Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

While we’re familiar with Amazon and the Kindle, there’s a lot more to Amazon than meets the eye. I’m going to start writing about some of the interesting services and products that Amazon has, and also include some analysis.

Amazon Web Services are a collection of Web Services offered by Amazon (starting in July 2002 – although various services have been added at various times since then). The services include -

1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is Amazon’s solution for cloud computing – you can create virtual servers and use them to address your server needs. Amazon has a pretty sizable advantage in this hot new field. Google (with Google App Engine), Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are all later entrants to this field. As are various traditional hosting companies (Rackspace with partner Mosso, PathServe with their subsidiary, MediaTemple and many more). This is a post in itself – however, suffice to say that Amazon’s lead here is a pretty significant advantage.
2. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. You can use S3 for web hosting (although not for running web servers – only for the storage of data part), image hosting, and a back-up system.
3. Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The service is currently in limited Beta.
4. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Its a human powered marketplace that you can access like you would an online service, except that its humans that do the work for you.
5. Amazon DevPay is a simple-to-use online billing and account management service that makes it easy for businesses to sell applications that are built in, or run on top of, Amazon Web Services.
6. Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is an online payments service that allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers.
7. Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS) allows merchants to access Amazon.com’s world-class fulfillment capabilities through a simple web services interface.
8. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers.
9. Amazon owns Alexa, and the Alexa Web Search web service offers programmatic access to Alexa’s web search engine.
10. The Alexa Web Information Service makes Alexa’s vast repository of information about the traffic and structure of the web available to developers.
11. The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites.
12. The Alexa Top Sites web service provides access to lists of web sites ordered by Alexa Traffic Rank.
13. The Amazon Associates Web Service (formerly  Amazon E-Commerce Service “ECS”) helps you pull information about Amazon products and use it on your site, in your applications etc. and also earn affiliate income from purchases made.

These services provide a very valuable set of resources for people building websites and applications. The two really important areas I see here are AWS Infrastructure services (including S3 and EC2) that let websites and applications use Amazon’s infrastructure for their products, and the Amazon Associates Web Service that is one of the most powerful affiliate marketing infrastructures on the net. These are both very high growth areas that are at a relatively early stage in their development and Amazon’s insights and expertise in these fields gives them two very big areas for growth.

Filed under: news, thoughts Tagged: | amazon, amazon insights, amazon web services, aws