Amazon Web Services Blog

ASP.NET Media Share Library Starter Kit

MSDN recently published ASP.NET Jumpstart: Introduction to the Media Share Library Starter Kit, a 23 page article on the use of ASP.NET, Visual Studio 2005, and the Amazon E-Commerce Service to build a complete tool for personal media management.

Taskable - Amazon Catalog in the System Tray

Taskable is a  unique application.  It runs in the Windows system tray, making it presence known with a little face:

When the face is clicked, Taskable springs into action, displaying data pulled from RSS feeds, OPML feed lists, and from the Amazon catalog in a no-nonsense hierarchical form:

Taskable can be downloaded for free at www.taskable.com .

Amazon Historical Pricing Service Released

The Amazon Historical Pricing web service gives developers direct, programmatic access to over three years of actual sales data for books, music, videos, and DVDs sold by third-party sellers on Amazon.com. Third-party sellers can use this data to make pricing decisions based on historical prices and market trends.

Access to this data costs $499 per month for up to 20,000 requests, and $999 per month for up to 60,000 requests. All billing and service usage data is accessible through the "Your Web Services Account" button in the AWS Developer Portal.

Check out the documentation, code samples, and the WSDL file for more information.

BookScout PRO - Amazon Book Pricing on Your Cell Phone or PDA

The BookScoutPRO application allows professional book scouts to get realtime pricing information for books, CDs, videos, and more using a web interface or any WAP-compatible mobile device. The application is easy for beginners to use, with a full range of advanced features for more experienced users. Free to start, and $7.99 per month to use.

Ning Does Amazon!

The freshly released Ning application environment includes a set of APIs to access AWS. The API is rather lean and mean at the moment -- it includes ItemSearch and ItemLookup calls, along with some methods for dealing with search results of various types. You will need developer-level access to Ning in order to find and use these calls.

If you have built a Ning application using these APIs, please let us know.

aytozon - Comparison shop across Amazon and eBay

John Krystynak recently released his newest creation, Aytozon.com . By using the APIs provided by Amazon and eBay, Aytozon performs parallel searches on both sites, unifies the results, and presents them in side by side fashion for comparison.

The search results are quite interesting. The screen shot at right (click for a larger view) shows the results of a search for the string "Porsche 911". The first page of results for the eBay search includes car parts and a book or two. The corresponding page of Amazon results includes a few parts, some books, and some non-automotive products from Porsche Design.

New SQS Tutorial on IBM's developerWorks

IBM's developerWorks has posted a new tutorial, Introduction to the Amazon Simple Queue Service. This tutorial is actually the second part of a multipart series. The first  part, How to Use the Amazon E-Commerce Service, was published earlier this year.

The tutorials are free, but registration is required.

Data on Billions of Sites Made Available

DevX.com has published an article with information about this week's production release of the Alexa Web Information Service: Data on Billions of Web Pages Made Available .

AWS Event Calendar Updated - 4 New Events

A new version of the AWS Talks and Chats Calendar has been posted, with details on 4 new talks by Amazon's Jeff Barr.

New Release of Associate-O-Matic

Version 2.5 of the Associate-O-Matic store builder is now available. The new release features enhanced control of the home page (more formats including single item and browse node, additional tabs), direct support for mod_rewrite to aid in search engine optimization, reporting, and improved caching.

Two versions of Associate-O-Matic are available. The full version lists for $99 and can be used for one or more sites. The lite version is free, with the proviso that 10% of the click traffic is sent to the Associate-O-Matic account.