Content Management Matters ™

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?

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 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.

Alexa has been around since the dawn of Web time, well pretty much. This organization has seen it all.

Alexa was caught in the maelstrom of the greatest boom and bust since the Depression… and survived. The group enjoyed exceptional growth in a totally new business and technological environment, followed by a long and languid fall from eminence. It innovated like crazy, and its innovations reshaped the landscape of the Web. And it was subject to one of the Web’s first huge, headline-grabbing takeovers.

Latterly, Alexa has faced stinging criticism over its traffic measurement model, and has responded by going back to the drawing-board with a new model and a fresh attempt to resurrect itself as a relevant Web player.

The Alexa story is part cautionary tale, part glorious legend. This is that story in 26 letters.

You've got an idea for the next great Facebook application, assuming Scrabulous and Vampires are not great enough, and you want the application to be available to all 55 million active (and growing) Facebook members.

What you don't have is a bucket full of money (or venture funding) to pay for a server farm?

What do you do, hot shot? What do you do?

You bet it can. Yesterday Nirvanix released its media app-rich Storage Delivery Service to the general public. The offering is gunning for a market dominated by Amazon's Dynamo-powered S3, which admittedly lacks a few stock Nirvanix charms.

Amazon has just published a white paper about its latest project Dynamo, which focuses on distributed storage.

Dynamo isn't an operating system; rather, it works on a series of hundreds of commodity PCs running Linux, all hooked up to an internal network. And while the company has no plans to sell the service to the public, Dynamo plays an integral role in a number of Amazon's existing offerings, including its shopping cart, product catalog and S3 -- Amazon's online web app storage solution.

"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.