Shrub / Amazon S3 Proxy. google app engine site that does muxtapes too. though you pay for the S3 bandwidth. via grant.

amazon acquires abebooks

Techcrunch is reporting that Amazon is acquiring AbeBooks. Abe was actually around before the world wide web when it was a tool for used book stores to find used and rare books at stores across the country. It’s current website let’s end users do the exact same search.

What’s very interesting, and not mentioned by techcrunch, is that the company is Canadian and will be keeping their Canadian presence. This is interesting because Amazon doesn’t currently have a Canadian presence because of some legal issues. If they did, then they’d be subject to Canadian content laws regarding the percentage of Canadian book titles they sell on Amazon.ca. I don’t know how they could have structured the deal that the two entities are separate yet not (though I’m not as crafty as corporate lawyers).

Amazon Rents Out Its Checkout Cart. You can use the Amazon order pipeline for a 2% to 5% cut. I wonder if you can use all payment types around the world or just credit?

Features are a one-way street - 37signals. that is, if you have a lot of users. Amazon had to keep some stuff forever for this reason.

Twitter / amazonmp3. they post their daily deals. includes some $2 full albums for great bands. oh wait, they’re not available in canada. luckily i still have my US credit card.

Splunk Your Distributed Logs in EC2 - igvita.com. splunk always struck me as a cool app.

Animoto. add your photos and some music and it makes a pretty cool slide show. UI has some issues and you’re limited to 30 second clips unless you pay for credit. Amazon invested in them today. here’s an example i made.

seattle, toronto, amazon, unspace

Looking at feedburner trends over the last few months it looks like there’s about 30 people who read awardtour five days a week. I highly suspect that I personally know every single one of these people. I also suspect that this won’t be news to any of them as it’s been in the works for a very long time…

I’m leaving Amazon in May and Seattle in June. I’ll be driving my 2000 VW Golf across the USofA and should be arriving at my final destination, Toronto, sometime during the second week of June. Soon after that, you’ll be able to find me at the offices of Unspace near Queen & Spadina. I met the guys from Unspace at Railsconf last year and I’m quite honored that they asked me to join their ranks. I suspect this is when I start asking everyone I meet “Hey, do you need a kickass Ruby on Rails consultant for your cool project?” or exclaim “What do you mean you’re not going to RubyFringe? Are you out of your mind?”

“But Tyler, don’t you love Seattle and enjoy working at Amazon? Have you lost your mind?”

‘Tis true. I am quite fond of Seattle and Amazon, excluding my brutal first year, has been great. But as you might also know, I’ve been dating my lovely girlfriend (who’s still in Toronto) for the last 3 years. Three years of phone calls and flights is more than enough for me. That said, I’m so excited to be moving back to Toronto (more so than Jessie Spano on caffeine pills).

Seattle people, I have no idea when the going away party will be. Toronto people, would asking for a parade upon my return be out of line?

That’s all for now.

Oh, I also suspect this is when Ram comments “Fuck ya! Toronto rules! What took you so long?”

Amazon Web Services Blog: Storage Space, The Final Frontier. Amazon will be launching mountable volume storage to EC2 soon enough. rightscale has a nice post of why this is useful.

jstn.cc : Muxtape, 24 hour mark “8,685 users / 19,731 songs / 35,000 visits / $118.17 on S3″. that’s gotta be getting expensive. via josh.

Scalr: The Auto-Scaling Open-Source Amazon EC2 Effort. uses 3 different AMI images (load balancer, server, and db) to add capacity and detect failures. kinda cool.

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Using SimpleDB and Rails in No Time with ActiveResource. it has to create an actual proxy to service requests. no caching (i can see) to address the “eventual consistency” of SDB.

Amazon EC2 Elastic IP Addresses. it’s static IP addresses. that’s some terrible feature naming.

Muxtape. a simple way to create and share mixtapes. i think their s3 bill is gonna be huge.

SmugBlog: S3 outage - We weren’t affected. some good criticism of amazon from that s3 outage. totally agree what AWS should have a site like this salesforce report card.

Amazon Web Services had a big outage this morning. 90% of the comments on the post are complete whiners. shit happens people, it’s your job to engineer for what happens during those failures (which SmugMug’s CEO points out perfectly in one comment).

Amazon to buy Audible for $300 million | Reuters. 25% of audible’s business comes from apple itunes.

Amazon Beat eBay in Holiday Traffic. “For the month of December, for the first time, more Americans clicked over to Amazon.com (59,624,000) than eBay (59,374,000)”

NYTimes Op-ed asking if Amazon’s customer service is the reason for it’s stock rise. “According to Forrester Research, 52 percent of people who shop online say they do their product research on Amazon.”, that is nuts.

Sony Joins Other Labels on Amazon MP3 Store - New York Times. i guess that means DRM for music is officially dead.