amazon

Google's AppEngine looks great. It's a way to build web applications and run them on Google's "cloud" infrastructure.

The downside? Your applications effectively become Google's applications because there's no easy way to move them elsewhere. You have to run them using Google's authentication engine, framework, file system, APIs, etc. Free as in Google's.

Enter Morph Labs.

[Morph] claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon's Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google's Microsoft-like vendor lock-in....… Read more

As expected, Amazon.com is hitting back at New York over a new law requiring online retailers to collect sales taxes from customers residing in that state.

In a complaint filed on April 25, Amazon asked the New York State Supreme Court to declare the recently passed law "invalid, illegal, and unconstitutional." (Wired.com, which reported the lawsuit earlier this week, has posted a PDF of the document.)

New York has long required vendors to collect taxes from customers in its state if they "solicit business" there, according to Amazon's complaint. But a few weeks … Read more

Amazon.com posted Wednesday stronger than expected first quarter results, in part driven by strong sales in its electronics and general merchandise categories.

The online retailing giant also issued a forecast for the current quarter and year that shows greater strength than Wall Street's current estimates.

Shares of Amazon, however, were down roughly 4 percent in after-hours trading to $77.77 a share.

During the first quarter, Amazon generated net income of 34 cents a share to $143 million, up 30 percent compared with the previous year. Revenues jumped 37 percent to $4.13 billion in the quarter, verses … Read more

Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.

Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications. … Read more

I'll admit it--one of my favorite sites years ago was Hot or Not.

Not because it combined the best facets of MySpace and StumbleUpon before either site existed, but because it was devilishly fun to put your own picture up there and get a general consensus of how other people thought you looked on a purely superficial level. Admittedly, there are serious flaws in such a system. Your picture could be not your own--and the camera can easily play tricks. What made the whole thing so damn fascinating were the stats. You got to see how you stacked up … Read more

Topic: Our top 5 online music stores (in no particular order)Amazon MP3: http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b/ref=sa_menu_dmusic2?ie=UTF8&node=163856011&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=507846&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=042ED91AXJKXBZP8TDB3 eMusic: http://www.emusic.com/ Music.download: http://music.download.com/ Daytrotter: http://www.daytrotter.com/ Rhapsody: http://www.rhapsody.com/home.html… Read more

Amazon.com was one of the first online retailers in the world. It started out with books and now sells nearly every consumer good, including groceries and over-the-counter medicines. The service is well known as one of the best places to find new or used books at prices below what you'd pay in most retail stores. It also features free shipping on many of its items.

One of the things that makes Amazon.com dynamic as an online retailer is its community of users, who write reviews and rate nearly every product on the service. Amazon.com is also … Read more

Amazon's Unbox service, once the bane of our very own CNET reviewers, has come a long way. The service lets you download movies and TV shows to watch on your PC or portable device. Through a partnership with TiVo, you can also rent and watch the movies on your TV without a computer if you've got a compatible TiVo device hooked up to the Internet.

What makes the service especially cool is its RemoteLoad feature, which lets you buy and download a movie to another computer. It's a distinctly competitive advantage to systems that require users to … Read more

Amazon's MP3 store has had a banner year. The service sells DRM-free MP3s of entire musical albums, ripped at a very high bitrate and with digital copies of the cover art. The service offers over 2 million tracks that are available for sale individually or by the album. In order to download albums, users must install a small helper program that lets you download several tracks at the same time. It will also automatically take the tracks and add them to your iTunes and/or Windows Media Player libraries.

Because there's no DRM, the files can be played … Read more