I am just returning from an enjoyable session of BarCamp delhi (for the uninitiated barcamp is the free un -conference) , it was really interesting and informative (besides regular social networking , blogging stuff thats ridding high in India currently) , one session was worth mentioning was Amazon EC2 presentation by Amazon’s Jinesh Varia which allows startups meet demand and scale with any upfront cost , its a xen based solution which allows you to provision a new Instance in minutes , plus they have tons pre-built Images which they AMI for common scenarios like lamp , Ruby or Java stack and various OS images. You can use Instance till its required after that you can terminate it to save costs (beaware your data will be lost !! so take a backup of you data on Amazon storage service S3)Amazon also provides web services api to control these instances . Downside includes no static IP (you a need dynamic dns service ) and no instance suspend support .

http://www.webyantra.net/2007/09/07/alabotai-nlp-enabled-automated-interactive-agent-for-your-portal/

http://blog.pagux.com/2007/09/19/original-idea/