How and why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business?

How and why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business?

An answer from Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, on the story that Amazon Web Services was created to use Amazon.com’s spare capacity during quiet periods.

The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself, with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the Amazon.com retail operation.

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Link: Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action

Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action

I find the conflation of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as one entity to be one of the more frustrating features of the WikiLeaks furore, and was therefore pleased to read Clay Shirky’s analysis of what groups like WikiLeaks mean for the future of, well, the world and democracies—rather than whether Julian’s rape charges are really a US conspiracy to “get at” WikiLeaks.

Like many recent areas directly affected by the changing ways technology provides to mediate access to content—in this case both access to data to leak and the ability to widely and instantly publish leaked data—the reaction generally seems to miss out on the fact that we’re dealing with fundamentally game-changing processes at work.

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Android Isn’t About Building a Mobile Platform

Android Isn’t About Building a Mobile Platform

A very interesting piece of analysis by Kyle Baxter, and a timely reminder that Google’s motives need not be pure. There’s quite a lot that is not evil, but which is well inside the grey area.

This helps explain some puzzling moves by Google. For example, Android’s market may not be terrible in comparison to Apple’s App Store for paid applications just because Google hasn’t yet finished it; rather, discouraging paid applications on the Android platform is in Google’s interest. If users won’t pay for applications, what will developers use to make money from their applications? Advertising. And Google conveniently owns one of the largest mobile advertising providers, Admob.

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Bluster around new Logos

The fanfare and bluster around company rebrandings really gets my heckles up sometimes. Take the new Starbucks logo. It’s pretty nice, but not exactly up to this love-in:

The new logo expresses what Starbucks represents to our partners and customers.

While I appreciate the power of branding, I don’t think a green siren in a crown expresses what Starbucks itself represents, instead, inversely, the logo recognisably represents Starbucks—-the Starbucks coffee shops are what “Starbucks” represents to their partners and customers, surely? Reducing this to a logo short sells their influence in making Starbucks as popular as it is.

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The rights and wrongs of hacktivism

The rights and wrongs of hacktivism

The Economist discusses the right of protection of protest in a free society, and whether Distributed Denial of Service attacks deserve to be a form of protected protest.

The furtive, nameless nature of DDOS attacks disqualifies them from protection; their anonymous perpetrators look like cowardly hooligans, not heroes. This applies to those attacking WikiLeaks too—a point American politicians calling for reprisals against Julian Assange’s outfit should note. Posses and vigilantes, online and off, mete out rough justice, at best. That is no substitute for the real thing.

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