Author: Jeff Barr

Important Update: There seems to be some confusion about the creator of Flowser – I’ve seen a couple of blog posts which claimed that Amazon created it. In fact, a creative member of our developer community created it and he deserves all of the credit!   This past weekend I snuck a peak at the […]

Isabel Wang’s cool post reminded me that I need to update the speaking engagements calendar. This is what we have planned so far: November 1st – San Jose, California – Zend/PHP Conference and Expo November 2nd-3rd – Mountain View, California – Startup Camp November 7th – San Francisco, California – Web 2.0 November 7th – […]

Woke up this morning to find an awesome post from Linden Lab, creator and operator of Second Life. In an article titled “Amazon S3 For The Win,” developer Jeff Linden describes how they used Amazon S3 to buffer the crushing blow of downloads that they had previously suffered every two weeks when they released a […]

Ok readers, let’s make this guy a star: Of course, this video was itself the product of a Mechanical Turk HIT that paid $8 to the star. If you would like to star in a video of your own, there are some $10 “Make a 5 Minute Movie” HITs in there right now (that link […]

This has been the pseudocode for my day so far: while (Cool AWS Stuff In Inbox){    Read About It    Visit It    Take A Picture    Blog About It    Delete Email} Today’s newest find is Slideshare.net,  a site for storing and sharing slide shows, powered by Amazon S3. The slides are served […]

One of the interesting and common threads found in the creative applications built with the Amazon Web Services is the fact that they can take data that’s been laying out there in plain sight for a number of years and turn it on its side (so to speak) to provide a whole new look at […]

iSearchBetter simplifies the process of finding new products that are eligible for Amazon Prime shipping. As the site says: “Try it out: I think you’ll agree that I search Amazon better than they do.” — Jeff; Update: Now with links! Thanks Jeremy.

Astute readers of this blog will notice that I have added Hardware as a new category! The zBox is a new storage device from Zettabyte Storage. A zettabyte is either 1021 or 270 bytes of storage, not that the exact amount really matters at that point. The zBox is offered as part of a complete […]

Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jinesh Varia just posted a really nice article on codeproject.com . The article documents Jin’s implementation of an idea that he and I discussed shortly after he joined my team earlier this year. Building upon the concept pioneered by the seemingly defunct Usenix Faces project the application in this article shows […]

A recent HIT posted on the Amazon Mechanical Turk asked workers to draw a clown… Taken at face value (so to speak) as a collaborative art project this is very similar to The Sheep Market, and it produced results that were colorful and entertaining. However, behind all of the pretty faces there’s something even more […]