amazon

Amazon puts the squeeze on print-on-demand publishers

Quite a kerfuffle has erupted over news in the last couple of days that Amazon is going to make print-on-demand (POD) publishers use Amazon's own internal printing service if they want to sell their books on the site.

Printing-on-demand has become a popular method for authors to bypass the large publishing houses with more niche or personal titles. And apparently the university presses have embraced it as well. So Amazon's announcement has some fairly wide-reaching effects.

Cries of "monopoly" are ringing out, with Amazon getting compared to Microsoft and the tactic being called a "landgrab".… Read more

Music downloads via 'Grand Theft Auto IV'

Why didn't anybody think of this before? Grand Theft Auto franchise developer Rockstar Games has teamed up with Amazon.com in an interesting joint promotion.

When GTA IV comes out on April 29 and you are cruising around inside doing whatever evil deeds come to mind, you might like a particular song playing on one of the radio stations in the game. Well, you will be able dial a number on your in-game virtual cellphone and receive a text message with artist and title information. And if you've signed up to be part of Rockstar's upcoming social … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 691: The Babies Have Wi-Fi

In the future, we will love the cockroaches, because they bring the Wi-Fi. Sadly, autonomous deathbots will make life unliveable, and that's assuming the Large Hadron Collider hasn't turned us all into strangelets. In happier news, the music industry is floating a plan to tax everyone who uses the Internet so they can prop up the decaying corpse of their business plan! What a fun day. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 691

The music industry's new extortion scheme http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/the-music-industrys-new-extortion-scheme/ http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9905404-7.html

U.S. students, … Read more

Amazon CTO on AWS outage: Like you can do better?

On February 15 this year, Amazon S3, the "cloud" storage service that's part of the Amazon Web Services suite of infrastructure applications, failed. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs who had been attracted to AWS based on its promised reliability and low cost had their confidence shaken. Several lost revenue when the service seized up.

Last week at the Under the Radar conference, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels sat down to an interview with Robert Scoble. The discussion of course came around to the S3 outage, and Vogels explained what happened. It was, he says, a "provisioning" and &… Read more

Amazon adds redundancy and geographical resiliency to EC2

Amazon is introducing what is definitely the "must-have" utility for it's EC2 cloud computing offering to become a reality. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service now has an application programming interface (API) that lets developers choose where its application physically runs.

As Martin LaMonica writes on News.blog:

This Availability Zones feature is important because people can now add redundancy to their application. Choosing multiple zones, people can have server instances with separate power, cooling, network access, and physical servers

This is an important move by Amazon and I would expect it to be echoed by … Read more

Amazon Web Services adds 'resiliency' to EC2 compute service

Amazon Web Services on Thursday is scheduled to release features meant to give its hosted computing service a better safety net.

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service now has an application programming interface (API) that lets developers choose where its application physically runs.

This Availability Zones feature is important because people can now add redundancy to their application. Choosing multiple zones, people can have server instances with separate power, cooling, network access, and physical servers.

"Up until now, if you boot up more than one EC2 instance, you had no control where it resided--it could hypothetically be sitting … Read more

Your common sense guide to stopping piracy

For the past decade, one of the most important debates raging in the tech industry is on the topic of piracy. Some people say that it should be stopped with the help of lawsuits and others suggest it can only be done by being slightly nicer by forcing people to pay for media. But whatever happened to the common sense route? Surely it has been espoused before and some even follow it. Why are some organizations so far behind?

As Amazon has proven, allowing people to do what they want actually works in an environment where they can easily get the same song elsewhere for free. In other words, why fight city hall when all you really need to do is agree?

Believe it or not, there is a way to almost entirely wipe out piracy once and for all. No, it's not by suing those responsible or forcing people into situations. Instead, it's by giving us what we want in a nice package for an affordable price. Does that sound so hard?… Read more

Is cloud computing more than just smoke?

The growing buzz around cloud computing sounds eerily familiar to the utility computing noise of a few years ago.

But there is a difference--or at least people in the business swear there is.

In reading blogs and speaking to a few people, I've found that cloud computing does indeed rehash some of the ideas of the past, but there are significant technology advances, notably virtualization, that set it apart.

One such cloud company, Elastra, launched on Tuesday its server for public and private clouds. Executives at another start-up, 3Tera, told me on Monday that later this year their AppLogic &… Read more

No. 1 in Google may not be enough

Google's new teleportation, its search-within-search function, is getting mixed responses, at least from some site owners, who may be remembering occasions when teleportation in the Star Trek transporter went wrong. Earlier in the month, Google introduced the teleportation functionality as a way to better help searchers find information within a site by providing a search box below the snippet of the top listing, which performs a "site:" search on the domain of that listing using the additional search terms the searcher added in.

The "site:" advanced query is quite familiar to those within the search … Read more