Amazon Web Services Blog

Mux - Video Transcoding Powered by EC2

The first time you try to create your own online video, you will quickly find out that there are all sorts of interesting tradeoffs between file format, bit rate, and file size. The encoding process always seems to require all of your CPU speed and I/O bandwidth, and then some, while still taking a considerable amount of clock time.

The developers behind Cruxy apparently faced this problem on a regular basis. After creating an internal solution powered by Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, they decided to package it up in standalone form so that other people could benefit from it as well.

The result is called Mux and it looks like this:

You simply point Mux at your original video and tell it what kind of output you want. Behind the scenes it will download the original video, transcode it to the new format, size, and rate per your specifications, and store the final video in S3.

Since this process can take a variable amount of time, it will notify you via an email or by performing a GET on a specified URL when your new video is ready.

The current version of Mux is for personal, non-commercial use only. My understanding is that this restriction will be lifted in the future, once the developers decide on the most appropriate business model.

There is also a mobile version of Mux. It will transcode the video so that it will work on a cell phone, and then send a text message to the phone when the video is ready to be viewed.

-- Jeff;

New PHP Interfaces to S3, EC2, SQS, and Mechanical Turk

Earlier today, Tyler Hall of Sitening announced that they were releasing a set of open source PHP interface classes for Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, and the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The classes are hosted in Google Code, and can be downloaded here.

Tyler also let me know that these classes were used to build Sitening's Basejumpr application.

They actually spool up EC2 instances on demand in order to do heavy duty batch data processing. As Tyler told me:

We couldn't do it with just one server, and being a small company, we can't afford to lease multiple dedicated servers which might sit idle most of the time. With EC2 we launch and shutdown instances as needed. It's typically an automatic process controlled by our web server. But we've also built a control panel so we can start and stop instances manually.

Once again, it is a great example of Web-Scale Computing in action (I'm sure you are getting tired of hearing me say that).

-- Jeff;

Stop Him Before He Links Again

A few interesting things in my Inbox today:

• Web Worker Daily asks So You Wanna Be a Web Tycoon? Amazon Can Help. They really seem to understand what we are talking about when we say "Web-Scale Computing." As they note, "We’re moving closer to the day when a non-programmer with a regular-sized wallet can come up with an idea for a web-based business and put it together himself from pieces available on the web. We’re not there yet, that’s for sure, but Amazon’s vision for bringing web business infrastructure to the masses, along with a few other key developments in the web technology landscape like DIY web app platforms, means web tycoonhood might be closer than you thought." Definitely!
• IBM Developerworks says that you should Offload your multimedia content and bandwidth to Amazon using PHP. This HOWTO article introduces Amazon S3, then provides complete PHP code for form-based image uploading and simple image retrieval, all using the Neurofuzzy PHP class. The article's download link for this class is broken; you can find out a lot more about the class here.
• Sergey Schetinin -- the author of S3 Backup (which once had a different name) -- dropped me a note to say that his development efforts are going really well, and that he's in his 9th round of beta testing. The feature list is quite long. You could also watch the screencast to learn more.

-- Jeff;

Cruxy - Serving Up Media Files in Second Life Using Amazon S3

I received a really cool email from Nathan Freitas of Cruxy.com earlier this week. Nathan explained that Cruxy had been working with EMI Records to create a Second Life lounge for the bird and the bee as part of the release of their first album.

Nathan (pictured at right) told me that:

There is no way / we could have even thought of saying yes to helping EMI "break" a new band in the time period we had if S3 wasn't at our foundation.

Nathan and his associates created the Echo Park Listening Lounge as a focal point for the group's activities in Second Life. Within this cozy lounge, you can listen to music and watch videos (all streamed from S3). At noon PST today (Friday the 27th of January) there will be a launch party there and I expect it will get pretty crowded.

This is a very nice use case for S3 -- it exemplifies a lot of what we like about Web Scale Computing. As Nathan notes, they didn't have time to build the infrastructure needed to host the media files themselves. Even if they had the time, it might not make financial sense to acquire enough servers and bandwidth just to handle the extreme demands of this one-time event. They were able to go from "0 to a lot" very easily, and when things calm down they can scale back down just as quickly and just as easily.

I like to think of it this way. If your 100 closest friends told you that they were planning to come stay at your house for the weekend, you probably would send them to a hotel instead of building an extension onto your house. The hotel is your scaling tool; using it on a temporary, as-needed basis makes a lot more sense than making a huge investment in rooms that will be empty most of the time.

Here are a few more pictures:

Here is the video streaming in action:

I have talked to several other Second Life developers about this same use case, and I am planning to write a little HOWTO on this topic very soon. It is relatively easy for a non-programmer to get media files hosted on S3 and to play them in Second Life, but I want to make sure that everyone knows how to do it.

Ok, looks like it is almost time for that launch party. I'm going to go snag a quick lunch at the food court (I am working from an undisclosed location today) and will be back in-world before noon. See you there!

-- Jeff;

Catching Up

Time for one of my cleanup the inbox posts! I've been in the office all week, but I've been unbelievably busy while planning for my February trips to Utah, Vancouver BC, and London.

Here are some of the cool things I've seen lately:

• Baseline Magazine has a really interesting article, Inside MySpace.com. In the article most easily read in the print form), you can learn about how the folks at MySpace went from handling a system with 500,000 user accounts to over 140 million accounts in less than two years. Judging from the amount of time my three teenagers spend on that site, its no wonder that scalability was a big challenge for them.
  
  There's nothing specific to any particular Amazon Web Service in the article, but I do believe that some lucky EC2-powered startup will find themselves in this enviable situation before too long. As you read the article, you will learn that scalability is a lot more than simply adding more hardware.
• On the topic of EC2, I follow a couple of blogs which cover the topic of hardware virtualization. You might enjoy reading the X86 Virtualization Blog and the VM Blog.
• Alex Iskold wrote about The New Face of Amazon: Tags, Ajax, Plogs & Wikis. If you are building an Ajax-style application you might enjoy the Ajax Cookbook.
• Amazon's Jinesh Varia attended and spoke at Mashup Camp last week. The Zontube application was demo'ed there, and lots of people seem to be excited about it.
• Developer Justin Mason gave a talk about EC2 and S3 and posted his slides. Dan Creswell talked about S3, and also posted his presentation.
• The Wiibadge site stores its badges in S3. I don't own a Wii, so I don't know exactly how it works.
• We recently published a Webmail.us success story.

That's about all I have today.

-- Jeff;

Snowbooks - Second Life Bookstore

Last week I received an invitation to check out the Snowbooks store in Second Life.

I spent some time wandering around earlier today and liked what I saw. Here's a full report. Snowbooks is a UK-based publisher and also an Amazon Associate. Their Second Life stores provides access to their own titles and to titles from Amazon.co.uk . As far as I know they don't use any Amazon Web Services yet; this is the Second Life equivalent of an Associates site with static pages featuring products chosen by hand.

True to its name, the Snowbooks store is located in one of the colder parts of the Second Life world, with year-round snow:

Just like a physical bookstore, they have featured a particular book, and they also note that they are affiliated with Amazon:

The winter theme is maintained in the chalet-like design of the store:

Inside, there's a good selection of books, all set up for casual, comfortable browsing:

There's even a meeting room upstairs:

Because Snowbooks is also a publisher, they need to meet with authors and other related parties from time to time. Conveniently enough, they have an Editor's Office with regular office hours:

You can visit the Snowbooks store in Second Life by clicking here. You can read more about the store at the Snowbooks site. You might also want to track down PK Rimbaud, the Snowbooks representative in-world.

This is all pretty impressive, and to me it shows off some of the interesting ways that a real-life brand can be brought into a virtual world.

If you are doing something interesting in Second Life with our services, please do feel free to track me down. I am Jeffronius Batra.

-- Jeff;

Top Ten Mistakes Startups Make Building Technology

Have been thinking about startups and technology, for the obvious reason that Amazon Web Services seem to serve Startup needs so well. That led to some discussion, followed by more thinking, and finally an inevitable “top ten” list.

But rather than just saying “these are the top ten mistakes that Startups need to avoid”, it seems like the perfect opportunity to ask all of you what YOU think the top pitfalls are. Feel free to share your actual experiences, or those of your "friend." What do you think? Love to hear your comments. Just asking that you restrict your list to technical reasons: we’ll save the business reasons for another list.

There’s a zillion ingredients in startup success. The purpose of this list is to identify ten technical pitfalls to avoid in a Web startup.

1. Failure to anticipate success, and failure to architect for it. (You can’t anticipate all the bottlenecks in advance, or at least you can’t afford to out-engineer them.)
2. Failure to plan for failure (a.k.a. over-investment in hardware leads to inability to exit one idea and move on the next one.)
3. Bad Location (Internet Alley instead of Internet Highway means that your bottleneck is bandwidth, latency, and second-tier operational environments).
4. Technology Religion: (The louder someone’s opinion on a particular technology, the smaller the chance that their opinion is well reasoned.)
5. Late adoption (Contrary to the "bleeding edge" cliche, early adopters are able to use technology as a differentiator that accelerates them out in front of the competition.)
6. Failure to use technology as a strategic weapon. (Viewing technology as overhead or strictly as an operational expense is the fastest road to making decisions for the wrong reason.)
7. Failure to plan results in an urgent care center rather than an online business. (You can’t just throw stuff together and expect success.)
8. Selecting the wrong bank, and the wrong payment gateway. (There are many anecdotes about gateway horror stories)
9. Staying in the closet too long. (Startups are about success, and they thrive on new business. It’s better to iterate on what works rather than hide behind a beta, because success never finds your plan, it just finds you.)
10. Adding audio to your home page. (Doh!)

-- Mike

Florida Developers

As long as I'm blogging about upcoming presentations, it would be remiss not to mention the Miami Code Camp in Miramar on Saturday, Feb 10th and the Tampa .NET Users Group on Tuesday, Feb 13th.

If you are able to attend either of these events, it's an excellent opportunity to meet. Of course that leaves Monday and earlier on Tuesday as opportunities for more meetings. As always, email me if you are in South or Central Florida and would like to hook up--either to speak or simply meet.

-- Mike

Texas Meeting Opportunities

Are you located in Dallas or Houston? During the week of Feb 25th I’ll be in Texas speaking in both these cities. If your user group is interested in a presentation on Amazon Web Services, or if you are a developer who’d just like to meet, please email me and I’ll try to include you in the schedule. And if you’re a .NET developer in the Dallas area, please plan to attend the Feb 27th meeting, in order that we can meet! See www.dallasasp.net for details.

-- Mike

Speaking at Provo Labs Next Month

Image courtesy of go-utah.com

As part of a 4-day recruiting and academic speaking trip to Utah, I will be speaking at Paul Allen's Provo Labs Academy on the 8th of February.

The final location will be determined based on the number of people who sign up, so visit Paul's blog today and RSVP if you would like to hear me talk.

I've also got some open meeting time on the afternoon of the 6th. Drop me an email if you are a developer or entrepreneur in the Provo area and you would like to meet.

-- Jeff;

 

Enomalism Virtual Management Dashboard

The Enomalism Virtual Management Dashboard provides an easy to use interface to provision and manage a series of physical and virtual servers through a single integrated interface.

Designed to work with Amazon EC2 and other virtualized environments, the Virtual Management Dashboard includes a dashboard, support for true elastic computing, dynamic, real-time virtual server management, disk management tools, user and resource management, physical and virtual server migration, an SSH client, and virtual appliance management to simplify the process of adding and removing software packages from the managed systems.

There's also an API for external control, and the entire package has been made available under an open source license.

Take a look at some screenshots, watch the system in action, or just download it and give it a try.

-- Jeff;

Amazon's Werner Vogels on Scalability

Over the last couple of years I have found that listening to podcasts is an effective way to learn and to keep up with what's happening in the software industry. My car has an iPod interface built in, so I spend a few minutes each morning setting up a playlist for my daily commute.

Last week I listened to Amazon's Werner Vogels talk about Scalability while walking my dog. In this 27 minute IT Conversations podcast, Werner talks about Amazon as a platform. He also discusses some of the ways that we stress-test our environment. It is a very interesting talk, and I think you will find that listening to it was a good use of your time.

-- Jeff;

PS - If you dig deep into the IT Conversations archive, you'll find this ancient interview with me as well.

New Version of ECS Released

I just received word that a new version of the Amazon E-Commerce Service has been released. Here are the newest features:

• Ability to search the Amazon.com Industrial & Scientific Products catalog.
• A new search index, All, with the ability to perform a keyword search on all product categories with up to 5 pages of results.
• Ability to search using 13-digit ISBNs.

There are also a handful of bug fixes. Read the ECS Release Notes for more information.

-- Jeff;

Links: REST, SOAP, EC2, Pancakes, etc.

I'm recovering from some minor surgery this week, which basically means taking things really easy, watching too much TV, hanging out with my kids (we've had so many snow days this year that they are actually complaining about not getting to go to school) and catching up on my feed reading!

Here are some good links that I had bookmarked for "later." A couple of these come courtesy of fellow evangelist Adam Trachtenberg,  currently working at eBay. A few others are from the Planet XML blog aggregator.

• At last year's OSCON, Adam talked about the Dirty Secrets of PHP5's ext/soap. Adam uses Amazon's ECS for his examples (thanks) but he should definitely upgrade to a newer version -- he's using ECS 2 and the current version is 4.
• Sticking with the web services theme, Adam also linked to The REST Dialogues, a Real eBay Architect, and there's also a second part. This nice interview with Dan Pritchett is a must-read for anyone who is even thinking about designing a web services API.
• Turns out that the previous article is a takeoff on an imaginary conversation originated by Duncan Cragg.
• Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo asks is REST is Hazardous to Your Career? Dare's post is a response to another one by Steven Jones who asks Want to be cool? Learn REST. Want a career? Learn WS.
• In a somewhat old (yet still totally relevant) post, Jon Udell talks about WS-Heavy, WS-Lite, and WS-JustRight.
• If you are putting together your own web services program, you'll need (as I've outlined in several of my talks) a whole lot more than an API. You may want a blog, some forums, a news page, management of developer keys, and tracking metrics. The folks at Mashery are now offering all of this a nice package. Even better, it is powered by S3 and EC2. Read more at the Programmable Web.
• Down the street from me is a little place called the Family Pancake House. Last week their signboard read "FULL-TIME SERVERS WANTED." I was hoping to get a picture of this to use in a blog post, but they changed it to "BLUEBERRY PANCAKES" on me!
  
  Anyway, that sign made me think of the interesting ways that people are using EC2 to access servers on-demand instead of full time. The Zeroflux Blog talks about Web Clustering With Amazon EC2 and how they will use it to support the very variable processing needs behind an email campaign.
• Finally, the Redmonk Report talks about how they decided to use a combination of S3 and ZRM to backup their data. Their article contains all of gory details needed to get everything up and running.

Ok, that's about all. Time for a rest.

-- Jeff;

Amazon EC2 and SOA Suites : Great Article

I love it, when people innovate!

Mamoon Yunus and team wrote an excellent article on Dr. Dobbs Journal that adds a new dimension to Amazon EC2 use cases. In the article, they are combining the power of Amazon EC2 with existing SOA Suites and BPEL Engines

They discuss the key features of some great products/technologies that are currently out there:

• Extending use cases of orchestration languages like BPEL beyond their typical application development role to also manage infrastructure provisioning
• Utilizing Events and Exceptions management feature of Oracle BPEL Process Manager (Oracle SOA Suite)
• Ability to spawn up a new server instance or clone existing server instance by a mere web-service call using Amazon EC2

The Shifting Sands section in this article is definitely worth a read - it discusses some real nice "trendy" ideas and predictions of the new emerging world. I would love to know your comments about these predictions.

-- Jinesh

Amazon EC2 Video

We recently posted a video that shows how to set up Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud from a Windows environment. More accurately, there is one video is in two formats: Windows Media and Flash. If you have Windows Media, that version of the encoding worked out to be both a smaller file size (faster download) and better quality.

Regardless of the version you chose, the content is the same: a few minutes of a business-level overview followed by a walk-thru that shows you how to set up Amazon EC2. It's low-tech, and I didn't even try to edit out some umms and ahs.

I spent Saturday afternoon sitting on my couch, playing with Amazon EC2 AMIs via a WiFi connection from a miniature notebook. Couldn't help but think "if only this couch were really a remote tropical beach, with a satellite signal". Not that running a business from a tropical island was on my mind...

-- Mike

Friday Inbox Cleanup

Its time to clean out the inbox again. Here's what I have this afternoon:

• Carson Mcdonald wrote about Creating Your Own FC6 Instance for EC2. The article is very detailed and should be helpful.
• Redmonk analyst Steve O'Grady was kind enough to bestow his first-ever Tecosystems Award for Technical Innovation on us. This was the first thing I read after getting up this morning, and it really made my day.
• New version of Blue Organizer, now featuring the Blue Menu.

-- Jeff;

Simple Code to Access the Alexa Web Information Service

My friend Adam Rifkin just pointed me at some simple PHP code to access the Alexa Web Information Service. You will need PHP 5 and the mhash library.

You can find even more such code in the Resource Center.

Thanks Adam!

 

-- Jeff;

Opportunity Knocks

RSS pioneer Dave Winer has an idea for a cool application powered by S3. In his post "Opportunity Knocks,Try #3" Dave explains his idea:

I want to define a cloud in Amazon S3 space, a cloud of subscription information, some of it public and some of it only accessible to the user. We're going to depend on Amazon's ability to keep stuff private that we want private, and make available publicly the stuff we want to publish.

Dave was originally looking for a PHP developer local to the Bay Area. He's relaxed his standards a bit and is now willing to talk to developers familiar with other appropriate languages. To contact Dave, you'll need to visit this form and enter your information.

I'm not sure what Dave has up his sleeve, but I figured I would help him out with this post!

-- Jeff;

Hadoop Filesystem Using S3

I blogged about Hadoop on EC2 late last year. In a nutshell, Hadoop is an open source implementation of Google's MapReduce algorithm. MapReduce is a simple and efficient programming model for processing large data sets using a whole bunch of processors (you are supposed to start thinking of EC2 at this point).

Tom White sent me a note this week to inform me that he had implemented a Hadoop file system on top of S3.  This file system can be used as a full or partial replacement for HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed File System.

Because bandwidth between EC2 instances and data stored in S3 is not metered or billed, this is a very cost-effective way to process large amounts of data.

If you aren't already running Hadoop on EC2, you can read all about how to do it here.

 

I would be overjoyed to hear from someone who's used Hadoop on EC2 to do something really cool. Drop me an email.

-- Jeff;

Some Cool HITs

There are some really interesting Mechanical Turk HITs available right now. Using a Flash application which is actually embedded in the body of the HIT, workers tag a sequential series of images to denote the presence of certain road features -- yellow lines, manholes, drains, bollards, and pedestrian crossings.

Read more about these HITs at the OpenGeoData blog, or just go do them.

-- Jeff;

Product Wars

I really love The DVD Wars, and I know that I'm not the only one...

During my recent visit to Tokyo, an executive with a major consumer electronics company actually brought a printout of the site's front page to the meeting. He told me that the site was a regular hangout for him and for his colleagues within the company and within the industry. That's pretty cool.

Now, the basic idea behind the site -- providing insights into the relative sales of two or more products by amalgamating multiple pieces of data pulled from the Amazon catalog using the Amazon E-Commerce Service -- has grown into eProductWars, a whole family of interesting comparisons.

You can easily see how well the three major console or handheld game systems are doing, check on the popularity of the three front-running operating systems,  MP3 players, satellite radio formats, or political books.

Spies call this kind of thing open source intelligence. Instead of digging through trash cans and conducting furtive meetings in sleazy bars, you can now discover all sorts of relevant, interesting, and useful information using some simple web services calls!

-- Jeff;

Special Opportunity for AWS Developers in Boston and Silicon Valley

Last last year I announced that an unnamed company was conducting a live seminar in the Seattle area and that they were holding some spaces open for AWS developers. I was able to attend that session, and can report that I saw some really, really cool development tools. In the space of the day I was able to see the tool in action, interact with a couple of members of the development team, and actually work through a series of tutorials to construct a couple of nice web applications.

I still can't name this company, but I can tell you that they have training sessions coming up in Boston January 16th) and San Francisco (February 20th and March 6th).

If you use AWS, are in either area, and are an individual developer, part of a small company, or a member of a development team in a larger company, you may be eligible to participate.

If so, send an email to Brad Hintze -- bradhintze@gmail.com .

-- Jeff;

More EC2 Beta Slots Available - Get Yours Now!

I just received word that we have opened up some more slots in the Amazon EC2 beta.

If you want to start using EC2 stop reading this message and click here now to sign up. Go to that page and click on the "Sign Up For Web Service" button in the upper right.

If you are quick (and lucky) you will get in right away. Otherwise you will be put on the waiting list and your turn will come. If you are on that waiting list, you should sign up for Amazon S3 while you are waiting. That way, we can simply auto-enable you when we have more slots.

Good luck!

-- Jeff;

 

Perl and EC2

It's gratifying to see third-party projects that interface with Amazon Web Services. For example, you can download a Perl Interface to Amazon EC2 from Jeff Kim on CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), released on December 28th. Check it out at search.cpan.org/~jkim/Net-Amazon-EC2-0.02.

-- Mike

Update: Title of post changed from PHP to Perl!

Amazon UK Associates Blog

The Amazon.co.uk associates team has a nice blog.

Recent topics include monthly payments of associates fees, dealing with foreign bank accounts, self-optimizing links with discount stickers, and information on 13-digit ISBNs.

Update: The Amazon.de associates team also has one!

-- Jeff;

AWS and The Windows Presentation Foundation

WPF/E is Microsoft's next-generation presentation for creating rich web experiences. Using an XML vocabulary known as XAML, WPF/E supports both cross-browser and desktop applications which run on Windows and on the Mac.

If you would like to learn a bit about the use of WPF/E in conjunction with the Amazon E-Commerce Service, you should check out Dan Wahlin's new article,  Viewing Albums with WPF/E and ASP.NET AJAX.  Dan's been experimenting with WPF/E, JavaScript, ASP.NET AJax, and Web Services and this article pulls it all together. You can even view a video of the application in action.

-- Jeff;

S3 Infinidisk for EC2

In the course of searching for some links to flesh out my previous entry, I ran into something new and very cool the S3InfiDisk for EC2. The InfiDisk takes the form of a mountable Linux file system, creating an infinite storage disk for EC2 instances. The file systems can be mounted on any running EC2 instance, with data cached in local RAM and on the instance's hard disk.

The product is available in two versions. The free community version doesn't include caching, and can be run on a single EC2 instance. The enterprise version includes caching as well as a prebuilt EC2 instance.

This looks pretty cool, and I'd love to hear about your experiences with it. Write a blog post and trackback this one, send me some email, or drop a note in the S3 discussion forum.

-- Jeff;

5 Minute AWS Presentation

I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to present at the first-ever meeting of Ignite Seattle this past December. This event attracted lots of Seattle-area technical folks for an evening that was both fun and informative.

We started out the evening by forming into teams to build bridges from popsicle sticks and hot glue. This was a great way to break the ice and to get people talking, sharing, and working together. Once the bridges were built each one was tested. The winning bridge was able to bear the weight of 5 people and used an astounding 998 popsicle sticks.

It was then time for the presentations. The presentations were done in a slightly modified Pecha Kucha format. Each presenter has exactly 5 minutes to present 20 slides -- just 15 seconds per slide. Of course I was slated to speak on AWS, and spent plenty of time earlier that day planning, rehearsing, trimming, and timing my talk. 5 minutes may not seem like very much time, but it was actually enough!

In the space of 5 minutes I was able to introduce the audience to AWS, talk about a number of individual services, and to show screen shots of a number of cool AWS-powered applications. Here's my video:

Click To Play

Under more normal presentation rules, it would take me an hour or more to cover this material! It is a very worthwhile exercise to take your message and hone it down to the bare essentials. A lot of what might be considered essential material in a longer presentation actually seems like fluff when you only have 5 minutes. In a longer time slot I always take the time to answer questions and to interact with the audience, and I also like to do demos if possible.

Sites and applications mentioned in the presentation include LivePlasma, TV Mojo, The DVD Wars, S3 Ajax Wiki, S3 Explorer, S3 Fox, Backup Manager, Smugmug, Webmail.us, Powerset, RenderRocket, and Casting Words.

There were a total of 25 presentations that night, and they were all quite interesting. The great thing about this format is that there's no time to get bored. If your aren't interested in a particular presentation, you can just wait a few minutes for the next one. One very interesting consequence of this format is that the medium and the message become somewhat conflated, and the dense, breathless, high-energy style of the presentation actually seems to lend credibility to the very things that the presenter is describing.

You may also enjoy watching the other videos.

The next meeting of Ignite Seattle will be held on the 13th of February. Perhaps I will see you there.

-- Jeff;

Developer Help Wanted

I received a call for help via LinkedIn early this morning:

How can I find a developer familiar with Amazon's API for a mashup I'm planning?

We don't have a formal way to make these connections right now, but the answers to this question are certainly interesting and thought-provoking. Among other things, we've thought about adding a "help wanted / help available" section to our Discussion Forums. This would be a natural rendezvous point for those who can provide development services, and those who need them.

If you think that this is a good idea, or if you have a better one, please feel free to leave a comment!

-- Jeff;

 

Welcome to 2007 - Let's Talk Mashups

Welcome to 2007 everyone. I've got all kinds of cool stuff queued up in my inbox. Let's start out with a couple of mashup notes.

First, long-time AWS developer Francis Shanahan's new book, Amazon Mashups, is now shipping. Weighing in at a hefty 408 pages, the book will show you how to combine Amazon data and services with data from other publicly available web services using technologies like JSON, Ajax, and Dynamic Scripting. You will learn how to use our data in cell phones and PDAs, and you will see how to convert Amazon data into JSON using XSLT.

 

Speaking of mashups, Programmable Web author John Musser offers his predictions on the Top 5 Mashup Questions of 2007. John covers making money with mashups, the role of widgets, predictions for the most popular categories in 2007, and more.

Finally, Tuneglue is a new audio mashup. Using data pulled from Last.fm and the Amazon E-Commerce Service, Tuneglue lets you search on an artist, explore relationships between artists, and see their works on Amazon.com.

That's it for now!

-- Jeff;