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What are Amazon and 37Signals Cooking?

“Nothing!”..if you are to believe statements made by both companies, following Bezos Expedition’s, a personal investment company of Jeff Bezos, investment in the Chicago-based startup.

37signals created Ruby on Rails (RoR). Amazon is branching into hosted data and services. They’ve been saying nothing much is going on, but you and I, dear reader, know better and the first fruit of this friendship has appeared.

Dubbed UnSpun, Amazon’s first Ruby on Rails based application is out of the garage and into the wild. Although its not much more than a Web 2.0-looking collaborative listing/poll application, it is most likely the first of many other applications like it to come. The site design is decidedly 37signals, even though they continue to deny it.

What kind of applications does Bezos hope to host on that monster S3 data center? In a word, “Yours”.

In a recent issue of Businessweek Bezos lays out his plan to run the software side of your business. Beta testers are already lining up to try his vision out. In fact, people who got shut out of the beta test are offering up to $10,000 to get a shot at the S3 engine.

It’s a very grandiose plan in a very lucrative market, however, RoR hasn’t proved that it can easily scale yet. There are clearly good signs though. Plus, he’s got some pretty stiff competition in this market.

Also, a lot of innovative development work is necessary. For this, Bezos has what he calls ‘two pizza’ teams doing the innovation over there at Amazon. These teams seem to be able to accomplish so much innovation in a much shorter times than their counterparts. What is a two pizza team? It is a team that can be fed on two pizzas — that’s seven to nine people. Funny, that’s the exact size of 37signals.

Perhaps your next Rails Web CMS will be hosted at the same place where you just did your Christmas shopping.