Amazon is preparing to battle with Netflix and Google (and Apple?) as it offers streaming TV services, offering shows and movies online.  This puts Amazon on par with Android’s goals around streaming, teaming with broadcast networks like Fox and ABC for rentals priced at $.99. It would be yet another media-centric opportunity for Amazon, as it already offers a hefty catalog of content via its online store, Roko Set-top box, some Blu-ray players and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Amazon certainly doesn’t want to overlook this huge industry.  Other Amazon prospects are NBC Universal, Time Warner and News Corp.   Netflix has already spent $200 million for its Epix content, a movie network backed by Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate, with its vi

Amazon is now tapping into your Facebook likes, lending them to your purchase recommendations. Proving more monetization opportunities around socially-shared preferences, Amazon still wants to make it as easy as possible to buy from its site. It's a more personalized experience with hopes to entice consumer activity. Amazon's social networking integration also ties into your friends' birthdays, recommending items based on their own likes. There's also ways to filter recommendations by format (books, movies, music) and popularity amongst friends. Facebook in fact tried its hand at a similar tool, though at the time it was missing the direct retail factor. From Inside Facebook, "These lists are reminiscent of Facebook Pulse, a

At TechCrunch's Disrupt conference a few weeks ago legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers spoke about what he considers to be the next, and third, great wave of innovation- the intersection of social, mobile and new commerce. Like swells in an ocean, technology innovation is not comprised of a single wave or event, but instead a series of them. Smaller, initial waves enable those in the middle of a set to generate the largest swell and associated impact, while the smaller waves at the end benefit from all the efforts of the preceding waves in the group. While I would agree with GigaOM’s Om Malik that we are already in the throes of John Doerr’s third wave, the areas of social, mobile and commer

There are as many definitions of cloud as there are technology bloggers. However, the major theme is that a Public Cloud provides IT resources that are provisioned remotely from the consumer and operated by a third party. In a Private Cloud, the infrastructure policies are governed by a single organization where workloads and data can be moved to and from internal and external data centers. Private Clouds provide an organization a single point of control for security, manageability, privacy, audit, compliance and governance. However the business case for engaging in a public or private cloud strategy involves several factors, the most important being business revenue and/or budget. Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

I have been thinking about this for a long time.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the folks at NTAP but it seems like the ‘infrastructure’ players of today are not the same players that will be in the game tomorrow.  If you look at the infrastructure players today (enterprise), you have: IBM, Hewlett Packard, EMC, NetApp, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Brocade, Symantec, and Dell. All of these players are hardware and software players. These may have been the infrastructure players of yesterday but today (or in 2009 when the ‘cloud’ became the next fad) the list started to evolve.  Added to the list are (at a minimum): Amazon and Google. Now lets take a look at the market cap of each of these players.  A company’s m

Apple has sold 1,000,000 iPads, and it’s the Kindle’s biggest competition; both wirelessly download books.  Amazon has a leg up as a book reader, however, in that they’ve grown with Chris Anderson-style ‘Long Tail’ research , they have tens of millions of book customers, know which books are most likely to be downloaded and have those books available for download.  With over 500,000 titles, the Kindle store has the largest selection of books that people want to read, including New York Times Best Sellers and new releases.  Kindle customers can also discover and download over 1.8 million free, pre-1923, out-of-copyright titles from other websites. Best of all, for readers, will be the ability to sort books and d

This morning Cloud and SaaS service provider Opsource is announcing the beta release of their Opsource Cloud Files solution.  With their continued focus on providing services to Enterprises and SaaS vendors, the cloud storage solution is a welcomed addition to their new, yet rapidly advancing suite of cloud services. Already standing out as a service provider with setting the bar for Cloud Hosting related SLA's, Opsource follows suit with their new storage solution with provides built enterprise friendly features such as 24x7 support, in-flight SSL transfers as well as at-rest 256-bit AES encryption. Building on top of their User Access and Role layer, user specific storage quotas can be set allowing organizations to give access to

With Apple's iPad hitting the market in a matter of days, how big an impact will the computer giant's entrance into the tablet and eReader business make? A huge one, according to several research firms such as eMarketer, Yankee Group and Credit Suisse. Amazon's eBook market share is going to shrink, shrink, shrink over the next few years; there will be formidable new competitors coming aboard (hint: a big search engine!); and consumers will be buying eReaders by the bushelful. For all the numbers and how the market shakes out, tune into my New Media Minute this week for a first look at some of the early data on this red hot market. You'll also learn how the beleaguered magazine and newspaper industries will fare on tablets.

One of the biggest issues for developers is moving their apps to the cloud. Many companies like RackSpace (@rackcloud) and Amazon are trying to figure out ways to on-board developers to the cloud. Today, Makara, a cloud startup, is coming out of stealth mode to target developers to provide a way to seemlessly move thier apps to the cloud and iterate fast with support for Makara provides easy on-boarding and management to the cloud. Makara hopes to leverages virtualization to simplify cloud application management. Makara’s Cloud Application Platform (now available as a developer release) helps developers easily deploy, scale and monitor mission-critical applications in the cloud Makara allows developers to deploy new or existing

Yesterday, Google announced that their existing Docs platform will soon open up to storage of all file types. This was widely anticipated, as Google evolved the Docs service over the past year and added references to "Files" rather than specific document types. This could be the next step towards the long-rumored "GDrive" storage offering. Although Google insists that this is not GDrive, it provides the capability of this leaked concept: 1) "... reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents ..." - This new offering supports any and all file types, regardless of whether Google supports them. Further, users (and enterprise Apps customers) can purchase extra capacity with no up