PiCloud dev here. Currently, our users are mainly scientists and researchers that leverage PiCloud's parallelism to expedite their computation. A lot of the us

PiCloud dev here. Currently, our users are mainly scientists and researchers that leverage PiCloud's parallelism to expedite their computation. A lot of the use cases are simulation and equation solving related - in areas such as finance, geology, hydrology, and biology. Many of the algorithms(especially monte-carlo methods) used in these fields are computationally intensive and embarrassingly parallel (http://bit.ly/dj3qQm http://bit.ly/dj3qQm) and benefit from PiCloud's compute power. On web apps, wile we cannot host web apps, we can benefit them. Some of our customers are using us as a web scraper for their backend. Encode videos (http://bit.ly/9JkLph http://bit.ly/9JkLph) also works. Ultimately, any background task can use PiCloud; we for instance used it for an automatic Facebook photo tagger app. If your app is already on the cloud (esp. on AWS), you will no latency difference between your own machines and PiCloud's ; PiCloud will save you though from the headache of managing servers for background processing. With crons, we are aiming to offer the community an easy and realiable way to run periodic work. While you can run a twitter bot on your own computer, it stops working when you power-off your computer or disconnect it from the internet. PiCloud's cron scheduler will always be running 24/7. And if you have multiple compute intensive crons, each will run much quicker by being spread horizontally across our cluster.