Newsletters
August 2007
Newsletter #28
Greetings AWS Developers,
The big news since the last newsletter: we have started a limited beta program for Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), our latest web service. We’re excited to see developers already taking advantage of this payments offering and encourage you to learn more about the service below. Also, with the growth of existing services and the launch of new ones such as Amazon FPS, we’re looking for enthusiastic members of the AWS community who can help support interest and activity in their local areas. If this sounds like you, please be sure to read about our search for AWS User Group founders.
Kathrin Jackson
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS): Limited Beta Program
Last week, Amazon Web Services began a limited beta program for Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS). Amazon FPS is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.
Use of the Amazon FPS developer sandbox is free and unlimited, and we encourage you to use the sandbox to begin building and testing your payment applications. As Amazon FPS is in a limited beta at this stage, we are accepting just a small number of payment applications to run in our production environment. To learn more and get started with the sandbox, please take a look at the resources below to start exploring Amazon FPS.
Learn more about this service.
Ready to get started? The Amazon FPS Sandbox is the best place to begin using Amazon FPS.
Amazon ECS Powers Facebook.com Applications
Calling all Amazon ECS developers! In case you haven’t heard, Facebook recently opened up its platform to encourage developers to create applications for its rapidly growing user base. Facebook users choose the most compelling applications to enhance their profile pages with content from Amazon and many other sources.
If you are an Amazon ECS developer, the more Facebook users that choose your application and use it in a way that sends traffic to Amazon, the more money you can earn at rates up to 10% by participating in the Amazon Associates Program. Below are some examples of compelling applications built for Facebook by developers using Amazon Associates and ECS (note that you’ll need to be logged into Facebook to view these):
iRead: Uses the ECS Search and List APIs to allow users to display their Amazon.com wishlist on their Facebook profile pages
Amazing Giftbox: Uses the ECS Search API to allow Facebook users to send any product on Amazon.com as a virtual gift to their friends
Amazing Wishlist: Uses the ECS Wishlist API to allow users to display Amazon.com wishlists on their Facebook profiles
Learn more about the Facebook.com Developer platform.
Amazon Web Services User Groups: Looking for Leaders
Are you a passionate user of Amazon Web Services? Would you like to share your expertise and enthusiasm with others by starting an Amazon Web Services User Group in your area? With the rapid growth of Amazon Web Services among individual developers, start-ups, and companies across the U.S. and abroad, our community has been asking for AWS User Groups.
If you are interested in starting a group in your area, please contact us and let us know where you’d like to found a group – we’ll help you get going!
Developer Resources: Using Hadoop with AWS, New Amazon ECS Libraries, and More…
Are you new to Amazon Web Services? These four tutorials, written by members of the developer community, introduce Amazon Web Services from the eyes of a developer, walk through a simple example, and link to other helpful resources to get you started.
Running Hadoop MapReduce on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3
AWS developer and Apache Hadoop committer Tom White illustrates how to use Hadoop and AWS together, using a large collection of web access logs as an example.
There are now a set of new libraries for Amazon ECS (Java, C#, VB.Net) with full API support and accompanying reference documentation. Use them to help you build your application, and let us know how it goes!
Alexa Web Information Plug-in for Microsoft Excel 2007
A sample application that makes it easy to get Alexa Web Information Service data into Microsoft Excel 2007.
Community-driven Ruby Library for Amazon Mechanical Turk
There’s a great new community-driven Ruby library for working with Amazon Mechanical Turk on RubyForge. The developer community is integral in making Mechanical Turk easier to use. We encourage all of you to participate and contribute to help make these libraries great for Ruby developers!
Solutions Catalog Highlights: What Your Peers Are Building
File123.com
File123 helps you GO PAPERLESS! File123 is the first secure online storage vault that allows businesses and households to store, search and retrieve paper and digital files. Users can fax, scan, email or upload paper and digital documents. People can use File123 for data backup, disaster preparedness or collaboration. All customers receive 1 gigabyte of storage space for free and upgrade plans start at $4.95/month for 10 GB of storage. Built using Amazon S3.
NaviSite provides Monitoring and Alerting Services for AWS applications running on the Amazon S3 and EC2 platform. NaviSite’s service provides web developers with key insights into the performance and availability of their application. Web developers receive alerts when their applications are degraded or unavailable and have access to NaviSite’s IT Management Portal to view near real-time statistics on system performance.
Event Photo Exchange Depot
In today’s digital world, cameras are everywhere. Every event you attend (whether public or private) likely has a number (perhaps even thousands) of photographers. The Event Photo Exchange Depot provides an easy mechanism for all of those photographers and all other attendees and participants to find, view, share, and upload images from this common event experience. Each photo-depot remains online for a limited time to allow all interested parties to access and download whatever photos they wish keep. 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
Don’t forget to let the AWS evangelists know where you’d like them to visit!
LinuxWorld – San Francisco, CA
August 6-9, 2007
Keynote Presentation – Werner Vogels, VP & CTO, Amazon.com
“Virtualizing the Datacenter: The Road to Infinite Capacity”
While this event has already begun, be sure to check out the video of Werner’s keynote which will be made available on the LinuxWorld web site linked above.
North Bay Linux Users Group – Sebastopol, CA
August 14, 2007
Mike Culver
Twin Cities Linux User Group – Minneapolis, MN
September 5, 2007
Mike Culver
September 2007 Europe Trip – Austria, Germany, England
Beginning in early September, Jeff Barr will be visiting a variety of European events and developers. To see where he’ll be turning up (or to request a visit), check out his wetpaint page.
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