Google acquires an infrastructure startup Talaria. Will it help Google crush AWS?
Google has acquired stealthy startup Talaria, in what looks like a deal that will help the search giant compete for cloud business with Amazon. Read more »
Report: IBM and EMC eye SoftLayer
photo: Flickr / mrs. tom
Softlayer may be in the cross hairs of not one but two legacy IT giants, according to a Reuters report. Even the idea that EMC or IBM would consider a buyout is interesting. Read more »
Amazon slashes price of 4G Kindle Fire HD by $100, expands tablet to Europe & Japan
Amazon announced Wednesday that it’s dropping the price of the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD in the United States, and is also rolling out the tablet in Europe and Japan. Read more »
VMware’s hybrid vCloud takes on Amazon. Kinda.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger sketches plans to take on Amazon Web Services in public cloud. Hint: The strategy keys on existing vCloud private cloud customers and the channel supporting them. Read more »
One secret about Ray Ozzie’s secretive startup is out: It will tap Amazon’s cloud
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Talko, a super-stealthy startup co-founded by Microsoft’s former chief software architect and strategist, will make use of Amazon Web Services. Read more »
Authors and publishers objects to Amazon’s “.book” and “.read” names; future process unclear
photo: Amazon
A flood of new website addresses with endings like “.book” and “.movie” are set to arrive in coming months. Companies like Amazon and Google are set to control the names but the terms under which they will do so are still undefined. Read more at paidContent »
Who’s the biggest cloud of all? The numbers are in
Synergy Research ranked the top Iaas, PaaS and CDN providers by revenue for the fourth quarter. Some of the findings might surprise you. Read more »
Like Amazon, Apple wants to create a marketplace for used digital goods
In a patent application filed Thursday, Apple outlined the possible creation of a marketplace for used digital goods. Amazon recently won a patent to create such a marketplace. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon slices prices on DynamoDB database service
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Not a huge surprise: Amazon Web Services cut prices on its DynamoDB NoSQL database service just over a year after its launch. Read more »
Steve Jobs biographer dropped from Apple ebook case, James Murdoch named in email
The case accusing Apple of fixing ebook prices is heating up. New court documents show that Steve Jobs’ biographer have been dropped from the case but that Jobs himself is still at the center of it. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon execs set to testify in price-fixing case against Apple
photo: Getty Images / Spencer Platt
Amazon won a court ruling last week that restrict Apple’s access to its executives and documents. Filings from the case also show that senior Amazon executives are poised to testify for the government in its price-fixing case against Apple. Read more at paidContent »
Look out below! Amazon offers free trial of Trusted Advisor monitoring tool
photo: Barb Darrow
A month-long free trial of the Amazon Web Services’ monitoring and alerting tool has to spook a raft of smaller companies offering similar services. Read more »
UpCloud bursts out of Finland for European launch, with U.S. in sights for this year
The infrastructure-as-a-service company offers flexible instances, high performance across all service levels, and enterprise-grade redundancy. Right now it’s also undercutting key European rivals, but its international expansion plans will need further funding. Read more »
VMware: Stick with us because Amazon will kill us all
VMware, the king of in-house server virtualization, wants partners to help it defeat Amazon for corporate cloud workloads. One problem: VMware has its own issues with its partners. Read more »
To battle Kindle, German booksellers partner with Deutsche Telekom on new e-reader
Leading German bookstore chains have partnered with German telecommunications company Telekom to launch a front-lit e-reader, the “Tolino Shine,” for €99. Read more »
Can a mobile game help find the cure for cancer? Amazon, Google and Facebook hope so
The U.S. tech firms are teaming up with Cancer Research UK in a bid to give citizen scientists a gene-analyzing game that they can play on their mobile phones for a few minutes at a time. Read more »
Updated: Amazon tells iOS users not to download latest Kindle app update
photo: huskyte77
Users who downloaded the Tuesday update say their books were erased from their devices and all their saved settings and bookmarks were reset. Amazon said Wednesday it was a known bug. Read more »
Amazon scales up its Cloud Player music app for the iPad and iPad mini
Six months after debuting on the iPhone and iPod touch, Amazon’s streaming music and storage service has been modified for Apple’s tablets. Read more »
Authors face change as Amazon tightens affiliate policy on free Kindle books
photo: Flickr / Alan O'Rourke
Amazon is cracking down on a policy that allows blogs and websites to earn money when users download free ebooks through their affiliate links. That means big changes in the ways that some self-published ebooks are promoted online. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon Prime Instant Video gets exclusive on FX’s Justified
photo: FX Networks
Amazon is adding FX’s Justified to Prime Instant Video. It’s the first time Justified has been available on a streaming site, and it won’t be on Netflix or Hulu Plus. Read more at paidContent »
Fear of lock-in dampens cloud adoption
photo: Flickr/ Moyan_Brenn
Data portability — the ability to move your information between clouds (or in and out of clouds) with relative ease — is a key concern of companies considering a cloud move. Read more »
Google’s plan to eat Amazon’s lunch and dominate retailing
Google’s acquisition of Channel Intelligence could give it a big leg up in ecommerce. But Jason Lehmbeck, DataPop, says the search giant has its sights on the offline retailing world, too, Read more »
Microsoft Azure storage ends the week with a bang — and not in a good way
photo: Flickr / getinet
Microsoft Azure, which started the week with kudos as the best cloud storage service, is down and out on Friday. Read more »
Rackspace: Hey Amazon, we can cut prices too
photo: Flickr/401(K) 2012
Rackspace, perhaps deviating from its “fanatical support mantra” is cutting prices on its CDN services and rolling out a new tiered price structure for other services Read more »
Google cloud grows up with more support options
Business customers who want more support than Google Groups or Stack Overflow for Google Cloud workloads can now choose from four tiers of Google-branded support. Read more »
Video recommendation engine Fanhattan expands from iOS to the web
Fanhattan, which is like a TV Guide for iPad, has launched out a beta web version with new discovery and recommendation features. On the web, it offers more content recommendations from more providers — 29 on the web, compared to 16 on iOS. Read more »
Amazon gets (more) serious about the enterprise. No kidding
photo: Shutterstock/ tommistock
The fact that Amazon Web Services is targeting enterprise accounts is nothing new. The company’s just getting more blatant about it. Read more »
Indie bookstores sue Amazon, big-6 publishers for using DRM to create monopoly on ebooks
photo: Shutterstock / zimmytws
Three independent bookstores have filed a class action suit against Amazon the big-six publishers, alleging that the proprietary DRM Amazon uses on ebooks creates a monopoly. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon’s ‘price parity’ clause attracts attention of German antitrust regulator
Amazon forbids third-party merchants that use its marketplace from offering the same goods cheaper elsewhere, and the German Federal Cartel Office is gearing up to do something about it. Read more »
OnApp’s federated cloud storage platform hits production
As a major step in its quest to take on Amazon in a federated fashion, the OnApp Cloud platform now includes fully-fledged distributed storage, VMware support and a more useful federated CDN. Read more »
Who’s the best cloud storage provider? Microsoft, says Nasuni; but it still likes Amazon
photo: Flickr / Carlos Gutiérrez G.
Evaluation of five cloud storage providers showed improvement across the board, but Microsoft leapfrogged the rest — including Amazon S3 — in some criteria, says Nasuni’s Connor Fee. Read more »
Amazon adds OpsWorks application life cycle management to AWS cloud
photo: Barb Darrow
Even folks who love using Amazon Web Services admit that it’s difficult to configure and manage them. That application management, some of which was handled by Chef and Puppet till now, is the problem OpsWorks takes on. Read more »
Four companies that are changing digital reading in Africa
photo: Flickr / worldreader
The digital reading revolution is not going to look the same in developing countries as it has in the developing world, but several companies are working on ways to bring digital reading to the African continent. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon sacks German security firm following ‘neo-Nazi’ allegations
Days after a documentary alleged the harassment and intimidation of foreign temporary workers at Amazon’s German distribution centers, the U.S. firm has cut ties with security company HESS. Read more »
This week in cloud: Amazon upsets Apple; NTT backs Cloud Foundry; cloud taxes in dispute
photo: Shutterstock / Gena96
Amazon is numero uno in consumer appeal, beating out even Apple and Google, according to Harris Interactive. Also, Cloud Foundry gets big backer in NTT and states reconsider sales taxes on cloud services. Read more »
Watch out HP, IBM, Teradata, Oracle: Amazon Redshift is here
photo: Barb Darrow
Can Amazon take on the giants of data warehousing and win? Now we’ll be able to find out as its Paraccel-based Redshift service comes online. Read more »
The Brainpickings brouhaha and the problem with affiliate links
Blogger Maria Popova has come under fire from a number of critics for her use of undisclosed affiliate links on her blog Brainpickings, which highlights how heated the debate over alternative forms of advertising has become. Read more at paidContent »
Is Amazon yesterday’s cloud?
photo: Barb Darrow
ProfitBricks, which goes head-to-head with Amazon for the IT budgets of startups with a new promotion, says the time is ripe to disrupt the disrupter. Read more »
Amazon makes it cheaper to spread your database around
Amazon this week cut the prices on multi-availability zone deployments of its Relational Database Service. Read more »
For Europe’s spooks, the cloud is a ‘double-edged sword’
The EU security agency ENISA has released a report on the cloud’s increasingly critical nature. Yes, it highlights the risks associated with the shift to the cloud, but also some notable security benefits. Read more »
