amazon

Would the cloud have saved Apple's iPhone 3G launch?

Apple had a serious problem with its iPhone 3G product launch last week, coupled with its limp-along release of its iPhone 2.0 software. Could Amazon.com's cloud have helped? Lee Faus, in his "Popularity Sucks" post, thinks so.

As he notes, the ability to spin up resources for a short-term crush on Apple's servers could have worked wonders (at least, for the 2.0 software upgrade), just as it could have benefited Mozilla during its launch of Firefox 3.0:

This would have been ideal for Mozilla (Firefox 3 Install Images on S3 with Apache … Read more

Jeff Bezos backs Social Gaming Network

Even though the iPhone has been dominating developer headlines recently, it looks as if there's still some air in the social-network gaming space.

The Social Gaming Network, a start-up that develops games for social platforms such as Facebook and OpenSocial, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' personal investment firm, Bezos Expeditions.

This comes just months after the company closed a $15 million Series A round from Greylock Partners, the Founders Fund, and others.

Founded by the creators of Web 1.0 page creator Freewebs (which now calls itself Webs.com), the Social … Read more

Rhapsody's new MP3 store offers full song previews

The story originally stated that Verizon's over-the-air music service downloaded DRM-free MP3 files directly to the user's handset. It was later learned that Verizon's direct-to-phone music download is not in the MP3 format. The copy delivered to the user's computer, however, is in the MP3 format.

Read the updated story here.

Pluribo summarizes Web content, starting with reviews

When I'm parsing product reviews on Amazon.com I usually look at two things after the price tag: the rating and how many people have reviewed it. This simple system tends to breaks down when it comes time to dig deeper into those sometimes thousands of reviews, which is where Pluribo comes in handy.

This small browser extension will go over everyone's ratings and pull out bits and pieces it finds noteworthy based on a similar words that pop up in rated reviews. The developer says it currently works the best on electronics items but that other items … Read more

Rhapsody MP3 store opens

Update: there is a lightweight browser plug-in that lets you play song samples without having to download and install the full Rhapsody client. When I tried the MP3 download service yesterday, I was unable to play the 25 free songs in that browser window--it only let me play 30-second samples. Today, using the same username and password, it started my 25-song count. So my major complaint with the service has been solved. Kudos to Rhapsody.

Amazon was first out of the gate with a comprehensive MP3 download store last September, and they've steadily upgraded the site since then. I'… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 756: Dicker caught dickering

You know how sometimes the punishment fits the crime? In this case the criminal fits the crime. GoDaddy's VP of domain auctions, appropriately named Dicker, was caught bidding (dickering?) on domains on his own auction site. D'oh! Also, Sony starts offering some creative incentives to get you to buy their TVs: their movies. Hmm. Listen now: Download today's podcast Episode 756

Save Windows XP http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/archives/2008/06/editors_blog_sa.html http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/30/BUDG11GE33.DTL

Google taps ‘Family Guy’ guy for Web series … Read more

Get a free MP3 album from Rhapsody

Watch out, AmazonMP3: Rhapsody just joined the DRM-free MP3 club. The music-subscription service's new MP3 store sells individual tracks for 99 cents and albums for $9.99. And if you're one of the first 100,000 folks to create an account by July 4, you can get a free album.

Strings? You do have to provide a credit card when you set up your account, and you have to install Rhapsody's MP3 Download Manager (Windows only), which can automatically add downloaded songs to your iTunes library. With that done, you'll immediately find a $10 credit in … Read more

Rhapsody's new MP3 store offers full song previews

A correction was made to this story. See details below.

RealNetworks on Sunday announced several improvements to its Rhapsody music service, including a new online music store and integration with Verizon's V Cast mobile phone music service.

Taking a cue from competitors such as Amazon and Napster, Rhapsody's new Web-based music store sells a catalog of universally compatible (DRM-free) MP3 files from all four major music labels (Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI), as well as a selection of independents.

The new Rhapsody store represents a departure from the strictly software-based music subscription model on which … Read more

Princeton University to publish Kindle textbooks

Another prestigious school is embracing Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

Princeton University has announced that it will start printing Kindle-edition textbooks this fall, according to a story in The Christian Science Monitor.

Princeton follows Yale, Oxford, and UC Berkeley in creating textbooks for the Kindle. In the United States, there are about 2,500 four-year universities, so Amazon still has a long way to go.

But the Kindle should appeal to university students better than other demographics.

I wrote this week that I was putting off buying a Kindle until I learn whether I can read digital books on the iPhone … Read more

Amazon's blueprint for cloud computing

In the early morning at Structure 08, AMR Research's Jonathan Yarmis described various tech trends around cloud computing. Mendel Rosenblum, a founder and technical lead behind VMware, outlined the role of virtualization in data centers.

Now Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO at Amazon.com, is talking about why Amazon is in the cloud computing business, how it got there, and why customers should want it. Instead of every company or developer doing the heavy lifting, dealing with the "muck" as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to say, Amazon opened up its software-as-a-service stack (Amazon Web Services) … Read more