Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

Yesterday was Amazon’s big Prime Day shopping event, for which tons of deals and discounts were promised all day. Since it was such a big shopping day that has never been seen before, I put together a few lessons I took away from this experiment. 1. Referencing Black Friday Automatically Gets People Excited The term “Black […]

Today, during annual Microsoft Build conference keynote, Microsoft’s own Scott Guthrie (executive VP  of cloud and enterprise group) introduced new Azure service which is going to be available in public preview in June: Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Large enterprise today can’t effectively function without big data realtime analytics. Realtime analytics means processing large amounts of […]

I was speaking to someone who stated, “I’m not convinced about the internet of things.” To be honest, I hewed to that opinion for a while but as we see more examples of computing occurring outside of your desktop, tablet, and mobile devices I’m starting to change my mind. The latest example of the trend […]

In January, Microsoft announced the general availability of a new, top-tier of Azure virtual machines: the G-series. These are some really powerful machines. The top configuration, G5, has Intel Xeon E5 CPU with 32 cores, 448 GB RAM and 6,144 GB SSD disk and it costs $9.65/hr to use. Considering how powerful the computer is, […]

I’ve blogged about the personalization failure before.  Now it looks like others are catching on to the ultimate failure on their part, even as they harvest huge amounts of private information about us. This article in ComputerWorld outlines the issues. The author Mike Elgan hits the topic of privacy quickly and never lets it go: […]

I recently blogged about Google’s Bigger, Cheaper Cloud and now it looks like Amazon has responded. CRN has an article about Amazon’s announcement of 10%-40% cuts for M1, M2, C1 and CC2 instances.  Amazon didn’t make much reference to Google and they have cut prices a number of times although the timing is suspect. Amazon’s EC2 […]

In backrooms and boardrooms across the country, businesses are discussing the ROI of social media. Where should I put my marketing dollars? What about my time? Why do I care about what Twitter says about my brand? Sometimes you can measure social media ROI by tracking traffic and sentiment and reach. Other times, the ROI […]

CRN has an article about Netskope, a startup security policy firm, who reviewed and ranked enterprise cloud apps.  Here’s the quick list: Salesforce Box Crashplan Amazon Web Services Easy Vista   While some you may not have seen before, others like Amazon and Salesforce already garner many headlines.  As I review a lot of options […]

There are a lot of things that I like about Amazon. Good pricing, wide selection, and ease of shopping. These qualities have been part of their ecosystem for a long time, but it was never enough to make me an Amazon loyalist like I am today. So, what changed? Amazon Prime. For an annual fee of […]

Amazon Web Services, which Amazon began offering in 2006, is a service provided to many important products that people use every day. NASA, Netflix, reddit, Foursquare, Dropbox and Pinterest all use Amazon Web Services to power their service offerings and to be billed dynamically based on usage. WIRED had a great write-up about the service […]

Continuing on with my Personalization series, I want to focus on personalization that caters to what you do on the web site.  We most commonly refer to this as Amazon’s approach.   Amazon does a great, but not perfect, job of recommendations based on your actual actions on the site.  Personalization of this sort would […]

So CRN had an article about Amazon Web Services going down this past Monday.  While that is certainly news, especially to a small number of people, I want to focus on total impact rather than the big scary word called outage.  Our reality in the cloud is that high availability cannot be achieved in the […]