Tag: amazon

Jeff Bezos vs Bill Gates

I’ve given presentations on “creating passionate users” at both Amazon and Microsoft. 2 big companies, 2 CEOs. Guess which CEO has been to the talk? And he didn’t just sit there, he participated. His hand shot up when I asked a question. He quit fondling his Blackberry. But far more importantly–he asked an amazing question. then he asked, “How can I do more for our reviewers? These people do so much, and work so hard–especially the ones who do a lot of reviews — and the ‘Top Reviewer’ badges are not enough.” I was speechless. Not because I couldn’t think of an answer, but because I couldn’t believe someone this far up the food chain would even think–let alone care about this.

The New Face of Amazon

Lately Amazon has been introducing a raft of ‘web 2.0’ features to its e-commerce website. In this post we explore how Amazon has implemented tagging, Ajax, blogs and wikis – and ask whether it’s made much difference to the user experience, and to the bottom line.

will be interesting to watch if all the 2.0 stuff will increase sales

AWS savings

Depending on my comfort level with EC2’s reliability, we may not even need a failover server as we have now. But just assuming we were comparing apples to apples and we assumed that Mass Events Labs needs 2 servers, the total annual cost is $1752. Today, our annual cost for 2 servers is $8400.

about time, too. there are far too many small, incompetent hosters out there

Amazon S3 cost savings

smugmug is saving massive amounts of money with S3

But wait! It gets even better! Amazon has been so reliable over the last 7 months (considerably more reliable than our own internal storage, which I consider to be quite reliable), that just last week we made S3 an even more fundamental part of our storage architecture. I’ll save the details for a future post, but the bottom line is that we’re actually going to start selling up to 90% of our hard drives on eBay or something. So costs I had previously assumed were sunk are actually about to be recouped. We should get many $100Ks back in cash. I expect our savings from Amazon S3 to be well over $1M in 2007, maybe as high as $2M.

Human Computation

For example, you might ask Mozes Mob (as I recently did) where the best car washes are in San Diego. Local subscribers will ping back almost instantly, via IM or SMS, with answers to your question.

Why do people do it? Call it an example of human computation. People are better searchers than computers are, especially for local services, and they want to share that knowledge. It works, and it’s an insanely interesting app.

using human computation and SMS to improve local search
2007-03-24:

I do this primarily for the money, but I also view it as a form of therapy to get me used to working again> The experience has gotten me thinking about pursuing a library science degree.

2007-09-22:

No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free.

in their treatment of human computation. i also like the snarky coining of eHarmony spouse.