amazon

Amazon's MP3s not affecting iTunes

Amazon.com's MP3 service is growing but not at the expense of Apple's iTunes, according to a report issued Tuesday by market researcher NPD Group.

Only about 10 percent of the people who shopped at AmazonMP3 in February were previous Apple shoppers, NPD said.

This is a "healthy indication that the digital music customer pool can expand into new consumer groups who have not yet joined the iTunes community," Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD said in a statement.

Apple's iTunes remains the No.1 digital music store. AmazonMP3, which launched in September, slipped … Read more

Google App Engine meets Amazon EC2

What do you get when you cross Amazon's EC2 on-demand cloud computing infrastructure with Google's new App Exchange foundation for Web applications?

It's hard to say what the union could produce besides ugly children. But it's not just a hypothetical hybrid: programmer Chris Anderson has released software called AppDrop that brings App Exchange to EC2. Programmer Andy Baio spotlighted the development Monday on his blog.

OK, now I need to mention the caveat that this isn't really one cloud computing foundation running inside another.

In fact, Anderson just has the single-computer version of Google's … Read more

Amazon adds persistent storage to cloud computing service

It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.

Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.

People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.

The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) … Read more

How Google's App Engine stacks up with Amazon's EC2

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon's approach to providing infrastructure services to Google's. He found that Amazon's set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google's App Engine.

Garett Rogers looks at some of the pros and cons of entrusting our applications to Google's cloud. The major issue he cites is getting deeply tied into Google's infrastructure:

What … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 701: Doughnut for your hate

Flickr-haters get free doughnuts. If that's what you get for hating, sign us up! Also, Gartner hates on Windows, and no one gets any doughnuts for that. Europe rejects plans to criminalize file-sharing, offering doughnuts in the form of broad exemptions for fair use, and Network Solutions gets a big, fat doughnut hole for putting ads on your subdomains. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 701

Mike Please keep doing the show.

Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9916717-56.html http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1870375122;fp;;fpid;;pf;1 http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8428… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 700: Merger-mania!

Yahoo and Microsoft bring Google, AOL, and News Corp. into the ring for a pretty awesome merger-mania that we sincerely hope involves the gratuitous use of Spandex. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday on Pay-per-view! That darned RSA conference continues to scare the sneezes out of us by demonstrating how taking down a national power grid is trivially easy. (Insert nervous giggle here.) We guess it's good to know? Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 667

Yahoo-Microsoft buyout brawl, one-two punch with a swift comeback punch http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9916001-7.html http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9915835-80.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120776803032602423.html… Read more

Does streaming lift music sales?

Free streaming music turns people on to new music and encourages them to buy, says social-networking site Last.fm. In the music industry, this will not come as a huge revelation.

Last.fm, acquired by CBS last May, announced Wednesday that since the company launched its on-demand streaming service two months ago, CD and download sales through its partnership with Amazon.com have more than doubled.

So what does that mean?

Music discovery continues to be one of digital music's greatest vulnerabilities. Nobody has come up with a sure or simple way to help people wade through the millions … Read more

Amazon.com feels bad you bought an HD DVD player, so here's $50

Still reeling from the recently concluded format war?

Lucky for some early adopters, the number of retailers lining up to ease your pain is growing: first Best Buy, then Wal-Mart, and now Amazon. The online retail giant is currently offering a $50 credit for every HD DVD player purchased on its site. The offer is good until April 9, 2009, for HD DVD players bought before February 23, when Toshiba said it would stop making the devices.

Gizmodo has posted the e-mail sent to some Amazon customers on Tuesday. I've excerpted the best parts:

"New technologies don't … Read more

The new hosting provider?

One of the problems with putting things into categories is that as technologies and the environment change over time, those which were once separate and distinct can become much less so. But, because we've grown so accustomed to thinking of them as independent entities, we can miss that shift.

From a practical business perspective, this can mean failing to notice that someone we never thought of as a competitor is now serving the needs of our customers. They may well be doing it in a different way or coming at a problem from a different mindset or design point. … Read more

Web 2.5: The emergence of platforms-as-a-service

On the road to the elusive Web 3.0 (something to do with semantics, meaning, and context rather than just data, links, and AJAX), core infrastructure is beginning to move from the edge to a center inhabited by companies such as Amazon, Salesforce.com, Joyent, and now Google with its new App Engine.

Call it Web 2.5, where the platform-as-a-service providers allow developers to create Web applications via the cloud and for users to consume them on any Web-connected device, anytime and anywhere. It eliminates what Amazon's Jeff Bezos describes as the "muck," the undifferentiated heavy … Read more