As a fledgling journalist more than a decade ago (has it really been that long?) I started covering a few companies in this crazy new concept called e-commerce. There were a lot of failures, and only a few success stories. And even at the time, Amazon.com seemed like a long shot bet – with a [...]

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Some of the work we’ve been doing around our own cloud computing offerings, and those by our competitors, has gotten me thinking. It seems there are two buckets, or types of clouds, that are emerging that the majority of offerings can be categorized in. On the one hand you have the “functional” cloud, which by [...]

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I just took note of this announcement by Amazon (albeit late) about integrating its EC2 and S3 Web services with Hadoop, an open source project in the making for the last few years that develops software for distributing data. But I felt compelled enough to blog about, mainly because everybody talks about scalability and cost [...]

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I’ve been blogging a lot lately about cloud computing and the role developers will play in their ability to make these emerging platforms more consumable. So when I saw that Ubuntu announced this week that cloud computing will be a cornerstone of its next release in October, it caught my attention. Ubuntu makes a compelling [...]

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I just saw a cool story about Amazon allowing its users with accounts to buy things simply by texting the UPC or ISBN number to the SMS address “Amazon.” The really killer notion here is that users could text to buy while inside a brick and mortar store and compare prices, etc. This is really [...]

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I read an interesting article in the New Yorker today – noting that online sales are still only about three percent of total holiday sales. (I don’t have a link – yes, I actually read print publications.) But it did note how the web has become an integral part of the shopping experience, during the [...]

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