Pinterest is launching three distinct types of pins, with one type each for food, retail products, and movies. The new format will only work with items pinned from the launch partner sites, but the number of partners is wide-reaching, and will grow. If you click on a food pin, it will now include the ingredient list and relevant information below the photo, auto-generated from the original site. Product photos will show where you can find the item for sale, and the movie pins will show information about the movie such as its rating, cast and release date.

The list of brands participating in the launch demonstrates the strong interest from U.S. retailers in getting on board with Pinterest. Some of the launch partners include: eBay, Etsy, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Sony, Target, Urban Outfitters, Wal-Mart, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Martha Stewart Living, Whole Foods, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Companies who want to be included in the program can apply on Pinterest’s developer page.

A Pinterest representative sought to emphasize that the new pins are not a form of advertising, but are instead supposed to make pins more “actionable,” a term the company has been using for a while now, including in our interview with CEO Ben Silbermann just last week.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he told us at the time. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

One major complaint with Pinterest, which has given an advantage to sites like Wanelo or Nasty Gal, is that users frequently share or re-pin the same photo thousands of times, but when you actually click the photo to see where it came from the link is broken.

If more and more companies and popular blogs integrate their photos of inventory with Pinterest under the new pin structure, it could make items more trackable on the site — which would be handy for consumers and crucial if Pinterest wants to eventually profit from the traffic it generates.

And it’s not an insignificant amount of web traffic. While Pinterest doesn’t officially release any stats, a recent ComScore report put the number of users at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report on social media put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is slightly less than the 16 percent on Twitter, and more than the 13 percent on Instagram — and far more than the 6 percent on Yahoo’s apparent new friend Tumblr.

A company spokesperson said Pinterest is currently not profiting from the new integration with brands. But the strong interest on the part of the companies and the launch of a tech platform to support them paves the way for making money in the future. After all, Pinterest just raised $200 million in new funding — it has to be looking to make money at some point.

It’s an inevitable move for Pinterest to accelerate its growth, as we noted in a story on the small team’s unique symbiosis between design and engineering. But the site needs to make sure it crafts a business model that fits with its content, much as Twitter has built up promoted tweets.

Pinterest is still in the early days of that growth, but all sorts of e-commerce companies, from the startup Wanelo to behemoth Amazon, will be watching closely as this unfolds.

Updated at 9:14 PM to note that the new recipe pins will show the full ingredient list, not the full recipe.

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AWS has a managed NoSQL database service called DynamoDB that’s replicated across three availability zones to ensure its stays up. Google’s Cloud Datastore sounds eerily similar, according to the product’s website (although Google calls its product “NoSQL-like). It’s fully managed, built for speed and scale and is replicated across data centers. For some queries, Google even promises that Cloud Datastore will support ACID transactions.

Although the services advertise similar features in terms of availability and scalability, they’re quite different technically. Cloud Datastore is based on Google’s BigTable database (and a library called Megastore on top of it) while DynamoDB is based on Amazon’s Dynamo database. You can get details on Datastore  and how it works here. Pricing information is available here.

If its goal is to compete with AWS, though, Google’s cloud platform still has a long way to go. Yes, it has most of the key services in place and even some seeming advantages in certain areas, but it’s lacking the incredible breadth of services AWS offers — everything from virtual server instances to a devops service to a hosted data warehouse. It’s also lacking a seven-year reputation for being an all-around reliable platform and an ever-growing list of large-enterprise users.

Of course, there’s also an argument to be made that Google doesn’t really have to compete with AWS at all when it comes to cloud computing. AWS made a name for itself by  taking all the new workloads from startups and corporate developers who wanted to build new types of applications and didn’t want to deal with the IT department; Google has the same opportunity ahead of it. New programming languages like Go and the unique nature of the rest of Google’s services, Cloud Datastore included, could make it the go-to place for a class of developers that likes to push the envelope in terms of application design.

Oh, and Google has a little ace up its sleeve called Android. If someone is so inclined to develop mobile applications for the most-popular mobile operating system on the planet, there are worse places to host them.

This post was updated at 5:35 p.m. to clarify that DynamoDB and Cloud Datastore are based on different underlying technologies.

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For example, the company is looking to hire a  software development manager for its “Kumo team” who will manage:

” .. software development engineers who are developing algorithms and building systems to automatically solve a variety of Information Retrieval and Data Mining problems related to the AWS Trusted Advisor — one of the company’s biggest assets.”

The Kumo team is also looking for a software development engineer and a senior product manager.

For enterprise support, more is more

That AWS should seek to add richer functionality to Trusted Advisor should come as zero surprise. The boilerplate describing the service says AWS will continually add to the number of checks it performs.

Reached for comment, a spokeswoman said AWS is investing heavily in support “not just with Trusted Advisor but also with the Service Health Dashboard, Forums, Social Media Monitoring, Service Health Checks Support APIs” and other tools that allow its engineers and associates to deliver a good user experience.

As for “Kumo,” it means cloud in Japanese and is the name of the AWS Support software development team.

But what about third-party partners?

It’s clear that as AWS wants to make itself as enterprise-friendly as possible, providing services like these is a no brainer. But, for a half dozen or so small companies that were founded to provide cloud implementation guidance, particularly on AWS, this has to be a concern. Companies including Cloudyn, Cloudability, CloudVertical, and Newvem all harvest — with customer permission — usage data from Amazon’s APIs and use that to make their recommendations. Some of them monitor multiple clouds. Others are for AWS only, a strategy they want to reconsider going forward.

Earlier this month, AWS made a support API available that, among other things, gives customers API access to their Trusted Advisor recommendations. That was seen as a huge deal by some in the AWS partner community.

Some of these partners flipped out when Amazon made Trusted Advisor available for free for a short period. They really don’t like that it’s now making all that key data programmatically available.

Said the CEO of one of these companies: “This is another step, in a roundabout way, of AWS giving their customers a Cloud Economics toolset. I’m not sure they haven’t just head-on launched a Cloud Economics tool — users need quite a lot of expertise to hack together the various data sets you can get exported to S3 – and now this. I suppose that’s the short-term opportunity for companies like ourselves.”

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The Digital Reader, which has been following this story for several months, reported Monday that an unnamed Delaware-based LLC was the new owner of Liquavista. Amazon confirmed the purchase in a statement:

“We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.”

The purchase price was undisclosed, though it may be made public in Amazon SEC filings’s next quarter.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets obviously already have color screens, but Liquavista’s technology offers the potential for color screens that wouldn’t deplete battery life to be added to e-ink readers. This would be particularly useful for children’s books and graphic novels.

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“We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities,” Mike George, Amazon’s VP of apps and games, said in a statement. “Today is Day One for Coins.”

Users can buy 100 coins for $1, with discounts up to 10 percent for larger purchases. Developers get their standard 70 percent revenue share for purchases made with Amazon Coins.

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The podcast is sponsored by Amazon Publishing’s romance imprint, Montlake Romance. The first two featured titles – Crazy Little Thing by Tracy Brogan and The Second Chance Café by Alison Kent — were both published by Montlake, although USA Today, which first reported the news about the podcast, says that “the books discussed will span a variety of publishers and imprints, including indie-pubbed books.” (Many of those indie-pubbed books will likely be published through Amazon’s own KDP.)

The podcast host is Laura Roppé, a singer-songwriter and the author of Rocking the Pink: Finding Myself on the Other Side of Cancer, published by Seal Press in 2012.

There are a number of podcasts out there focused on romance books, including those from Smart Bitches Trashy Books and Romance Radio Network. One possible advantage of “Kindle Love Stories” is that, if it focuses primarily on titles published by Amazon, all of those titles should be available free to Kindle owners through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

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Apple’s issues with mobile photos and cloud storage were brought to light this week with a great post from an app developer, Peter Nixey. In a widely circulated personal blog post, he expressed his frustration with Apple’s current approach to managing photos on the desktop and on mobile. He presciently noted there would be a time when competitors — he named Google or Dropbox — would come along with better cloud-storage options for mobile photos.

Well, here comes Amazon with one such solution. Cloud Drive Photos, already available on Android, is a place to store all your photos (“thousands,” according to the company). Images taken with an iPhone or iPod touch get uploaded automatically to Cloud Drive when the app is opened. And you can also see any of your photos stored in the cloud on the device with the app. It’s free, and available on the iOS App Store now.

Just like Google with Maps, Search and Mail and Facebook with social things, Apple’s biggest and most important competitors are repeatedly besting Apple on its own platform when it comes to producing well designed, popular basic apps that are core to the mobile experience.

This Amazon app is different than, say, Yahoo being better at making a weather app than Apple. Or Kindle being a better ereader app than iBooks — sort of embarrassing, but not really areas Apple considers its core mission.

But the secret behind Amazon’s cloud-based photo storage is something at which Amazon is verifiably awesome, and something at which Apple is not: the cloud. Even with its billion-dollar data center and more on the way, Apple repeatedly struggles with keeping its cloud-based services reliable for users. And even when things are added to iCloud, like photos, some users still run into problems, as outlined in the link above, with multiple copies or confusing organization.

The more troubling part of it all is that Apple’s cloud services aren’t just supposed to be something added on to its hardware offerings. Linking users’ data, whether it’s photos, music, videos, documents, email or messages, and making it accessible regardless of device, is part of Apple’s plan for growth.  As CEO Tim Cook has said, it’s at the centerpiece of its strategy for the next decade.

Apple’s going to have to start offering far better core mobile apps that connect with its cloud if it doesn’t want Amazon and others to peel users off to their own services.

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Telcos must invest in their infrastructure, even as demand for their services rises. Yet they cannot ask revenue to continue rising at the pace of consumption, and in some cases, such as text messaging and voice calls their revenue is falling. So far their response has been to decry bandwidth hogs, implement new pricing plans that try to hold the line on the dollars coming in even if users choose to use over-the top-alternatives.

But some are realizing that that’s not enough. They are investing in technologies such as OpenFlow, or at least software defined networking, as they try to get a handle on their costs. And they are demanding their suppliers provide them with specialized software running on commodity hardware, as opposed to the pricey, proprietary boxes of previous generations’ of technology.

Metaswitch’s big switch for telco gear.

For example, Metaswitch, a three-decade-old company based in San Francisco has created Project Clearwater, a software-based IMS core for telephone networks. An IMS (it stands for IP Multimedia Subsystem for those who care about these things) system is the glue that connects the old analog wireline systems to the newer digital systems. The thought behind IMS was that mobile operators would use them as a bridge into the IP world, but in reality they proved complex and expensive and telcos put off making those investments.

As Metaswitch looked at the market two years ago it saw an opportunity. The company, which provides other hardware to wireless carriers, saw the world was changing. So CTO Martin Taylor said the company decided to build an IMS core that ran on commodity hardware. And if that wasn’t revolutionary enough (remember, we’re talking about telcos here) on May 8 Metaswitch will open source the software.

Taylor points out that telcos used to have the largest scale systems, but that is changing. The globe-spanning networks delivering five nines that once inspired such awe, are now common as Google, Microsoft and others build out their own globe-spanning infrastructures. And telco’s know that to keep up they must adopt the same tricks the web scale companies have, like open source software and commodity hardware. Thus Metaswitch will open source its Clearwater software, and follow a Red Hat model of supporting the software and releasing regular updates. Taylor has the right idea, but telcos need to go even further.

But the real solution isn’t open-source software

As forward-thinking as Metaswitch is with its open source business model and trying to deliver a software-based IMS core built for commodity hardware, its customers are making a mistake if they rely on Metaswitch to hold their hand. As the telco network looks more like cloud and webscale infrastructure — in that telco networks they are taking on more load without adding costs — telcos need to think like real cloud vendors and webscale companies, not like enterprise IT customers.

Telcos are providing essential infrastructure in their mobile networks. Many of them also provide cloud computing services. In yesteryear it was enough to just provide the pipes, but if you’re going to provide compute and networking infrastructure today you need to adjust to the new reality for infrastructure providers.

The new infrastructure reality

And that reality is you need to own your systems. Infrastructure is going to be a commodity, even in mobile access (look at Free Mobile’s plans in France or even Republic Wireless here in the U.S. if you want to see the future). And people are going to want more and more of it, so the build out had better be cheap. So if telcos really want to be cloud providers, and the really want to compete in an all IP world, they need to stop demanding hand-holding from their vendors, hire smart people to own their infrastructure development, and get off their butts and start innovating.

For example, Amazon doesn’t hire a company to provide help on its operating systems or databases. When it chooses an open source technology it also chooses and hires smart people to make sure that technology is up and running and maintained. Google, Facebook, Netflix, they all operate the same way in the core areas of their business. Because when you cut out the middle man you cut costs. When you have smart people on staff, you can keep innovating at your pace and in the direction you want to go.

So if you’re going to be an infrastructure provider, that mindset and skill set is par for the course. And telcos do not seem to get this.

They can’t say they want to be like Amazon and play in that world if they want their vendors to do the work. They’ve got to find a way to embrace not just the technologies but the economic realities of competing in the commodity and cutthroat business that is the cloud and IP networks. Otherwise they will begin a long decline.

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There’s a paradox in the cloud vendor community. All the players agree there is tons of demand for cloud and cloud services — at least for their cloud and their cloud services. The future is bright, the upside enormous.  But when pressed, many also say that we’re due for lots of consolidation — that there really isn’t market demand for umpteen different cloud flavors and the vendors that sell them. In short demand is great for my cloud, but not nearly enough for all these other guys’ clouds.

Last week’s news that Xeround is shutting its doors sparked this talk anew. Xeround gave users of its free database service just over a week to vacate the premises and paying customers two weeks. There have been other examples of cloud services shutting down.

One cloud watcher who requested anonymity because he works with many of these services said many companies who “tried to do free have gotten their heads handed to them. And other cloud services companies are consolidating the number of cloud infrastructures they support because “API bloat has gotten horrific.”
So what goes on here? The gist is we are really early in the cloud business and there will be a ton of work. But is there enough work for 90 different OpenStack players plus CloudStack plus Eucalyptus along with Amazon? Or 50 cloud database providers or Platform-as-a-Service providers? Um, not so sure.

In an interview at the OpenStack Summit last month, OpenStack executive director Jonathan Bryce applied his own paradox when asked if he expected there to be more or fewer OpenStack players going forward. “The answer is both. Over time you’ll see a greater variety of vertically oriented flavors of OpenStack — versions built for highly secure, highly regulated workloads but you’ll also see a number of general-purpose versions that will solidify.” Solidify. Hmm.

At the summit, HP cloud master Saar Gillai said he expects consolidation. OpenStack is much more complex than Linux — it includes complicated networking and storage as well as compute aspects. Building and testing all that takes money and if a company cannot make money off its work, it won’t be in the business long.

Given all that would-be cloud deployers really need to assess the risks — and mitigate them going in, as Derrick Harris wrote Friday.

When is a cloud not a cloud?

Amazon, the dominant public cloud company, is sick of the hype around private clouds. All too often these private implementations do not offer the true benefits of a public cloud, at least according to Andrew Jassy, SVP of Amazon Web Services.

At Amazon’s Global Summit Series event in San Francisco last week,  Jassy slammed private cloud purveyors for selling what is not, in actuality, a cloud at all. Citing a survey by Forrester Research, just 24 percent of companies surveyed had self-service provisioning; 14 percent could charge back costs to their departments; and 27 percent had built resource automation, according to Nancy Gohring over at ITWorld. 

Covering the same event, The Wall Street Journal quoted other Forrester numbers however. These hold that nearly one-third (31 percent) of companies in North America and Europe have deployed private clouds with another 17 percent planning go do so by next year. On the other hand, just 10 percent say they have adopted public cloud with another 7 percent saying they plan to do so. No wonder AWS is so grumpy especially given the emphasis it’s put on winning over enterprise workloads that go beyond test-and-dev and that it will face more public cloud competition — from HP, from VMware, from Pivotal, from IBM( s ibm), going forward.

It was interesting that, at the same event, AWS trotted out Nokia to talk about moving its analytics over to AWS’ RedShift, given Nokia’s tight relationship with Microsoft in the mobile phone arena. In mid-April Microsoft made its Azure IaaS, which competes with AWS, broadly available. One might think Microsoft would really, really want companies like Nokia to use Azure.

Oh, and by the way, last week Microsoft said its cloud business reaped $1 billion in sales over the past 12 months, a figure that raised many eyebrows. The cloud number includes Azure but also software deployed at sites run by partners — partners like Rackspace and Amazon. We live in a complicated world.

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According to a statement from the company, the 70-plus engineers that Amazon will hire will work on technologies for supporting various hypervisors, management tools and operating systems. This is effectively a major expansion of the development team Amazon has already had in Germany since buying Berlin-based Peritor last year – a purchase that led to the release of the OpsWorks devops toolkit this February.

The engineers, who will be hired over the next year, will also develop machine learning technologies to be used across Amazon’s business.

“Locating the development of key parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud in Germany speaks to the broad set of talent here and the investment we are making in the country,” the managing co-directors of the new Amazon Development Center Germany, Ralf Herbrich and Chris Schlaeger, said in a statement.

Amazon’s big European data center is located in Dublin, Ireland, although it also has a couple of edge locations in Germany (Frankfurt, to be precise) for content delivery purposes. The company also already has teams of AWS sales and business personnel in Germany.

UPDATE: Someone who would know says:

@superglaze they've already been hard at hiring machine learning folks the last 2 months.—
Mikio L. Braun (@mikiobraun) May 03, 2013

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