Newsletters

Newsletter #23

Greetings AWS Developers,

The O’Reilly ETech and SD West conferences are coming up quickly this month – be sure to take advantage of the registration discounts available to you (details below), and join us to participate in conversations with Amazon leadership and evangelists at these events. Also in this newsletter: if you’re looking for an easy way to get started with some of our services, or simply explore something new, check out the highlighted resources below, and get a jump start on Amazon S3, EC2, ECS, and Mechanical Turk. Enjoy!

Kathrin Jackson
Amazon Web Services

Developer Tutorials: Jump-Start your Applications Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Search for Jim Gray Solutions Catalog Highlights – What Your Peers Are Building Upcoming Events

We’ve got lots of great resources available for using our services with a variety of languages and technologies. Take a peek and start coding! Don’t forget to review these resources after you’ve used them – we want to hear what you liked and didn’t.

Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Search for Jim Gray

We’ve seen Amazon Mechanical Turk be creatively applied to a number of difficult challenges. We thought we’d share with you how Mechanical Turk aided in a distributed search effort to find Jim Gray, renowned computer scientist, after he disappeared during a sailing trip outside the San Francisco Bay. In this search effort, satellite imagery provided by Digital Globe and high altitude imagery from NASA’s ER-2 spy plane were split into smaller, easy-to-scan tiles. These tiles were then uploaded to the Amazon S3 storage service, and used to create HITs. Workers were asked to review the images for signs of the missing vessel and tag any images needing further analysis. The tagged images were then fed back into Mechanical Turk for a second round of review by qualified experts. Mechanical Turk workers looked at more than 560,000 images, covering over 3,500 square miles of ocean. The final set of tagged images, together with ocean drift model data, was used for a focused search via private planes and boats as the coast guard had long since called off the official search. Regrettably, despite the extensive efforts of many dedicated people, Jim has not been found.

Solutions Catalog Highlights – What Your Peers Are Building

A few new applications that aim to make file synchronization, sharing, and collaboration easy. Read on…

TeamWork Live
TeamWork Live, built using Amazon S3, is an easy and effective tool for project collaboration. You can use TeamWork Live to manage projects, centralize team communication, share documents and files, collaborate with clients and remote teams, build an intranet or knowledge base, and more. The service is hosted so there is no software to install or maintain. All you need to get started is a web browser and an internet connection.

Super Flexible File Synchronizer
This technically mature software is used to back up data and to synchronize PCs, servers, and notebooks. Amazon S3 can be used as one side of the synchronization in order to store an unlimited number of files, and also multiple versions of each file.

Senduit
The easiest way to share files that are too big for email. Upload any file up to 100MB and receive a private link to share it. Every file is set to expire between 30-minutes and 1-week, at which point it becomes inaccessible. Built using Amazon S3.

Not listed in the Solutions Catalog yet? Start with our community co-marketing.

Check out the AWS blog for more news about AWS developers and their applications.

Upcoming Events

Utah Valley Ruby Brigade – Provo, Utah
March 13, 2007
Jeff Barr

SDWest – Santa Clara, CA
March 19-23, 2007

Keynote Address:
Felipe Cabrera, VP of Software Development, AWS
Jeff Barr, AWS Evangelist

Get a FREE Expo Pass or $300 off of the VIP Pass by using code 7WEXH81 when registering.

Under The Radar – Why Office 2.0 Matters – Mountain View, CA
March 23, 2007
Jeff Barr

VSLive! – San Francisco, CA
March 25-29, 2007
Mike Culver

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2007 – San Diego, CA
March 26-29, 2007

Keynote Address:
Werner Vogels, VP and CTO, Amazon.com

Get a 20% discount by using discount code et07ps20 when registering.

Toronto Code Camp – Toronto, ON
March 31, 2007
Mike Culver

Web 2.0 Expo – San Francisco, CA
April 15-18, 2007
Keynote Address: Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com