Don’t like the cost of your cloud deployment? Wait a second, it’ll change. And Rightscale says it can help you make sense out of all those changes and cut your costs. Read more »
Are you going to the sixth Structure conference on June 19 and 20? If your business depends in any way on the cloud and enterprise IT, you will want to be there. Read more »
CloudHSM could make regulation-constrained companies and agencies more comfortable entrusting workloads to the Amazon Web Services public cloud. Read more »
Wal-Mart will start a locker program to enable customers to pick up items they purchase off site. Other retailers have looked at the model, but Wal-Mart has 4,000 pickup spots in the United States. Read more »
A new mobile engineering effort out of Palo Alto, Calif. appears to be all about client-side development, but it’s likely that AWS will get into the Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) market too. Read more »
Financial institutions have a lot of data — as in multiple petabytes– so storing that data for use in new products and for regulatory compliance will move to the public cloud. Read more »
According to the British advertising regulator, Amazon listings are ads. That’s why a listing for a rude greeting card has just resulted in a slap-down for the online retail giant. Read more »
Amazon launched a “Send to Kindle” button that publishers can add to their websites. The Washington Post and Time are among the first to sign up. “Send to Kindle” is Amazon’s answer to read-it-later services like Pocket and Instapaper. Read more at paidContent »
Who better to show the CIA how to build a cloud than Amazon Web Services? No one’s confirming anything but an AWS-CIA contract would make sense for both parties. Read more »
Amazon Publishing is speeding up its royalty payments to authors, the company said in a letter to literary agents Monday. The full letter is printed below. Read more at paidContent »
Mega data centers’ innovations in serviceability, automatically detecting and recovering from failures, procurement practices, and so forth will become standard practice in all modern data centers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It was a busy week in cloud as VMware took the wraps off its public cloud play; Newvem added still another way to watch your Amazon account; and Amazon itself churned out a ton of new AWS features. Read more »
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 »
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 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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Not a huge surprise: Amazon Web Services cut prices on its DynamoDB NoSQL database service just over a year after its launch. Read more »
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 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 »
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 »
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, 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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 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, which started the week with kudos as the best cloud storage service, is down and out on Friday. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
The fact that Amazon Web Services is targeting enterprise accounts is nothing new. The company’s just getting more blatant about it. Read more »
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 »
