by Andy Brudtkuhl on March 4, 2009
Roku is my favorite gadget. There, I said it.
On that note they just made it even better by adding access to Amazon Video On Demand – which lets you buy and rent new DVD releases from Amazon.
Video From Engadget
So what are the drawbacks? Well Amazon does not stream in HD or in surround sound. The device, however, can support this (as they do with Netflix) – so as soon as Amazon adds this feature the Roku will support it.
Roku is the best $99 I’ve ever spent on a gadget. Hands down. If you have Netflix or enjoy movies – just buy it. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on March 3, 2009
Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) was on Charlie Rose last week talking about business, the economy, reinventing your business, the kindle, the future of reading, and much more. I love Jeff Bezos and I think he’s one of the greatest business minds around – and he’s awesome to hear speak.
Some notes:
- “Your value proposition to customers shows itself better to your customers in this economy”
- “If I look long term, I am very optimistic”
- “Me too companies tend not to do very well”
The quote I will take with me was…
“People often ask me – Jeff, what’s going to change in five to ten years? But I rarely get asked ‘What’s going to stay the same’? [...] If you base your business strategy on things that are going to change – then you have to constantly change your strategy. Whereas, if you formulate your strategy around customer needs – those tend to be stable in time.”
Brilliant. It’s so easy to get caught up with the changing landscape on the web, in business, etc – and it’s hard to focus on your core competencies. But in the end it always comes back to what your customer needs.
[click to continue…]
by Andy Brudtkuhl on January 5, 2009
This was coming in my 2009 Wishlist post but here it is early… Roku will be adding Amazon Video On Demand to its streaming arsenal “soon”!!!
This is huge… We’ll have more on this later. This little device may be the best $99 I’ve spent on a gadget… If only Netflix would add their entire dvd library to the Watch Instantly library…
Press Release (pdf)
via cNet
by Andy Brudtkuhl on November 18, 2008
Two months ago I wrote about Amazon’s plans for launching a Content Delivery Network (What’s a Content Delivery Network?). Today, Amazon announced CloudFront – “a service designed with ease of use in mind from the very beginning.”
So what does this CDN have to offer?
“Today marks the launch of Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.
Amazon CloudFront has been designed to be fast; the service will cache copies of the content in edge locations close to the end-user’s location, significantly lowering the access latency to the content. High sustainable data transfer rates can be achieved with the service especially when distributing larger objects.” via Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
Sounds pretty cool right? We will definitely be using this at 48Web for a new project we are launching soon… What for? Hosting and serving multimedia, images, and some downloadable material.
Do you have any questions about using a CDN for your website or business? Ask us questions in the comments or ask me directly.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on October 24, 2008
Today Amazon announced the general availability of EC2 – the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (I think that means it is out of beta). This means it now comes with a Service Level Agreement – which one would think will dramatically increase adoption rates by medium-large sized companies. The SLA provides a 99.95% availability commitment.
Amazon Web Services also announce the availability of the beta for EC2 running Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.
Amazon EC2 will provide an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees. Pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour.
They also provided insights into future plans for 2009 to help companies using their services plan for future roll outs. These enhancements include:
- Load balancing – Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
- Auto-scaling – Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
- Cloud monitoring – Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
- Management Console – Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.
