Andy Baio, otherwise known as Waxy (I don’t know why) is an independent journalist and programmer who lives in Oregon, and in addition to maintaining one of the most interesting link blogs on the planet he periodically takes on research projects — including an exhaustive investigation of all 300 or so samples used in the new Girl Talk album. In order to compile that data, he used Amazon’s “crowd-sourcing” engine known as the Mechanical Turk, and became fascinated by the idea that hundreds of people were spending their time doing small research jobs for him anonymously through the service. So he posted a request that Turkers take a photo of themselves holding a piece of paper, with the reason why they like to Turk. The results? Photos of 30 people, 10 women...
You may have heard that Amazon has decided to some pretty amazing stuff with “Frustration Free” packaging with its 19 most popular items, moving away from plastic clamshells that might was as well be bullet proof. I have ranted on this before, and I think its fantastic that Amazon has gone — and is continuing — to go to lengths to find a solution to this problem: by going directly to manufacturers to help repackage these items that make sense.
Why hasn’t anyone else done this? Probably because Amazon is the only one who could.
Consider that bulletproof plastic clamshells exist for (the perhaps erroneous) reason of deterring retail theft, and you’ll realize that Amazon probably went to these manufacturers and said “hey — there’s no...
So what happened when Oprah, the Queen of All Media, mentioned on her show that the Kindle is her “new favourite gadget?” According to Ad Age, the amount of traffic to the Amazon website was about six per cent higher than usual on that day. That’s not a huge amount — but the article also mentions that the number of searches for the keyword “Kindle” rose by close to 500 per cent, which is a pretty big number. Traffic from Oprah’s site to Amazon’s, meanwhile, went up by more than 15,000 per cent.
As Greg Sandoval of CNET points out, Oprah is hugely influential with a certain demographic, one that is much larger than the initial geek/early adopter crowd that gravitates to things like the Kindle. The biggest issue for the device, in my view...
As the speculation about the launch of the first Google Phone tomorrow continues to ramp up, one of the first reports that I’ve come across that makes me a little excited is the news from MG Siegler over at VentureBeat that the device could be equipped with a mobile client for Amazon’s music store (the other piece of interesting speculation is that T-Mobile might offer free email). Like MG, I think that an Amazon store app — although still just a rumour — makes perfect sense as something to add value to the phone and make it more competitive with the iPhone.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m interested in the Google Phone launch for other reasons, including the fact that I like the idea of the iPhone having an open-source competitor, and I’m hoping that...
Almost a decade after Amazon bought the darn thing, the Internet Movie Database or IMDB is finally getting the ability to stream movie trailers, TV shows and other content, so that when you go and check the site for reviews of a film or goofs (my favourite feature) or a plot synopsis, you can watch some of it right in the page. As Rafat Ali notes at PaidContent, this is so obvious an offering that it kind of makes you shake your head that it has taken so long — but that’s the movie industry for you. Apparently Amazon has signed deals with CBS and News Corp. (for content from Hulu) as well as Sony, and is hoping to get more. I wish them luck.
IMDB was probably one of the first websites I became addicted to — I loved going there before I picked a movie to watch to read...
Silly question for you to ponder: even though mistakes happen, and they are inevitable, in the evolving space of cloud computing, is ever acceptable for the structures which host the cloud to be “down”?
I wonder if we’re yet at the dawn of an era where enough businesses are building — and depending on the reliability thereof — their systems through “cloud” servers, where the kind of outage that Amazon’s S3 service, for example, is unacceptable.
Sure, its understandable, but even the pea-brained amongst us (including myself, admittedly) can “get” that dollars … *LOTS* of dollars … are lost when your website can’t do what it needs to do. Sometimes that need is a small thing (i.e. avatars), but sometimes its...
Whatever it is, I would like some. According to Henry Blodget, the Citigroup analyst seems to think that Amazon will be selling $750-million worth of its Kindle e-book readers within two years. What actual data is this analysis based on, you ask? Absolutely none whatsoever, as Kevin Maney points out at Portfolio, since the company has refused to give any details about Kindle sales. In other words, it’s just a bald-ass guess. And as far as I can tell, it’s a howler.
As Henry himself knows all too well, making outlandish claims about what stocks and/or products will do in the future can get you noticed pretty quickly — so maybe that’s what Mark is after here. Or maybe it’s a kind of thought experiment, in which you run some theoretical numbers in order to get a...
Call it a clash of competing clouds. It seems that Google is launching an application-hosting service that appears to be going head-to-head with Amazon’s trio of distributed computing services — the EC2 computing network, the S3 storage service and the SimpleDB database offering, all of which provide a kind of back-end in a box for companies that want to scale quickly. So is Google’s “App Engine,” which the company described at one of its invitation-only campfire events on Monday night, a real competitor for Amazon, or just a me-too knock-off?
Aaron Brazell of Technosailor — former technology guru for b5media — says the Google announcement is “much to do about nothing.” Among other things, Aaron says that Python, the only programming...
A few days ago it was the RIM network that suddenly went down, cutting people off from their emails and other BlackBerry goodness (which some saw as a good thing rather than a catastrophe) — and this morning it was Amazon’s S3 network that suddenly went offline. The network provides cheap remote storage for dozens of Web startups, including Twitter, as well as some larger companies. What users of those services wound up with for several hours was a host of 404 and other errors.
This is something I was just talking about on TVO’s The Agenda program (there’s more info here, if you’re interested), and I wrote another post about it after reading danah boyd’s account of someone who was suddenly cut off by Google. Ironically, in that post I mentioned how I...
I confess that I don’t really know anything much about databases — apart from the fact that if my Wordpress mySQL database goes wonky, all hell breaks loose — but I think the announcement of Amazon’s Simple DB is a pretty major deal, if only because it seems to be the third leg of a stool that also includes Amazon’s S3 distributed storage service and its EC2 “elastic computing” server platform.
Unless you’re a total geek you probably don’t need to know what either of those do, but what’s interesting is that they are the building blocks of a “cloud computing” model of the kind that Sun Microsystems co-founder and former CEO Scott McNealy used to talk about with such zeal back in the day (and Eric Schmidt too, for that...
Several weeks ago, Amazon introduced the latest in a long line of “e-book” readers, known as the Kindle. Available for $400, it comes equipped with an easy-to-read “E Ink” screen and a wireless connection that allows users to download books that they purchase from the online retailer. Kindle users can also upload their own files to the reader by e-mailing them to a special address associated with the device, or by using a USB cable.
Could this latter feature help the Kindle do for books what MP3 players did for music — that is, provide a platform for copyright infringement on a vast scale? Mike Arrington of TechCrunch seems to think it might. In a recent post, he speculated that the Kindle could become the vehicle of choice for reading “pirated”...
I haven’t held one yet, but if Robert Scoble could act as my proxy, then I’d have to say that Amazon’s Kindle is one fugly awkward looking piece of … jeez, well, “technology”. I mean, its flashing screens between pages look like something you’d see in an LCD screen back in the 1980’s — you know, the ones where you had to use screen savers to prevent phosphor burn.
One other thought? Why is the Kindle biased against lefties? I mean from the looks of it, its oriented to righties, as the sharp edges protrude to the right, so that your right hand can hold it comfortably. Furthermore, it also looks thicker on the left as it tapers to the right.
Besides these issues, as jkOnTheRun notices that you *must* hold it at the bottom with...
So Amazon has launched the Kindle, its e-book reader, with a press release and an event with CEO Jeff Bezos, which TechCrunch is live-blogging. Several sites have hands-on details, including Engadget (which I would be happy to pay for, Ryan, just not via a monthly fee).
If anything, my skepticism about the Kindle — some of which I allowed to escape in this post yesterday about the paying for blogs option — has increased. And not just because it looks (as someone said) like a giant version of a Handspring PDA from 1997, although I think that’s going to reduce the demand more than Amazon might like to think.
The thing that I’m really torn about is the wireless connectability. On the one hand, it’s great to have a device that can download books (although it...
So lots of people probably know by now (at least if they read Techmeme) that Amazon is launching an electronic book-reading gizmo called the Kindle on Monday, and there’s a gigantic cover story about it in the latest issue of Newsweek magazine. Speaking of which, the Kindle will apparently be a magazine and newspaper reader too, letting you read publications that you’ve downloaded using its built-in wireless connection.
First things first — I think that Bezos is right to emphasize the wireless aspect, which is based on a cellular-style service that Amazon is calling Whispernet. Previous e-book readers had to be hooked up to the PC or a cradle of some kind in order to download new books via the phone line and so on, but being able to buy and download them almost...
I remember awhile back coming across a post that Nick Carr did about someone who was using Amazon’s S3 remote storage service to do backups, and wound up getting a bill for a month’s worth of charges for hosting his data — and it was a single cent (the original post by Dave Gurnell is here, and Nick’s post is here). I thought at the time that it was pretty impressive, so I created an Amazon Web Services account.
I downloaded JungleDisk, a backup/storage app that acts as a front-end to S3. Then I uploaded a whole pile of photos as a test, which worked flawlessly, with my JungleDisk files and folders showing up as a network drive in Windows and a WebDav remote share in Linux and the usual drag-and-drop to add or move files and so on. A little while ago I got my first...
Facebook isn’t the only company to be raising questions (in my mind at least) about some of the valuations that are out there. It wasn’t until I looked at Amazon’s stock chart that I realized the shares closed above $100 on Tuesday — touching a level they haven’t seen since the latter days of the tech bubble in 2000, just as things were about to pop. Not long after they hit that price, they began a free-fall that didn’t stop until they got below $20.
Maybe that’s part of the reason why Amazon’s shares slumped on Wednesday, despite a strong quarter in which profit more than quadrupled and revenue rose by more than 40 per cent. Amazon’s business has grown substantially since 2000, and there’s no question that the company has had a...
A heart-warming story — at least for those who have long thought that Amazon’s patent on the “one-click” buying system it uses on its website was stupid and should be struck down: the guy who has almost single-handedly been fighting to have the Amazon patent reviewed by the USPTO won his review, and many of the broad claims in the patent have been invalidated.
You can find out more on his blog, which is called IGDMLGD (for reasons that I haven’t been able to determine). As it turns out, the blogger is a chap named Peter Calveley, a New Zealander who has a science degree and a commerce degree and studied to become a patent attorney, although he has never practiced. His interest in the Amazon patent was apparently fueled by an unsatisfactory experience buying...
Another twist in the NBC-Apple saga: after dumping iTunes as a distribution method for its TV shows, the peacock network has cozied up to Amazon and its Unbox service instead. It appears that Amazon — whose movie-distribution unit likely has one-millionth the market share that Apple’s does — gave NBC more flexible pricing terms than Apple was willing to.
In particular, NBC gets the ability to offer a series of shows as a bundle, which is the kind of “if you want the good stuff, you’ll have to take some of our other crap as well” deal cable subscribers have grown accustomed to. Apple has said that NBC wanted to boost the price of its shows almost four-fold, but from the sounds of it, Apple didn’t want to offer the kind of bundling NBC wanted...
I know there’s been a lot of Canadian flag-waving around here, what with my recent posts on Treehugger, Club Penguin and Webkinz, but heck, if I don’t wave it, then who will? In any case, there’s some news today about another Canadian Web 2.0 success story, namely Freshbooks — which (full disclosure) is run by my friend and fellow mesh organizer Michael McDerment.
As discussed in a post over at the Amazon Web Services blog, Freshbooks is one of a handful of partners that has been testing a new service called Amazon Flexible Payment Service. Mike’s partner Sunir explains more about the details of the testing they’ve been doing in a post at the Freshbooks blog, and Amazon has more details on FPS here, and Phil Burns says he is already working on...
Although it often gets dismissed as a boring, Web 1.0 retailer at heart, Amazon has been doing a lot more innovative things than it gets credit for — including its very Web 2.0-ish S3 distributed storage service (which more startups should make use of) and its EC2 virtual server offering. And now, Amazon has jumped into the wiki business as well, with the “Amapedia,” a wiki devoted to products, which was discovered by the resourceful Rogers Cadenhead.
It’s still so new that there’s very little content in the Amapedia, but it has a very clean interface — arguably even cleaner and easier to follow than Wikipedia’s. There’s a featured product on the landing page, and then a big “tag cloud” of keywords. When you click on something...
Although it kind of got lost in all the hoopla about Google launching a customized search tool, Edgeio got financed to the tune of $5-million on Tuesday, in a round led by Intel Capital. Edgeio is the Web 2.0 classified service that Mike Arrington of TechCrunch co-founded along with Keith Teare, and remains a shareholder and board member of, as he mentions here.
At the time Edgeio launched to much acclaim, it was thought by many — including yours truly that it could become a kind of eBay-killer or a successor to Craigslist, because it allowed any blogger or person with a webpage to place an ad on their page and have it appear in the Edgeio index. But there seems to have been an evolution of sorts in Edgeio’s business model, or maybe something closer to a 180-degree turn....