Amazon News & Articles

A wave of excitement shot through the Internet as bloggers suddenly noticed that Amazon (news, site) had posted the source code for each version of the Kindle.

However, the code is really just the GPL'd Linux libraries and drivers (Debian Linux is the common speculation), and it's been available since 2007. The e-book reader part is in no way part of the source package.

While no license file is attached, the folder the code unpacks into is called "gplrelease," which might be a massive hint. Not to mention all that's in there is what would be required for them to release legally for the GPL portions.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon had hinted recently at a conference that Kindle books and Kindle readers were, to him, two separate businesses. Releasing a Kindle iPhone app was certainly one hint that he was serious. Another was his statement that he intended to give the Kindle device team competition by making the Kindle books available on even more mobile and computing devices.

But entirely releasing the Kindle source doesn't appear to be the way they're going to do it just now. Who knows, maybe later if Amazon decides it would rather offer their content on more devices and get out of the hardware business.

Here come the Marketeers! Hot on the heels of last week’s launch of SDL Tridion’s (news, site) Unified Online Marketing Suite, Moderandi, an Arizona-based web applications developer, has today launched a new marketing platform called Growth Panel.

Targeting the small-to-medium (SMB) sized business market, this SaaS solution enables marketeers and consultants create plans and manage marketing projects in the cloud.

Moderandi says that this new platform fills a gap in the market that is not being properly serviced, notably for SMBs, who have neither the cash, nor the bandwidth to develop an all-inclusive marketing campaign.

Moving further into the hosted world just as they promised to late last year, Amazon Web Services (news, site) has announced the release of a handful of new tools for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Wanting users to spend less time and energy on the “muck” that is operational burdens and system admin, the new tools focus specifically on enabling visibility into the health and usage of AWS resources, enhancing application performance, and giving wallets a little break.

Amazon Simple Storage Service, also called S3, (news,site) is a great service for those who desire a pay-as-you-go, hosted storage service for building web apps or storing files in the cloud.  CloudBerry Lab, a software vendor, has released a freeware solution called CloudBerry S3 Explorer that makes accessing and managing your Amazon S3 storage easier than ever before.

The race for enterprise 2.0 stardom is on. Companies like Microsoft, Adobe,  Amazon and Skype have all been in recent news regarding the topic.

Sadly,  SuiteTwo, an Intel-backed enterprise 2.0 suite, is dropping out when competition is tough and the economy is even tougher.

Amazon Web Services, the hosted application environment from Amazon.com, announced the availability of the Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in Europe. Having Amazon EC2 in Europe will mean developers and businesses can build applications and websites on the EC2 platform with less latency, as computational data will not have to travel across the Internet as a part of the workload.

The news that Amazon is now offering a low-cost CDN has likely excited many people. Aptly named CloudFront, this service is stirring up a lot of attention. In our overview of the new service, we outlined the basic steps to use CloudFront.

In this post, we thought we would give you a little more detail on those steps to help you get started sooner.

Well known as being the pioneer for cloud computing services, Amazon has released the beta version of its latest initiative — a content delivery network. Amazon’s CloudFront CDN is cheap enough that SMB web publishers are now able to serve their more popular content to their customers quickly and easily.

An integral part of Amazon’s cloud computing services is showing a sign of maturity, while adding a much anticipated element. The Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2), which facilitates a Linux server environment as a service for Web developers, has come out of beta.

Additionally, as previously rumored, Amazon.com has added an on-demand Windows Server environment to accompany the already existing OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition offerings.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) not only provides impressive storage, distribution, hosting and computing solutions for Web developers, but this Amazon subsidiary also offers remarkable pricing that has never before been seen. So, how does a company do much better than this? Well, how about offering even cheaper prices?

We’ve recently discovered two resources that will make your life a little easier should you work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) either as a data manager or developer.

Ylastic is a tool built upon AWS Infrastructure Services. With this tool, you can manage Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, and SimpleDB all from one easy to use interface. The Ylastic tool also allows users to set up monitoring, alerts, reporting tools and functional dashboards to keep tabs on one’s AWS cloud computing utilization and health.

Also, if you are a developer, the Amazon Web Services Developer Relations team has collected the most used data types, function calls and command line tools for their popular services in Quick Reference Cards. The cards are available for Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, Amazon DevPay, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fulfillment Web Service and Amazon Associates Web Service, with more guides to come in the coming months.

Amazon has recently informed its AWS customers that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will allow users to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server later this fall. For those who take advantage of those two Microsoft products, this is surely news to get excited about.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a provider of Internet data storage and delivery services, is expanding options for developers and enterprises looking to host their databases on the AWS cloud computing platform.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a scalable web service solution offered by AWS, is now the first authorized cloud computing platform to run supported Oracle databases.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a provider of Internet data storage and delivery services, is planning to release an unnamed content delivery service that will likely undercut the existing Content Delivery Network (CDN) competition to provide customers with faster and cheaper digital content delivery options.

Electronics superstore Best Buy announced its decision to acquire online music provider Napster for approximately US$ 121 million. The transaction is expected to close by the end of this year.

Apple, with its iPod and iTunes currently holding a big chunk of the digital music market, may soon see some competition.