Amazon.com has joined the iPhone frenzy with a new application available free for download through Apple’s App Store.
The software is relatively straightforward, offering a way for iPhone or iPod Touch owners to browse through all the products offered by Amazon.com, as well as by third-party retailers like Target and Macy’s that make their products available online through Amazon.
There is, however, one unusual and noteworthy aspect of the app called Amazon Remembers, which Amazon is calling “experimental.” The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos More»

Labels: Amazon, iPhone

Amazon.com announced the launch of a new service called Amazon CloudFront. It is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.
Amazon CloudFront delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) More»

Labels: Amazon, cloud computing

Hoping to renew growth, boost inventory and ultimately revenue eBay is courting fixed priced sellers a model Amazon has been operating successfully.
Tomorrow eBay will announce plans to slash the upfront fees it charges to list sale items by as much as 75%, while increasing its final sales commission. eBay makes about has traditionally made as much as 60% of its shopping revenue from upfront fees—levied regardless of whether an item sells. The structure encouraged more sellers to list items for auctions, which at least guarantee a sale, than for fixed prices.
eBay is rapidly moving away More»

Labels: Amazon, eBay

Google gave the cloud computing initiative a major boost today by launching Google App Engine. Web developers can build and run their web applications on the Google infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.
The service is similar to Amazon Simple DB and SalesForce App Exchange where developers can online demand applications or SaaS applications. Google More»

Labels: Amazon, cloud computing, salesforce, web applications

Many thanks to Expo companies Mzinga and BayArea Internet for providing raffle prizes at the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo last Tuesday. The winners of the prizes were as follows:
Kindle Winner, Dan Olsen, with Mzinga Team; iPhone Winner with BayArea Internet Rep
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Labels: Amazon, Apple, web 2.0

LongJump has just launched an online database service called Database as a Service (DaaS). DaaS enables you to quickly provision an online database for your web site very much like how you provision your hosting or storage.
LongJump hopes to eliminate the hassles of installing MySql on your server, reduce infrastructure More»

Labels: Amazon, online services

Amazon Web Services has been providing some really powerful web infrastructure solutions at low cost for some time, and Amazon is about to add a database feature to their current offerings. SimpleDB looks like a robust database feature that will allow companies to leverage Amazon’s computing environment to great advantage. From Amazon’s SimpleDB page:
Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity. Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a More»

Labels: Amazon, database

The Amazon startup contest has video profiles of the seven finalists in their web company contest that helped showcase users of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a very robust technology platform using Amazon’s substantial infrastructure.
Jeff Barr, Amazon’s great tech evangelist, noted the finalists on Amazon’s blog as well.
These look like some really interesting companies. One is measuring brain networking, another is providing 19 usability testing (this is brilliant for the small website market!) One is optimizing PPC campaigns (hmmm - but won’t Google analytics do that extremely well?)
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Labels: Amazon, companies, web 2.0

The newest revolution in reading is about to make its debut today. Amazon is slated to release the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device which is expected to vastly improve on traditional e-readers like the Sony Reader. CEO, Jeff Bezos, states that “Books are the last bastion of analog. Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn’t.”
The paperback-sized handheld device will apparently allow you to wirelessly download e-books directly to the device from Amazon’s e-Book More»

Labels: Amazon

Newsweek’s cover story is about Amazon’s Kindle, a reading device that debuts tomorrow.
The Kindle is Steve Bezos’ attempt to revolutionize the art of … reading. Like many bloggers commenting on the new gadget even before it’s been seen in public I’m skeptical this approach will succeed for Amazon. They are trying to charge for stuff we all expect for free. Also, they are offering what appears to be an inferior gadget to a laptop.
Thus laptop folks won’t buy this and carry around two gadgets, non-laptop folks will buy a laptop before a Kindle, and folks who don’t really like the More»

Labels: Amazon, journalism, Kindle