so I think there's some argument to be made for this kind of reconstruction of our society and the direction that I'm maybe maybe we have to reconstruction may not be the exact right word. That's the right word, but we're reconstructing. But this might be a bad patch. We have to get through to get to a better patch. I don't know. But we're not all there yet. And too many of us are still picking up those sticks and hitting on that black obelisk. So I think that what what we need to do is understand that better and know that that's who Trump has unleashed. OK, so he's given all of those. We were ignoring those people before there were still some some ways of, you know, the majority was bigger to stay with what we knew to do. And now he's empowered people that are fully free to do anything to default to Cro-Magnon, to default to cave activity, to default to the worst level of human behavior possible. You know, Stephanie raises a very interesting point, Chuck. And I am mentioning that movie about Woodstock 99. These kids, you know, all relatively young, quarter million of them at Rome Air Force Base in 99 and an attempt to recreate the Woodstock of of ancient York. They the music, the noise, the commotion, the the topless women just drove them to insanity.  This was the ultimate human chaos. And so, you know, I used to think that the what would happen in the streets, you know, created by the divisions in our country would be team team red against team blue and, you know, team red would definitely have weapons, team blue, maybe not, maybe not, but they'd be fighting in the streets. And you can identify who is team red and who is team blue as you could. And, you know, was it Portland and Seattle back a few years ago in the early days of the Trump administration, but I no longer feel that I want to throw my revised model at you and see if you agree. And this is based in part of what Stephanie had to say. This is Lord of the Flies. This is insanity. This is a human condition gone back to, you know, the state of nature. And when they get out on the street, you won't be able to tell team red from team blue. It'll all be something like Woodstock 99, where they just all go nuts. And what is it like in the violence that could happen because of Trump's ability to liberate people, to let them express their most base human instincts in public? What will it be like? Do you have a thought about that? It's a great question, Jay. And it goes to the heart of the matter because and I think one of the things that brings to mind is that portion of the famous Yates poem, Sailing to Byzantium, right? If things fall apart to center, that's not whole. And what we see at all levels of society is a breakdown in not just the socioeconomic fabric, the political fabric, but the moral fabric, the human connection fabric of society itself. It manifests differently at different levels. The way that somebody who can get a hold of an AR-15 and go into a public school will manifest it is going to be really different than the way that a guy who is a member of Congress who thinks that he can inflame people to attack law enforcement is going to do it. Their objectives and their methods are different, but you've gotten at the heart of the matter. The question is, where does it go from here? OK, let's assume it goes into the street and it's all hard to find who's on what side. And all we know is there's a horrendous bloodshed as in a state of nature. Cynthia, how does the government respond to that? Will the government be able to handle that? I mean, on the one side, you think of the autocrats that come in and say, we're taking charge. You know, we're nationalizing the National Guard. We're declaring an emergency. If you don't listen to us as in Hong Kong, we're going to hold you away. And we're going to stop this this noise. That's one possibility. And the other possibility is the government is unable to do it or doesn't want to do it. Does a GOP conservative want to stop the chaos? You know, I'm not sure that they think that far ahead. They want the chaos. They want to break the rule of law, but they don't know what follows it. So, you know, make make me a prediction. Make me an observation about what happens when the government decides it's time to stop this. I don't know if it's possible, to be honest. And I cite the Kyle Rittenhouse trial as a perfect example of we're going to encourage you, then we're going to make you a hero if you go out into the streets and shoot people that you don't agree with. And that's exactly what happened. And of course, all of this self-defense stuff is nonsense. And the judge was giving all kinds of partiality to Kyle Rittenhouse, which is the reason he got off the way he did and his lawyer was at that. You know, the prosecutor wasn't that great either. But still, what it is that set a precedent for the courts to be able to go look, that's a precedent. So we have somebody else in that shoots somebody in the street. What do we say? We look to precedent. Precedent is Kyle Rittenhouse. Oh, it's OK. You go free. The next person, it's like this chipping away at the rule of law, setting precedent after precedent after precedent. So pretty soon the government's powerless to do anything because take it to the court, well, we know how broken the Supreme Court is. So if it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court, we know which way they're going to fall. And so it's because of our rule of law, it's going to go to the courts. The government, I don't know if the government can do a lot. What? Declare martial law? Well, if it was Biden, I might think that was an OK thing. But if it's a Republican that's in office and they declare martial law, it's autocracy on a fast-courced dictatorship, I think, I mean, that's what I say. Those are my predictions. Yeah. Well, Stephanie, you know, it opens a question about what we as law-abiding citizens and I feel a strong feeling that all four of us are law-abiding citizens. OK, no argument there. We believe in the rule of law. We still believe in the system and the Constitution. But what do we do to protect ourselves? What do we do to protect our children in schools? But more than that, what do we do to protect our communities? When the melee comes to us? Because if the melee comes in Cincinnati, I'm just picking that city. It may be monkey see monkey do in some other city. And you have copycat melees elsewhere. Before you know it, the whole country, she is burning. What is an ordinary human being person like us guys? What do we do? What do we do? You know, what are you going to do? Write your congressman? I don't think so. Congress won't be able to act. The courts won't be able to act. The only, you know, branch of government to be able to do anything is the executive. But how can you affect that? And if the executive, as Cynthia says, is a right-wing Republican, huh, that's going to go straight to autocracy. I'm so query, what does the ordinary human being, law-abiding person do now? Well, I think that it's a very complicated question and there is no answer, Pat, you know, to give to give now. But what can we think about doing? I mean, we are looking to elections. That's that's how we get our problem solved is through elections, right? Well, we haven't done a real good job with that. But when we go to elections, aren't we looking for leadership? We're looking for leaders, but we're looking for leaders who will take responsibility and not leaders who are going to take power. And I see that as a dichotomy of the people that are running now and are winning and are the people that are not prepared for the office. Are going into that office to to serve, to be obsequious and serve some leader. They appreciate but a leader that's not in the game for taking responsibility and moving the country forward, but to take power. And I think that one of the signs of that that we should know now is is the the mendacity.  It was your honor.  You know, over this a lot for centuries. I mean, this was really important. And that those of us who are still affiliating us with those values have to keep holding the line and look look to others to to affiliate with who are holding those values. That's that's because it all devolves on us. And that's the problem with the democracy is it's all about us. You like you said, there is nobody to send the letter to Santa Claus isn't going to put him on the bad list, not give him any presents anymore. There's nobody out there. It's just us. So, you know, so yeah, so we are evaluating this. Jack, you know, we make we make the the the assumption of fundamental assumption that we will know what's going on, that we can make decisions or not make decisions, we can appreciate or be outraged, whatever the case may be, take action, not take action, based on information. But, you know, I offer you two recent incidents, one in Hong Kong, where the where the PRC arrested Jimmy Lai and shut his newspaper down. And that was the end of that. And so the freedom of the press in Hong Kong is severely curtailed now. And you don't know what's going on if there's any protest or anybody arrested or what have you already street violence. And then in Nicaragua, just a couple of days ago, the president of Nicaragua arrested the the leader of the newspaper and put him in jail and made him disappear into jail at the newspaper. And then he seized all the, you know, the assets of the newspaper and closed it down. That's the price of, you know, the price of criticizing a leader in an autocratic country. And so it seems to me that if we do have street violence that needs to be addressed, we won't necessarily know. We won't. You can't assume the times in the post will stay online. You can't assume that you can sit back with your bonbons and watch MSNBC and CNN. You can't assume you're going to know anything. You may be in a blackout of news. How right am I about that? And how does that affect the equation that we are dealing with today? Well, drastic shock. Yeah. Well, I think it goes directly to Stephanie's point is that you can either take a role of responsibility or you can take a role of power. Media generally has opted for power at the expense of responsibility, at the expense of truth. Until that tide shifts, we're going to be at the mercy of trying to find independent, reliable sources of information. There you go. Which is the mendacity part of it. Yes, the lies that aside from the availability of the press online to inform you, there's other press and who knows where the line is that will lie to you and officials that will lie to you in order to quell any response to what is going on in the streets. So, well, let me let me we're going to have to close up to you guys. Stephanie, let me take you first. OK, what are your closing thoughts about this and your level of concern about it? And how real? You know, we've been talking about, you know, like we're making a lot of assumptions here that there will be something happening in the street. How real is that risk and how concerned are you about that risk and the result of it? Very good question. I am extremely concerned. I don't want to end my life living in that kind of a society. And right now this man has everybody acting like we did on the sixth grade school yard and our only resources are to, you know, fist fight it out afterwards and do those things we they're so childish and at such the level of default to this basic aggression we do have. We do have to and we're trying to manage that. But my my concern is that we not live in that kind of a world. And what we can do about it, I I'm just very I am very concerned and we just have to keep working by little bitty steps because one of the reasons I wanted to to state was these people that are like the Trump groups that affiliate with him, they're there because they now have power and they have and they can exert some agency through this man who does it in a way that doesn't solve their problems and that their problems are said to come from their discontent and their difficulties in in reaching their own goals and living their own lives fully, which I really question how they how they conclude that and what what is it in their lives that is is not good, not not enough? What what is it that they're the question we need to find out is what is making these people so aggressive and discontented with our way of life? Why are they in such a state of mind that they will tear it down to shreds and rather than try and make it better in cooperation with others? That is a very important question. Why do I feel that Cynthia has an answer to that? The Dunning-Cougar effect. What is that? They want power. They don't think they have power and so they want to hang on to somebody that does have power because they think if they stand close enough, they'll get some too. Basically. What are your comments now in summary? In summary, I have a couple of quotes here for us today. Of course. OK, good. You know me, right? So I, Ron, Philip Kowski, who is a lawyer, he was a Republican, he was part of the Lincoln project, said nothing could confirm Trump's guilt more than this statement this morning suggesting the FBI planted evidence. He got caught. He knows it. And this is what guilty people say. Expect this to be the new GOP talking point. Well, that is a really good thing that shows us why he's got to undermine the FBI so that people will believe that they planted evidence because they're such crummy people that can't be trusted. This is what I want to end with. Trump himself signed into law in 2018, stiffening the penalty for mishandling classified information to five years in prison. He did it himself. He has mishandled classified documents. He already did it by taking them there. They retrieved 15 boxes, you know, that was classified. So they already know it was, which is how they got this whole warrant and this whole everything that, you know, all of it going to begin with subpoena for their video stuff, all of it came from that. So then they took away 12 boxes on Monday. So he didn't give them everything. And we don't know if there's somebody. This is the thing, let's hope that there's somebody in his camp that is ratting on him, that's willing to, you know, step out and inform on him. And so maybe there's an informant. Maybe it just came from the information and the interviews that DOJ did, information that they got through those interviews and not an informant. But I like to think it was an informant and we're going to learn more. Yeah, well, I hope we never, we never find that he shipped off a bunch of boxes to Vladimir for safekeeping. Yeah, that's horrifying. So, this is all kind of disturbing. One of the points that I think is central here is Cynthia's reminded to us that we crossed the Rubicon on January 6th. That's where this became very visible in terms of the violence, you know, by the Trump team on the country. And I guess my question to you and my request for your summarization is, is this part of the insurrection? Is this just a continuation of the insurrection? It seems like you have the insurrection, you have the guns, you have these unhinged people. And now it all sort of comes together in a in a in a struggle by the unhinged group against a whole government wherever it may be and the population wherever it may be. I mean, are we having a national insurrection now? Is this a continuation but an expansion? Yes, absolutely. I'm asking. OK, I'm not disagree with your answer, but I want Chuck's answer. Sorry, Cynthia is right. Yes, and actually we crossed the Rubicon and many other rivers a long time ago. As far back as March of 2017 at an inauguration that we're going to pay for for many, many, many years to come. But ultimately, the question is going to be what you've all brought up is. Can we find and support in our leadership in ourselves? Moral conviction and fiber that will achieve a balance between our respect and appreciation for our differences and our connection in our common humanity? We've come a long, long way from that. And I think if we use that measuring stick for people who want leadership in these times, it's going to be a pretty clear litmus test. OK, what a great discussion. I would I would respond to your comments, Chuck, with only a small question. It's only if we find these values. And my question is, who exactly is the we? And on that note, this is American issues. Take two with Stephanie Stoll, Dalton, Cynthia Sinclair and Chuck Crumpton. This was a really interesting discussion. Thank you so much, all of you. Aloha, thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at think tech Hawaii dot com. Mahalo.


Welcome to Facebook ads Friday week 17. So every single week I show you two very successful Facebook ads that are selling dropshipping products. So these are Facebook ads which have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views, thousands of engagements, hundreds of comments, but most importantly, every single one of these ads is current. So what you're about to see essentially is two winning products, two products that are working right now. So if you haven't found your winning products yet that gets your business off the ground, in this video you're gonna see two great options that are working right now. We will also go one step further too, so when it comes to running a successful dropshipping business, you need more than a good product. You need a good landing page, AKA product page slash Shopify store, and of course you need a really good ad creative as well. So when you look at any successful Shopify dropshipping business, there's always three key components or three pillars, and they are the product, the creative and the Shopify store. So in this video I'm gonna show you all three of those things for two different businesses. If you enjoyed the video and you wanna keep up with the series and see two winners every single week, make sure you subscribe to the channel. Any comments or questions as well about how to sell these products or how I found them, just drop them down below in the comments section and I will get back to you. Okay, so the first Facebook ad I wanna show you is some UGC content. It's from a Facebook page of business called Bonsai Bright and this particular one was created on January 10th. As I record this video, it's only a couple of weeks ago, so this is a new current and what's working. The ad copy at the top is super simple. To the point, there's not a lot to it really. Ready to create a relaxing space with a question mark to kind of hook the customer in, transform your space with the warm soothing glow of the soothing light spirit tree. Get yours today and then what's actually interesting is they have two call to actions which actually takes the customer to the homepage. The ad copy at the top, though, is not unimportant but it's not as important as the actual visual creative itself. It's a fact that images and videos capture attention more. So let's take a look at exactly how they've done that. My husband got me the most unique Valentine's Day gift. Look at how beautiful this is. It gives off such a pretty glow and it works via USB or batteries so it can be used anywhere. It's also the perfect light to read by so I'm definitely getting a second one to keep next to my bed. Get yours at bonsaibright.com. So that was the video I had creative. 18 seconds long, very short, sharp. Again, not a lot to it really. When it comes to creating the actual creative itself then sometimes less is more. Too many times I see people try and bulk out their video creatives to make them 30 seconds long or to make them 60 seconds long just for the sake of it. What you should be doing is making sure that every second in that creative counts rather than counting every second. So clearly a UGC strategy to have a video ad creative made like this yourself you can use companies like Billow which start at about $100. You'll be looking anywhere from sort of $100 to $150 to replicate something like this. The parts I like about this video ad creative if you wanna go ahead and sell something similar is they obviously have an actor or influencer on screen. It's her real voice. There's no cheesy music in the background. She's talking about how beautiful the product is and she also shows the product in many different scenes and features. The ad is snappy and it goes between lots of different scenes and every time it snaps between a different scene it kind of refreshes the viewer's attention keeping their attention on the creative itself. There's also a clear call to action at the end as well. So get yours at bonsaibright.com. I'm not sure if you caught it in the earlier run through but she actually says that out loud as well which means nobody can steal this. It's original content unique to bonsaibright.com. As for engagements then 2.9,000 reactions, 300 comments and 300 shares. Now to be honest, that's not massive but considering it's been live for just over two weeks it's a pretty decent amount. It's quite clear that this will be making this company some money. This is also backed up and reaffirmed in the comments section. So a great way to do your product research is check out the comments of people selling the products that you're looking at. If you can see comments like these, so I have one in every room one week ago. I love my lifted tree one week ago. Love it, I have two one week ago. Love mine, bought more as gifts four days ago. I have one and I love it one day ago. I've been fiddling with mine since it arrived last week. I've won and I love it. Almost every single comment is from somebody who has bought this. What you can do is once you have started getting a bit of traction and you're getting sales start emailing your customers and sending them the link to your ad. So if you hit the three dots at the top right here you can copy the link, send that to your customers and say, hey, would you mind posting a picture on our post for us? And we'll give you say 10% off your next order. Over time, this will start to build up. The social proof will start to build up. And in turn more and more people will trust you and your business as long as you're doing a good job of course, which in turn will just lead to more sales. This is the product page then quite neat, quite clean, quite tidy. They do a really good job of making it super crystal clear what the difference is between buying one and two. So one is 30 pounds and 63 pence. However, for an extra 50% or just over for an extra 18 quid you can get two.  I'll have one upstairs in the bedroom or I could give one away as a gift. After this though, so this will be a third party app integration. After that, the product page layout is very traditional. So it's just got simple bullet points pointing out the different features of the product USB and battery powered. Then it's GIF followed by header, followed by explanation paragraph, followed by image or GIF, followed by header, followed by explanation paragraph. And that's a very typical kind of product page layout. It's tried and tested and there's no denying that it works. So 30 pounds for just the one unit at a time or 48, 4, 2. Just to jump on to AliExpress then if you put in LED tree lamp you'll find lots and lots of different suppliers. You're looking at in and around 10 pound delivered. So even if somebody's buying one you're still looking at at least 20 pounds profit per sale, somebody goes for two then you can bump that up an extra five or 10 pounds profit per sale. My advice though and given my experience buying things from Alibaba in bulk you can probably source this for, oh, I'm gonna say half, maybe even less than half. Now probably four or five pounds actually this. So this is still on the expensive side paying 10 pound per unit. So again, once you've established that traction you've built that relationship and with your supplier try and knock them down and get a VIP link it's called on AliExpress or take your business elsewhere go and find an agent or someone like CJ or Send Drop who may be able to do it for you cheaper and better delivery times as well. Move on to product number two super relevant and current with the time certainly here in the UK is this baby pod. So here in the UK it's flipping, freezing at the moment middle of the winter. So products like this, especially coupled with kind of like where the economy is at the moment and electricity prices and the new saying or the new phrase that's coming out is heat the human not the home because it's cheaper to do so. So products like this like fleece leggings heated clothing and this baby pod to keep people warm rather than the entire house is definitely spiking in popularity which is probably why this product is selling so well at the moment. So the company is called Baby Pod they've got a clear push all over everywhere you go when we take a look at their store you'll see that they're pushing this buy one get one free the ad copy is very simple again they've got the use of bullet points just pointing out the different features of the products with a call to action taking them to their homepage which again is interesting you don't see that very often just to point out on that previous ad their shop now button was indeed taking them to the product page which is what I recommend everyone do products itself then it's pretty self-explanatory it's basically a sleeping bag for a baby the baby niche is definitely one of the bigger more popular niches when it comes to drop shipping and it's really suited for Facebook as well so the average Facebook user is female over the age of 45 plus so they either have a young child themselves or they've got a daughter or son that has recently had a kid so they're a grandparent basically and they're the types of people that at least from my experience are the most common buyers on Facebook which is why the baby niche is so good because grandparents love to spoil their grandkids so by having a cute ad with a cute baby with a cute product it's just a win-win situation okay so 3,000 reactions, 2,500 comments and 400 shares I've just sorted these by newest as well so again you can see that this is working right now as you watch this video it's definitely a great product three hours, six hours, eight hours, 19 hours one day, one day, one day three days, three days, three days so definitely relevant or current I should say let's take a look at what these comments are saying so I ordered these for my friends somebody's bought this received ours today so there's another person that's bought this Leah's just said she's bought hers for a little man Lisa's said she's just put her order in four days ago and Sinead has just ordered two of the pink ones this is all newest as well if I just go back to most relevant we'll probably see even more people yeah actually posting pictures of their baby they loved one in the actual product itself a few more comments another person another person received mine today got here in a week another person so on and so forth so there's no denying people buying this product it's working right now so if this is the sort of thing that appeals to you definitely do your own research and see if it's going to be viable for you okay so this is the Shopify store just going to check the theme on this because this looks like debutify it is very simple straightforward layout all the kind of expectations of information where they would be are there if that makes sense so baby pod TM whether it is trademax or not I don't know I'd have to check that but they've got custom imagery here so I have seen this product on quite a few different websites before but I've never seen anyone with this great background they've gone to the extent to put their logo in it as well which is a nice little touch to kind of establish them as the original sellers you may have noticed as well it says buy now to receive in two to seven days so you might be thinking that they're not drop shipping but try not to I know I always show AliExpress on my channel but it's just purely because it's the easiest way to find a product certainly if you want to drop ship to the US there's very unless it's like a brand new products most products that are good sellers you can source from the US as well UK is a little bit behind but even still you're looking at max two weeks and that's from AliExpress too if you go with a better supplier or agent you're looking more I mean five days you can get but realistically kind of like five to seven maybe nine days moving down into the product description then again a very kind of similar typical textbook layout I suppose header little paragraph image header little paragraph image header little paragraph image and it's kind of repeated on the way down and what again what they've done though is they've gone to that extra extent that extra mile of creating custom images or gifts for their website so whenever somebody sees this product like I've said before I've seen it on loads of other stores before but because I haven't seen this imagery before or seen that ad created before this is the one that captures my attention and it will be the same thing for your customers so they're selling the product for 30 pounds that is with buy one get one free too if we take a look at a supply so this is one of the biggest supplies for this product and the reason I reckon why they're doing buy one get one free at the moment is because these guys are basically doing buy one get one free so the product is almost half price so you can source it for six they're selling it for 30 so if they're selling one unit at a time looking at about 25 pound profit per sale which is very good on the front end and even if they are giving away two for every one then they're still in and around sort of 18, 19 pounds profit per sale but I would guess with the products like this without this sale being on most people would probably buy two and again if they have a established relationship with a decent supplier they're probably sourcing it more towards this kind of price per unit anyway not this usual price of in and around 10 pounds okay so with that being said I'm gonna wrap the video up because we've seen all three key pillars or keys to success for two different businesses we've seen winning creatives, winning products and the winning Shopify stores hope you enjoyed the video I hope I've given you something to inspire you to get started with your business as soon as possible if you want some extra help getting started then I highly recommend you check out my free training it's the top link in the video description down below and it will show you all the necessary steps and show you how to do those steps that you need to take to launch your business in the next three weeks as a reward as well and thank you for signing up and watching the training I will give you a copy of my PDF my list of profitable 194 profitable product ideas for 2023 just like the two products you've seen today any questions at all drop them down below I read every single one so I will get back to you and of course if you enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe thanks guys and I'll see you in the next one cheers


Ubiquiti adds phone home to the access point firmware. This was a little bit concerning when I seen this. And I started reading before I went to bed. And thank you for everyone who tagged me on Twitter in this. And other people had messaged me on this and has posted on my forums. And yes, as a advocate of a lot of Unify Ubiquiti equipment, this is a big concern. And the concern really comes down to it was not opt in. It was, you upgrade your firmware, now we collect your data. What data do they collect? Well, that's where things get a little bit fuzzy. We'll dig into that in a second. Now there's a lot of commentary on GDPR. I am not a subject matter expert on that particular topic. It's just not the realm I live in. So I will skip any of the GDPR comments because I cannot validate them one way or another. But we will talk about things I do know about which is packet tracing. Now I dug into a little bit about what data it's sending and I'm not clear, but we'll start with the official post. So UI official urgent please answer. And someone had posted this and they were tagging other Unify people here saying, hey, we wanna know what happened because our devices are contacting trace.svc.ui.com. I also thought it was weird. I don't know, I don't have an archive of this particular forum post, but apparently that one's deleted. But I'll leave links to all these other places. It's being discussed over on Hacker News and of course over here on Reddit. Now Unify, someone from Unify UI, Mike D, did reply. And his statement on this is, we have started to gather crashes and other critical events strictly for the purpose of improving our products. Any data as collected as common is completely anonymized, GDRP compliant, transmitted using end-to-end encryption and encrypted at rest. So there is no on-off switch, but there are no penalties for blocking internet access to the device, dropping traffic to this host and or blocking via DNS. If there are any questions that's related, I may suggest that you look at our end user agreement terms, service, privacy policy, readily available, treat on website. And obviously I'm not gonna read through those right now. Now, someone did say when they blocked it, they had a problem with a memory leak and the device was crashing and running out of memory and that was fixed in the 4061 firmware. So if you do block it, make sure you're on the latest firmware. So they were saying you can, they're fine with that, but this kind of makes the only way to opt out actually sync-holding the DNS of where this goes, which like I said, that's very concerning. And I'm really disappointed because I've participated in plenty of things in the Linux world where they say, hey, would you like to, and I'll use Debbie in the example, participate in our package survey. And yes, I would like to participate in package survey, that'd be great because I like to give data to companies to help out. I feel, and I could be wrong, that they do do this anonymous scene, GDBR compliant because well, the risk because they're an international company is huge. And obviously their shareholders don't really want them to put at risk. And I don't know what data they would really mine because trying to exfiltrate mass amounts of data while it could be done from an access point, I don't know. I mean, obviously they could just gather MAC addresses, gather devices and start gathering stats. I don't know if they'd really want to do that, but I did some some packet tracing so I at least get an idea of the volume of data that's being exfiltrated without our permission per se. So I'm a little disappointed and I think what he didn't doing is because as a product and someone we, you know, as someone we really like these products, we've had a lot of clients who like this because they can self host everything internal without having a bunch of random connections leaving the network. And obviously that's less true with these devices. So I will show that I have two different access points and we're going to talk about how I actually captured some data. So the one we call the air rectangle, air rectangle is a base station XG. It's running 4.0.66 firmware here. And this new, better Wi-Fi is our nano HD and it's running also <IP_ADDRESS>32. So it's running latest firmware. Now I did some testing and rebooting on these and set up packet tracing on here. And I also created some rules and was watching and resetting these rules to show the data being collected, how many kilobytes of data. It's very small amounts of data going to this. Now how do we figure out what unified trace is? Well, it's those IP addresses. First we'll start with you do a dig, dig.trace.svc.ui.com. Here's the IP addresses. Then we go in over to pf.sense and we created an alias called unified trace. And what I did was anything that goes there, I want to know about it on my network and create a very specific log. And I want to see the states and number of kilobytes going over there. Also, I took and did full packet tracing on each one of these devices. One packet traces for the nano, one packet traces for the base station XG. We'll go over here. Here's the nano and this is a nano reboot. So the nano wakes up after a reboot and says, let me IGVMP v2, then do some arping and figures out DNS in this ping. And says, okay, here I am, I'm awake and goes back and forth. And away we go. No response found. There's a couple ICMP and then joins. Now, you don't see the joining data because I was only filtering for things leaving the building. They're on the same network. So the controller is on the same network so I did not packet trace any of that. So this is just the packet trace for what I went to. And please note, it didn't try to go to that URL, the service URL. Here, this is where it does trace.svc.ui.com. It's the first thing it does when it wakes up. So this is a full packet trace of the base station. So the nano doesn't do it, the base station does. And I don't know what the circumstances that make this occur or which models it's in yet, but I did test two separate models. And this one does go to, first thing it does is query this, goes through, does some query response, query response. And then we have some data being sent back and forth. And there's not a lot of data. So when you get to the application, part of this, the application, it doesn't send much. So not that it's in anything as I'm justifying, I'm just saying it doesn't send much. So at least, so to speak, stands up some of the statements by UnifyOfficial that there's not a lot of data being sent. It's just very specific anonymized data. So I'm not seeing it. I have a few devices connected to it. And it doesn't send that much. And it just doesn't unboot. Cause after it boots, it just goes into arping and doing its normal thing. So this was only done on boot. And as you can see, even, you know, that many kilobytes has resetting the devices. And it's only in reset they are sending. So as you can see, there's currently zero active states with that particular filter on there. So it's not like doing it consistently. It seems to do it like a restart. And maybe if you crash it, but it's still concerning cause it was not something, you know, I updated a firmware to fix whatever is on the list of firmware. What I didn't see in the list of firmware here in the 406610832 firmware was that we're going to start sending out data. So that's where the bigger problem is they had an option saying, hey, you're going to opt into this or you have to opt out and I wish it was opt in. But of course, no one would ever change the default and ever send it. So if they're collecting data, they would probably forced to be opt out, not saying it's right. I'm just saying it's probably what would happen. But I think an option to do so would be nice. Rather than the option to go, well, go sinkhole it. That's, you know, but it's not in the, that I can see in the red. I mean, someone found somewhere where Unify actually published that they were doing it before it became an outrage in the forums that would be interesting. But it's still disappointing that they're, you know, doing this. I mean, I do and would like to participate in letting Unify know that there's a problem and make better firmware. So this would be great. I'd like to tell you guys about better firmware for the device. That would be awesome.  And it's certainly not like they wouldn't get noticed because a lot of network engineering people use this. A lot of companies use this. And when we find something new, especially one of the wifi devices directly going out, it may trip some of our tools that we use to go, hey, new connections, where are they going? So, you know, like I said, the packet traces not every device seems to do it. I don't have a whole list of what does or what does not.  So at least it's only being shared with our friends at Ubiquiti, whatever it is they're sharing over there and Unify Mike here, his statement, you know, I don't feel that they're in a variously evil company like people may want to portray over this. But, you know, hey, whatever, hopefully this in the future gets better when they don't do things like, you know, do this unannounced and maybe they'll come back on this. They've come back on other things before, you know, then they, I think they do listen to the community to an extent because they want to keep the company moving forward, listening to the community and feedback, like all of you that are participating in this post and commenting on this is probably getting attention over at Unify and hopefully make someone there go, hey, look at this. And of course, that's the pitch they have to the shareholders that said, hey, why don't you gather some stats and they're going, hey, guess what? It may make us sell us products and guess what shareholders are make less money.  I don't know how this will play out. I just want to bring attention to it right now. And like I said, I don't know.  But then again, Chief Parish is super fuzzy. It's such a new law that it's going to be fuzzy to sort all that out. And I don't have, like I said, the qualifications or the legal background to really comment on the GDPR implementation of this, whether or not they're compliant or not. But I am concerned when a company in general, the bigger picture thing is them deciding to add to the firmware that it contacts and sends some type of data out about crash reports. Would be nice. Like I said, wouldn't mind sending it if you ask me. But when you don't ask me, I just get a little concerned here about it. So those are my thoughts and thanks. And once again, thanks for having to brought this up. It's something I'm going to keep an eye on and be able to update a video if this changes. All right, thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. 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