Amazon

Overheard - Amazon PayPhrase

“PayPhrase is less fun than it might be due to Amazon’s content restrictions. PayPhrases can’t use trademarked terms. Nor can they use language that is unlawful, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, harassing, threatening, harmful, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable.” Thomas Claburn, Amazon Introduces PayPhrase Payment Shortcut

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Amazon PayPhrase.

Overheard - Origins of Amazon Mechanical Turk

“Mechanical Turk began life as a service that Amazon itself needed…Amazon had millions of Web pages that described individual products, but it wanted to weed out the duplicate pages.” Jason Pontin, Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans

Amazon makes money from Mechanical Turk by charging companies 10 percent of the price of a successfully completed HIT. For simple HITs that cost less than 1 cent, Amazon charges half a cent. ChaCha intends to make money the way most other search companies do: by charging advertisers for contextually relevant links and advertisements.

If you haven’t heard about ChaCha yet, it’s a free voice search service for mobile phones. It’s interesting that one of ChaCha’s investors is Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.  According to marketing literature:

ChaCha, a free mobile answers service, allows users to call 1-800-2ChaCha™ or text questions to ChaCha (242242™) on mobile phones and receive answers within minutes. Its unique advertising solutions provide pay-for-performance opportunities for advertisers to precisely target and embed their messages within millions of text conversations.

Aha! So maybe Mechanical Turk isn’t so much about enterprise search — it’s really about mobile voice search!  Makes sense. Amazon would have a revenue stream by serving highly targeted ads along with the search results.

Terabyte - two terabytes in the news

The National Archives lost a terabyte disk drive filled with sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including Social Security numbers and Secret Service procedures.  Had this data been on a self-encrypting drive, we would not have heard of its loss. Pete Steege, The National Archives lose a terabyte drive filled with sensitive data

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is terabyte. A terabyte (one trillion bytes) is in the news today for two reasons — a terabyte of data of data from the Clinton administration is missing from the National Archives and Amazon has announced a new cloud service called Import/Export for moving terabytes of data to the cloud.

The interesting thing about missing data from the Clinton administration is that it was on a 2-terabyte hard drive that was left sitting on a shelf for a couple of months. And guess what? The data on it was not encrypted. What the heck???

The Amazon announcement is another WTH.  The Import/Export service is being promoted as a way to move large datasets to and from the cloud (meaning Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).)

A terabyte is a lot of data and trying to push it up to Amazon over the Internet takes a lot of bandwidth.  With Amazon Import/Export, you can move the data by off-loading it to a portable storage device and then shipping the device to Amazon.  Amazon has a handy-dandy calculator for estimating the cost of service.  They will charge you $80 for moving the data from the portable device to the storage you’ve purchased at Amazon (along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour surcharge) and then they’ll ship the device back to you.  It might sound pricey until you consider that uploading a terabyte of data over the Internet with your T1 line is likely to take 82 days.

And oh yeah,  you may want to take a lesson from the National Archives and encrypt that data before you ship it out.

Overheard - eBooks reaching the tipping point

Like the move from silent pictures to ‘talkies’, the transition to electronic publishing will prove fatal to laggards. Those aggressively pursuing and developing e-books will rise to take control of the publishing industry. Mike Elgan, Here comes the e-book revolution

Mike Elgan’s done a good job breaking down the reasons why eBooks are about to reach the tipping point. This week’s announcement of the Kindle app for the iPhone was just one more ingredient in the perfect storm.

Overheard - Kindle is a platform, not a device

Amazon’s expansion of Kindle to the iPhone makes me wonder if we’ll soon see Kindle as not just a device, but as a full-fledged publishing platform. Nick Mediati, Amazon Brings Kindle to iPhone

Back in 2007, there was a lot of speculation about Apple going head-to-head with Amazon by creating their own “Safari Pad” reader to compete with Kindle.   How very smart of them to PARTNER with Amazon instead. I think Nick Mediati has hit on something important — especially after seeing how very easy Amazon has made it to publish on Kindle. Kindle is a platform, not a device.

My prediction? Short stories will become popular again. Teachers will publish third grader’s stories on Amazon so Mom and Dan can download and send to Grandma.  Nicole Lee compared the reading experience on both devices.  Check it out.

This is just one more reason why Apple is so smart. You see, the key to the iPhone’s popularity is not just its “cool” factor — it’s how well it plays with others.  And that’s a lesson that Apple is using to win the browser wars.

Industry watchers Net Applications recently reported that Safari owns 67 percent or the market share for  mobile browsing.

With the recent release of Safari 4,  Apple is finally making some progress drawing the PC desktop crowd away from IE and Firefox. How are they doing it?  By promising them speed. The official press release states that Safari 4 “executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3.  Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.”

Overheard: Amazon cloud services

One of the Highlights in the [Q4] earnings statement picked up by the geek press was about Amazon’s online data and storage services: Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined. Jack Schofield, Amazon delivers financial results, says Kindle is a sell-out

Thanks to Dennis Shiao for the cloud watch tip. It’s interesting that Amazon is using bandwidth as the success metric.

Overheard: Amazon will put your database in a cloud

“Amazon.com has begun publicly testing a third element to its online computing services: a database capability called SimpleDB. The new Web service joins two others the online retailer launched in 2006 that anyone can pay to use: computing horsepower called the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and data storage called Simple Storage Service (S3). SimpleDB works in conjunction with those services, letting customers store, modify, and query data.” Stephen Shankland, Amazon opens testing for in-cloud database

Erick Schonfeld caused a bit of a buzzfire by starting out his blog entry on SimpleDB by saying:

“Companies can now go ahead and fire their expensive database administrators—those engineers who keep the Oracle or IBM databases humming.”

Overheard: Kindle

I’ve tried to narrow down why I think it will fail to once sentence: It solves problems that don’t really exist. Ed Kohler, Why the Kindle Will Fail with Business Book Readers

At first I agreed with Ed Kohler, but after shopping for books this weekend on Amazon, I’m not so sure. The problem Kindle solves is instant access. With Kindle you can think of a book, order it and start reading it within three minutes. Doesn’t get much better than that.