Author: Jeff Barr

RightCart allows you to embed an ECS-powered storefront directly into any blog or web page. The site provides cut and paste HTML snippets for a shopping cart and for individual products, making it very easy for you to sell products based on, for example, blog entries. There’s also a full sales tracking system. Behind the […]

Talis is sponsoring a competion to encourage developers to create mashup applications using web services from Talis and from other vendors (hint: ECS would be ideal). Top prize is 1,000. To enter you simply create your application and then blog about it using a specific Technorati tag. There’s also a discussion board, and a separate […]

Rankforest tracks and can graph the sales rank of Amazon products over time, with graphs available over all time, 90 days, 30 days, 7 days, or a single day. Many graphs are available for free; some others require a free account, and a final few require paid membership. There are also hourly and daily RSS […]

It is always interesting to see how a developer’s background, experiences, and the contents of their “mental toolkit” come together in unique approaches to problem solving and creative thinking. Here’s an example of what I am talking about. Alan Taylor of Kokogiak.com has been building applications with AWS since the early days, starting out with […]

The Swampcast has an interview (in podcast form) with Dominic DaSilva the developer of jSh3ll, a popular shell tool for Amazon S3. According to Dominic, “The talk covers the basics of Amazon S3, accessing it via jSh3ll, and a little code walkthrough of jSh3ll.” — Jeff;

Image processing (and its cousin, machine vision) both entail designing algorithms to process pixel-based images and to extract recognizable information from them. Earlier today I saw the following request on the Ask Metafilter site: i need an algorithm to extract statistics about the diameters (in pixels) of some roughly-circular objects from an image file. Having […]

Last week I did an AWS presentation at Westminster University. The audience was very lively and asked a number of great questions. They also wrote some nice blog posts. One of the audience members asked if anyone had integrated Amazon S3 into a Linux live CD distribution. I’d thought about this a couple of times, […]

It’s VHS vs. Beta, all over again! Back when I was young, there were two main consumer video tape formats, VHS and Beta. Both had their advantages and disadvantages, and it took years for the market to decide which one was best. VHS ultimately prevailed, to the extent that many of today’s youngest consumers don’t […]

We are pleased and proud to announce that the Amazon Mechanical Turk was the winner of a 2006 Software Industry Association Codie award in the category of “Best Web Services Solution.” For those of you who are keeping score at home, this is our second Codie in as many years. — Jeff;

People more persistent and clever than I have managed to find the Werner Vogels interview in the current issue of ACM Queue. Werner is Amazon’s CTO and the author of the All Things Distributed blog. Werner goes into considerable detail on the inner workings of the Amazon site, scalability issues, our internal services architecture, and […]