Amazon Hops On the Orient Express
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It was only a matter of time. On Aug. 19, Amazon.com (AMZN ) finally jumped into the e-commerce market in mainland China, joining an online party that has been raging for a couple of years now.
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(InfoWorld) - Best known as an online retailer, Amazon.com has been gradually building up the number of Web services it offers to developers, with the ultimate aim of turning that operation into a profitable business. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, dubbed the company's growing move into developer Web services as "the hidden Amazon" during a keynote address at the Emerging Technologies Conference on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Cambridge campus Wednesday. About 200,000 developers have registered to use the 10 different Web services Amazon.com is providing so far, including three that Bezos highlighted in his talk -- Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Mechanical Turk is a Web service that allows developers to post questions to a large group of people to gain their insight on a particular issue. S3 and EC2 are Web services that let AmazonÂ sell excess storage and excess compute capacityÂ respectively to third-party developers. "These are all pay-by-drink services," Bezos said. "You can use and experiment." The S3 and EC2 Web services are proving particularly popular with developers at companies that can't afford to invest in huge amounts of hardware and storage that they only require on an occasional basis, to test out the scalability of their software. With EC2, a developer could pay Amazon.com $70 for continual access for one month to the computing power of one of the company's high-level servers or alternatively, pay the same amount of money to have access to 700 servers for a single hour, Bezos said. "It completely changes what's possible," Bezos said. "Everyone who's started a company wants to go directly from their idea to a successful product." Instead, the inventor faces a host of obstacles, such as lengthy purchasing decisions on what computer hardware to invest in and how to manage heterogenous environments. Bezos terms those IT obstacles as "muck" and is hoping that Amazon.com's Web services can help alleviate some of those issues. "We're working on a Web service to get rid of tax lawyers, but it's not working yet," he quipped. Amazon.com plans to make its Web services operation into "a very profitable business," Bezos said. The company intends to keep its focus on developers with the hope that third-party companies will then use Amazon.com Web services to create consumer-facing applications, he added. All of the services are work that Amazon.com has already done internally to run its own vast online operations. "The last few years, we've been exposing those things that we have to do anyway," Bezos said. "It's a relatively small step to say we're eating this dog food, we should share it with others." One area Amazon.com has had to figure out is what business model to use in selling the services. "It tickles me that we routinely send people bills for 18 cents," Bezos said. He added that such a process isn't cost effective at present, but is more about experimenting with a potential new business model.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Amazon is selling storage, computing power and other behind-the-scenes data center services.
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Amazon.com AMZN.O on Thursday   unveiled a widely anticipated Internet service offering movies   and TV shows that can be downloaded to personal computers,   solidly moving the online retailer into the nascent market.
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Amazon.com has signed on Warner Music Group to its music download service, which aims to compete with Appleâs industry-dominating iTunes online store.
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The deal for the provider of digital audiobooks bolsters Amazonâs offerings of audio downloads.
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Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. officially moved into the search engine market with the unveiling late Tuesday of its Internet search engine, A9.com.
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If you&#39;ve been eyeing Amazon.com (AMZN), you may wonder what got into the online heavyweight over the holidays. Shares shot up 8.5%, or $3.32, on the first trading day after Christmas, as Amazon said it logged a record 2.8 million orders in a single day.
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Stocks to watch on Thursday: AMAZON.COM INC. :
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Blog: Company, on a Yahoo book tour of sorts, to offer faster shipping at lower rates to Europeans as it prints books on demand in the Netherlands.
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Amazon's Mechanical Turk scours latest sat images Amazon and Google are colloborating to try and locate adventurer Steve Fossett, missing since last Monday somewhere in Nevada.â¦
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Amazon.com has entered the search-engine wars with the debut of A9.com. The site, which relies on Google search technology, includes personalization features like a running log of sites visited
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Amazon.com on Thursday unveiled a   widely anticipated Internet service offering movie and   television shows that can be downloaded onto consumers'   personal computers.
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New products to build Web services with Eclipse, e-commerce apps with Amazon's technology, and more.
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Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc.   is making its first foray into the big-screen movie  business after buying an option to develop a film from Keith  Donohue's fantasy novel "The Stolen Child."
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The train is becoming an attractive option for business travelers in Europe.
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[Frankfurt/London | Reuters News Service, 7 October 2004] - Google yesterday introduced a new search technology to help publishers sell books online, a fast-growing market dominated by Internet retailer Amazon.