Amazon Adds Object Expiration to S3

Kindle Fire: Amazon’s Latest Consumer Point of Sale Terminal

The Kindle Fire seems to have been designed and built not as a tablet, but as a device to read and watch that happens to be a tablet. It has been designed to help Amazons customers buy more in the best way possible it’s that sort of user centric approach that will make it so popular.

Kindle Fire: Developers be Warned – John Nye

Good succinct article that gets to the heart of the matter: Amazon doesn’t sell tablets, Amazon sells stuff and the Kindle Fire and its siblings are designed to help you buy more stuff quickly and efficiently. Sure, the Fire will have access to Android apps from the Amazon App store, however consumers (and developers) will need to keep in mind that it is running a forked version Android 2.1, so some stuff is not going to work as expected. Even though there will always be more powerful, more capable Android tablets on the market, the Fire will find market share as the Android device for the home consumer. Just the thing for using around the house to read books and magazines, watch video, listen to music, perhaps chat with friends, or check your email. I suspect that if your looking for a powerful device for serious business and education use the Kindle Fire may well disappoint. Of course we won’t know until mid-November when it actually appears.

Amazon Adds Import/Export of Data From External Storage Devices Shipped to AWS Data Centers

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.

via AWS Import/Export.

This is an interesting development for folks who need to move really large amounts of data on or off of the cloud. According to a table in the article the cost of shipping the drive and having Amazon do the transfer at the data center becomes cost effective when dealing with data amounts over 1TB being pushed over a 10Mbps connection. That is a lot of data[1].

The service will accept eSATA, USB2.0, and internal SATA drives and transfer your data to an S3 bucket or an EBS Snapshot.

[1]For reference, a single copy of all the data on CALI’s public servers (lessons, court opinions, podcasts, conference video, as so on) weighs in at just over a 1TB.

Google eBooks: Hey Amazon, Look At Us?

Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world’s Duke Nukem Forever: vaporware for seven years, depending on how you count. Its actual emergence was like the birth of a unicorn. A mewling, misshapen, half-baked unicorn.

Google eBooks: Is That All There Is?.

So, yep, Google launched an eBookstore. It really is a direct shot across the bow of Amazon, but Google should have gone for something with a bigger caliber.  As this article notes it has taken Google a lllooonnnggg time to get here, but one does wonder if “here” moved in the meantime and Google some how missed it.

There are really good reasons to believe that Google’s only real competition is Amazon, after both sites are just trying to sell you stuff. The thing is, Amazon sells directly while Google sells through search. And the fact that Google wraps everything in search actually puts it at a disadvantage.

When I’m looking for information I go to Google. When I want to buy something I go to Amazon. But that isn’t what Google wants to tell advertisers. Google needs those big spenders to think that people are searching Google to buy stuff. Amazon, OTOH, is a big retail search engine. People really do buy stuff there, not click thorugh ads to somewhere else to buy.

Try this: search Google for Sony Televisions. One of the top sponsored links is right to Amazon. If you see this enough, that direct link to Amazon for stuff you want to buy, sooner or later it will occur to you to just go to Amazon to look for stuff to buy. Just skip Google. And I have to think that is Google’s worst nightmare. If folks go directly to Amazon to buy stuff without searching Google first, then that ad money is lost to Google.

So, back to the bookstore. The Google bookstore is an attempt to try and harness the stuff that Google does real well, crunch lots of data in interesting ways, and turn it into retail dollars spent on the Google site. That would show Amazon! Look we can sell stuff too! It is a gamble though since retailing (even ebooks) is really different than search. But who knows, maybe some day a search for Sony Televisions will return a big “Buy Now” button taht takes you right to Google Checkout.

Finding Spam on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

At this point, Amazon Mechanical Turk has reached the mainstream. Pretty much everyone knows about the concept. Post small tasks online, pay people cents, and get thousands of micro-tasks completed.
Unfortunately, this resulted in some unfortunate trends. Anyone who frequents just a little bit the market will notice the tremendous number of spammy HITs. (HIT = a task posted for completion in the market; stands for Human Intelligence Task.) Test if the ads in my website work”. “Create a Twitter account and follow me”. “Like my YouTube video”. “Download this app”. “Write a positive review on Yelp”. A seemingly endless amount of spam HITs come to the market, mainly with the purpose of spamming “social media” metrics.

via Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% spam. – A Computer Scientist in a Business School.

Article points out that spammers tend to pay too much and only assign one HIT per request. Comments reveal that workers on MT can be relatively sophisticated in detecting spam, often wary of requests that seem too good to be true. So, if you’re thinking about using Mechanical Turk to get some work done, keep in mind that the request should offer a reasonable fee and include multiple HITs.

Kindle Gets Audio/Video… On the iPad and iPhone

Amazon just introduced a audio and video to the Kindle, but the only way to experience the new Kindle multimedia books is on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. A baker’s dozen of titles already come in multimedia editions, including Rick Steves’ travel guides, Best of the Beatles For Acoustic Guitar, and Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds In Song.

via TechCrunch – Amazon Introduces A Video/Audio Kindle . . . But Only On The iPad And iPhone.

Interesting development., but a couple of things are worth noting here. First the entire collection of multimedia editions numbers just 13 indicating this may be a test as much as anything else. Second, while it seems odd that they would sell ebooks that have features that aren’t usable on the Kindle, think of it as simply expanding their market by offering more ebooks to a wider market by including other features.

Think of it this way, a Kindle now costs $189. For your money you get what is considered the industry standard in readers. A great device for reading fiction and non-fiction works that are primarily text. It is a device that is aimed at casual reading and it works very well for that.

Of course text is hardly the only content type that can be used effectively in ebooks. By their very nature ebooks can be multimedia works incorporating color graphics, images, audio, and video. Amazon knows this and they also now that selling those works requires a platform that is different than the Kindle. No problem, the Kindle software turns your iPad or iPhone into a Kindle and it will handle multimedia quite well. So, Amazon offers audio and video enhanced ebooks for the Kindle on the iPad/iPhone. If you want ebooks with those features get your self the more expensive iPad[1], starting at $499, and buy those books Amazon.

I think this move is really designed to enhance the Kindle app and make it more appealing than Apple’s own iBooks. No need to have 2 separate accounts for your ebooks, just use the Kindle for all your ebook needs. Of course I would expect that we will see the multimedia features of the Kindle app turn up on the Windows and Mac versions of the software. And at some point Amazon will introduce a color Kindle of some kind.

[1] Yes, you can get the features on the Kindle iPhone, I suspect that you will find it more satisfying on the iPad.

Using EC2 to (re)Distribute “Repurposed Virtualities”

They give everyone the power to create their own version of Windows and share it with others. Granted, that’s not the kind of thing too many non-techies, or even techies, wake up in the morning with an overwhelming desire to do. But why not? I’m still getting used to the idea of creating my own versions of Windows, haven’t even released anything yet. But since everything I’m building is open source, there’s no reason someone couldn’t take my package, make some changes, and then redistribute it with their customizations. Trust obviously becomes a pretty important issue here.

via Scripting News: Caprica and repurposed virtualities.

This sounds a lot like what already goes on in the EC2 community around public AMIs. If you take a look at the list of public AMIs (over 4,000 at this point) you’ll see that many are bundles of the OS with one or more application packages. For examlple Drupal and Asterisk AMIs are easy to find. Most the public AMIs are Linux-based, but nearly 300 use Windows as the core OS.
I’ve done this sort of thing building a Linux AMI that started with a base image from RightScale to which I added Apache, MySQL, PHP, Drupal, and more configured to work together. Once I saved the AMI, I had a proto-type server that I could use to quickly scale up our web cluster. I’ve also shared the AMI with colleagues interested in getting started with Drupal.
So, having an AMI that contains Dave’s work is certainly doable and an excellent idea. I, for one, would certainly try it out.