Amazon News & Articles

The Web offers a virtual ton of solutions built on top of Amazon's (news, site) infamous cloud, so now the company is attempting to make some sense of all the chaos. Their new Solution Providers Program lends accepted applicants support from Amazon Web Services business development, marketing, and technical resource teams.

Additionally, perusable by all is their new Web Services Directory. The list is a directory of all the companies that have developed software and services based on Amazon's offerings, and is handy dandy for individuals looking for a comprehensive catalog of their options.

The directory lists companies all the way from Acquia to Zmanda (there are more than 60 in total), and users can search the archive based on services and geographic locations.

Though it's too early to tell whether or not Amazon has bigger plans for the directory, it's doesn't hurt to mention that this time last year the company received a patent for "Providing a marketplace for Web services." Could this be the first step to a third party cloud services shop? Let's wait and see.

Microsoft's ASP.NET team has launched a free AJAX content delivery network (CDN) that will provide improved performance for your AJAX-enabled web applications.

The CDN is a network of edge cache servers around the world that stores Microsoft's AJAX libraries so your application can download necessary files faster, thus increasing web application performance.

This service is similar to Amazon's CloudFront CDN. The Amazon CDN is primarily targeted at small to medium sized businesses and developers who can't afford, and don't necessarily need, the more well-known, expensive CDNs like Akamai and Limelight. It supports the caching of images, css files, video and other static content.

Unlike Amazon's CloudFront CDN, the AJAX CDN is free for both commercial and non-commercial use and provides caching support for only AJAX libraries such as jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX.

Using the CDN is as simple as adding a couple of script elements to a page in your application that wants to access the AJAX libraries on the CDN. Also available are debug versions of the script. A single script is required to access the JQuery library.

You can get a list of the current scripts available on the CDN on the Microsoft AJAX website. Make sure you read the terms of use statement.

As libraries are updated, they will be added to the CDN.

If you are using ASP.NET 4, you can use the ScriptManager control to access the CDN. It has a new property called EnableCdn. If set to true, it will automatically request Javascript files from the CDN.

Learn more about how to use the ScriptManager control and  ASP.NET AJAX Preview 5 in Scott Gu's post introducing the new AJAX CDN.

Alfresco (news, site) has launched a new developer program designed to support cloud-based development on the Alfresco Enterprise CMS platform.

Called the Cloud Content Application Developer Program, it includes a developer toolkit and an Amazon EC2-ready stack.

Move over Kindle, Sony is throwing its hat into the ePublishing ring. Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, has announced that it will start selling digital books only in the ePub format by the end of the year.

By adopting open standards for ePublishing developed by the International Digital Publishing Form, which are already supported by a growing number of major publishers and a growing number of reading devices, Sony will end its proprietary DRM software (that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied) in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe.

Amazon (news, site) opens up some more services for its AWS users, allowing fast movement of data between locations.

Now out of limited beta, a new service called AWS Import/Export, provides the ability to move your content into and out of the cloud much easier and quicker.

A few years ago, after Amazon threw developer-friendly Amazon Payments into the mix and Google made things more interesting with Google Checkout, the Web payments throne was seized from PayPal and it was every payment service for themselves.

Today it’s still that way, but it seems PayPal has finally upped the ante. The service is opening up its platform to third-party developers this fall, meaning global payment options (different countries, different currencies, different devices) can be plugged into applications from the start.

That Psigen Software (news, site), a fourteen year old company that has focused on “perfect, simple imaging”, and Atalasoft (news, site), a provider of scanning and imaging technologies have gotten together is no real surprise given Pisgens’s recent form.

Psigen is mostly known for its capture solution for SharePoint -- PSI:Capture -- and has been busy using it to fill one of the holes in the SharePoint platform, notably its ability, or lack thereof, to provide a decent document image capture function.

Atalasoft’s crown jewel is the sophisticated, but user-friendly, image viewer VizitSP that adds viewing, cleanup, classification and annotation abilities to even the poorest system.

As we said earlier today, it’s a non-stop flow of news from Autonomy (news, site) so what’s one more?

This post’s news hails from the Meaning Based Marketing side of things. Introduced earlier this week, the new module is called Autonomy Interwoven Multichanel Optimization, and reportedly combines the capabilities of Web content management, contact center, and advanced analytics.

According to the company release, the new module provides organizations with three primary capabilities: active “listening” across all customer interactions, testing across all formats of customer interactions and delivery of a targeted customer experience based on understanding. Autonomy claims this translates to organizations being able to respond to all forms of customer interactions across multiple channels including social media, the Web, contact center, email and in-store.

The module comes after a report by Forrester Research, which found U.S. online consumers who move from channel to channel are largely dissatisfied with their experiences.

“Regardless of which pairs they start with, customer experience professionals need to design experiences that provide users with the three C's: choice, consistency, and continuity,” Adele Sage, Forrester analyst and author of the report wrote.

Will Autonomy’s new module provide the missing link? Follow our coverage closely here and tell us what you think.

It's a non-stop flow of news from Autonomy (news, site) these days. Most recently, the company announced the integration of its document management product, iManage WorkSite, with Autonomy's workflow.

It doesn't come as a surprise that the new module -- iManage Workflow Manager -- is built on Autonomy's meaning-based technology.

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.

Earlier this year in an interview, George Grippo, VP Media Asset Management at North Plains, indicated that many Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors are struggling to cope with the special requirements of video asset management.

While he didn’t explicitly say in the interview that North Plains (news, site), a rich media and DAM solution vendor, was working on a solution to do just this, this week’s release of their latest version of Telescope Video Manager shows that they were.

Available as an on-site or SaaS solution, the Telescope Video Manager provides a relatively inexpensive solution that even novices can use in the creation, editing and distribution of short and long form video across multiple platforms like YouTube and other social networks.

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.