Tag: Amazon

Ubuntu is the cloud king

Posted on August 31, 2015 by - News

cloud 2Ubuntu is more than twice as popular on the Amazon cloud as all other operating systems combined, according to a new analysis.

According to the Cloud Market which looked at operating systems on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Ubuntu has approximately 135,000 instances. In second place is Amazon’s own Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), with 54,000. Windows is third with 17,600 instances.

By dominating AWS, Ubuntu is the most popular cloud Linux.

Ubuntu has been available on HP Cloud, and Microsoft Azure since 2013. It’s also now available on Google Cloud Platform, Fujitsu, and Joyent.

Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is also putting considerable efforts behind OpenStack for the private and hybrid cloud. Indeed, Canonical has also worked with Microsoft to bring Windows Server to OpenStack and with Oracle to bring Oracle Linux to the Ubuntu take on OpenStack.

Apparently, 53 percent of all production OpenStack clouds are running Ubuntu. CentOS is far in the back with 29 percent.

Amazon kills off pay-per-click advertising programme

Posted on August 12, 2015 by - News

amazonAmazon has pulled the plug on a pay-per-click advertising programme that allowed businesses to divert traffic from the retailer’s platform to their own websites.

The programme allowed businesses that were not sellers on Amazon’s online marketplace to buy ad space on the website. Targeted ads for specific items would pop up on Amazon’s website and drive shoppers to the retailer or manufacturer’s own site.

Scot Wingo, the executive chairman of ChannelAdvisor told Reuters that customers liked it because it provided a middle ground of being able to partner with Amazon but also not allowing them to see all their transaction data.

Wingo said the programme was known for its high conversion rate and said advertisers were surprised when they received an email from Amazon notifying them of the change this week.

An Amazon spokeswoman confirmed the change and said the advertising programme will no longer be available after  October.

Amazon offers other advertising options for third-party sellers to differentiate their products like its sponsored ads program.

Angela Hsu, vice president of Internet business and marketing at Lamps Plus, a home decor company that used the product ads programme told Reuters she was disappointed.

The company was featured in an Amazon case study in May and said the programme increased its sales by more than 80 percent.

People are increasingly starting their product searches on e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon before looking on an individual retailer’s website.

 

Amazon’s Prime Day miffs customers

Posted on July 16, 2015 by - News

amazonAmazon’s Prime day failed to live up to the hype generated sending a strong message to e-retailers of the dangers of overreaching customers’ expectations.

Merchants participating in Amazon.com’s much-advertised “Prime Day” sale saw an 80 percent rise in US sales from a year earlier but it appears that the event caused more trouble that it was worth.

The one-day sale on Wednesday for members of Amazon’s $99 per year Prime subscription service is similar to an annual sale by China e-commerce merchant Alibaba.

Wal-Mart panicked and also launched an online sale, fearing that the Prime Day would lose it customers.

Amazon was trying to create a Black Friday frenzy and partly managed it., Amazon did not give detailed sales numbers but said it sold 35,000 Lord of the Rings Blu-Ray sets in 15 minutes and that a Kate Spade handbag was sold out in a minute.

However Amazon shoppers were completely underwhelmed by the experience. Twitter polls show that Prime Day deals were selling out too quickly and complained that deals were not attractive enough.

Other shoppers used the #PrimeDayFail hashtag on Twitter. One user tweeted: “Hey @Amazon, #PrimeDay is not Black Friday in July. It’s April Fools’ in July. #primedayfail”.

Adobe Digital Index said that 50 percent of overall sentiment related to Prime Day on social media was about disappointment.

“Much of the disappointed chatter focused on the lack of blockbuster deals,” it said, adding that users cited sales of less desirable items like socks and towels.

“It was a sale of Amazon’s junk, there was nothing exciting there, and the limited ones which were s were either sold out in seconds,” one irate shopper said. “It was a missed opportunity for Amazon… they should have offered special deals and an across the board discount.”

An Amazon spokeswoman said the retailer was listening to its customers and planned to add more deals like TVs next time.

Wal-Mart launched a three-month online sale of some 2,000 items on Wednesday. The company said customers “shouldn’t have to pay a fee” to get low prices, a dig at Amazon, which it did not name. Deals should be around for more than a single day, a spokesman

Amazon gives loans to small sellers

Posted on June 29, 2015 by - News

amazonAmazon.com is extending its business loan program for small sellers later this year in eight more countries including China.

Until now, the e-retailer has offered the service only in the United States and Japan.

Now, according to the head of Amazon Marketplace, Peter Faricy, Amazon Lending, founded in 2012, now plans to offer short-term working capital loans in other countries where it operates a third-party, seller-run marketplace business,.

The scheme is being rolled out in Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom as an “invite-only” .

Amazon offers three- to six-month loans of $1,000 to $600,000 to help merchants buy inventory. It makes money on interest and takes a cut of all sales on its marketplace, which now account for about 40 percent of total Amazon site sales.

Amazon said it has offered hundreds of millions of dollars in loans since 2012, with more than half of its sellers opting for a repeat loan.

Faricy said the company has become better at understanding the inflection points in a small or medium business where capital can make a difference.

“We know a lot about our sellers’ business and invite only those who we think are in the best position to take capital and grow,” he said.

Amazon uses internal algorithms to choose sellers based on the frequency with which they run out of stock, the popularity of their products and their inventory cycles.

Microsoft wants $20 billion from cloud

Posted on April 30, 2015 by - News

clouds3Software giant Microsoft has said that it aims to make more than $20 billion in annual revenue from its cloud computing businesses by the end of fiscal 2018.

Chief Executive Satya Nadella said this would mean tripling its cloud based revenue in three years.

Microsoft is one of the leaders in the cloud, and been making a killing providing computing power and storage to customers through its network of data centres.

Microsoft said  that its total commercial cloud revenue, which includes online versions of its Office and Dynamics applications, is running at $6.3 billion per year.

Its closest rival in the cloud, Amazon.com said its competing Amazon Web Services operation took in $1.57 billion in revenue in the quarter, which would also equal an annual rate of $6.3 billion.

Amazon sets up service side

Posted on March 31, 2015 by - News

2580297818_3c864043e6Online book seller Amazon is creating a service side to its business based on the very sound idea that customers might want to buy flat-pack furniture, but have not got a clue how to assemble it.

Peter Faricy, vice president for Amazon Marketplace said that there were more than 85 million Amazon customers who have shopped for products this past year that often require a service afterwards.

Amazon’s answer is a new section in the US, Home Services, where customers can shop for professional help. It’s launching with 700 different services, from the ordinary to the esoteric, everything from installing a garbage disposal to renting you a goat herd.

So far it is all being tested, but it could be rolled out to the EU, where it will solve one of the biggest problems that people have – finding a service person who is not a cowboy, now that all the Polish people have gone home.

Faricy said it is tough to quickly find someone who is qualified. It has only accepted an average of three out of every 100 service professionals in each metro area. It makes sure each business is licensed, insured, and passes a five-point background check, with a further six-point background check for each technician.

Amazon said that it takes 60 seconds to buy a service, regardless of whether that is deck repair, house cleaning, or hedge trimming and you will how much it’s going to cost you, up front, no surprises.”

Amazon offers unlimited cloud storage

Posted on March 26, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeOnline giant Amazon said it is to offer unlimited cloud storage, offering two plans for people who want to upload vast collections of media that they have.

The first is called the Unlimited Photos Plan – it comes with a free three month trial, then a subscription of $12 a year – this lets you store as many photographs as you like on the Amazon Cloud and includes 5GB of extra storage for videos, documents or other files.

The second is called the Unlimited Everything Plan – this also comes with a three month trial at no charge then a subscription of $60 a year.  As the name implies, it lets you store all of your stuff in Cloud Drive.

Existing members with a Prime subscription already can use unlimited photo storage but can add a subscription to the Unlimited plan to store everything else too.

Amazon is now a considerable player in the IT business – although many people can buy CDs, books and the like – it also offers services for enterprise players too, particularly in the cloud.

 

Apple buys into white box servers

Posted on March 18, 2015 by - News

novità-apple-2013Cupertino based Apple Inc has decided to ditch HP and Dell to supply its servers and instead is looking to Taiwanese firms to supply its data centre needs.

That’s according to Taiwan wire Digitimes which said some of the local white box server manufacturers have already received orders from Apple for boxes.

One of the major manufacturers of servers is Quanta, which used to specialise almost wholly in making notebooks for big vendors but has diversified its business over the last two years.

It offers servers at a price that undercuts Dell and HP and will customise the machines for customers which already include giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Apple said recently it will open data centres in Ireland and in Denmark and it’s also spending billions on building up data centres in the USA.

The company is also cuddling up to IBM and wants to release tablet machines that will appeal to enterprises rather than the home users it has depended on in the past.

Google’s Nearline could melt Glacier

Posted on March 12, 2015 by - News

bear_glacerGoogle is offering a new kind of data storage service which should go a long way to melting Amazon’s Glacier.

Nearline is for non-essential data, similar to Glacier, but it is offering it a cent a month per gigabyte. This is more than half the cheapest in the market place, which is Microsoft’s 2.4 cents a gigabyte.

Glacier storage has a retrieval time of several hours, and Nearline data will be available in about three seconds.

While three seconds is years for something like serving a web page, it is ideal for data analysis as well as long-term storage.

This could be Google’s cunning plan – positioning itself as the cloud computing company for all kinds of data analysis.

Tom Kershaw, director of product management for the Google Cloud Platform said that it is not about storage stupid. Its about what you do with analytics. Set ups like Nearline will mean you never have to delete anything and you can always use data.

Google announced plans with several storage providers, including Veritas/Symantec and NetApp, to encrypt and transport data from their systems onto Nearline.

On the consumer front, Dropbox charges about $10 a month to store a terabyte of data, which is the same price as Nearline and Glacier. However those businesses count on most of their customers storing well below their limit.

Either way it is looking like things are hotting up on the cloud with costs being driven down. Scattered showers much be expected.

 

 

Alibaba gets its own US cloud

Posted on March 4, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeAlibaba is launching a cloud computing hub in Silicon Valley which is the first that the e-commerce giant has set up outside of China.

The new California data centre marks the Chinese company’s latest expansion onto an US market dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Alibaba’s Aliyun cloud division intends the new data centre to cater initially to Chinese companies with operations in the United States. Later it will target US businesses seeking a presence in both countries.

Ethan Yu, a vice president at Alibaba who runs the international cloud business said that it was all part of Alibaba’s international expansion plans. The next stage would be a cloud on the East Coast, or somewhere in the middle of the US.

Aliyun is similar to Amazon Web Services and was part of the company’s in-house technical infrastructure. It has since expanded to lease processing and storage space for small and medium Internet businesses in China.

Aliyun, also known as Alibaba Cloud Computing, holds about a 23 percent market share in the Chinese market. It faces both Chinese and foreign competitors, from carriers like China Telecom to Microsoft and Amazon. Its existing data centers span the Chinese cities of Hangzhou, Qingdao, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Tablets slow right down

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

cheap-tabletsOnly 221.4 million tablets will ship worldwide this year – a drop of 11.9 percent compared to 2014.

That’s according to Digitimes Research (DR), which predicts that Apple will continue to take the lead, managing to ship over 54 million units this year. While this sounds healthy, that’s a predicted decline of 16/6 percent.

The so-called “white box” market will see the biggest decline, with a drop of 20 percent. Margins on these products are super slim.

DR gives estimates for the different vendors’ shares of the market – with Apple accounting for 24.5 percent, Samsung 16.3 percent, Lenovo 5.3 percent, Asustek 4.2 percent, Google 1.7 percent, Acer 1.7 percent, and Amazon only 1.6 percent.

Meanwhile, a report in Chinese language Economic Daily News said that Amazon has cut orders of tablets, sourced by Compal and Quanta by as much as 30 percent.

Compaq has the lion’s share of Amazon tablet business, churning out 80 percent of them compared to Quanta’s 20 percent, the Economic Daily News said.

 

Microsoft offers start ups Azure credits

Posted on February 11, 2015 by - News

Pic Mike MageeMicrosoft has launched a package to lure start-ups and SME’s to its Azure profile by offering them $500,000 in Azure credits. 

The deal, announced by partner Y Combinator, is only available to Y Combinator-backed companies and will be offered to the 2015 Winter and future batches.

It seems that Microsoft is following Google, AWS and IBM which already offer incentives for start-ups to join them.

Microsoft is giving Y Combinator start-ups a three years Office 365 subscription, access to Microsoft developer staff and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services.

It is starting to look like Microsoft is getting more aggressive in its competition with Amazon Web Services and Google, both of whom already offer credits and freebies.

Amazon offers $25,000 in AWS credits and other freebies, while Google offers $100,000 in Google platform credits and IBM offers $120,000 in credit for SoftLayer infrastructure of BlueMix PaaS.

Writing in his company’s bog Sam Altman said that this brings the total value of special offers extended to each YC company to well over $1,000,000. “The relentless nagging from partners to grow faster we throw in for free,” he said.

It is likely that the YC deal is the first of many which will be rolled out worldwide to Microsoft’s partners.

 

Adblock Plus asks for “security” money

Posted on February 9, 2015 by - News

shut-up-and-take-my-moneyThere have been howls of derision on the interwebs after it was revealed that ad-blocking browser Adblock Plus  has been paid off by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Taboola.

What appeared to have been a brilliant bit of software which kept adverts out of your browser, has turned into something of a debacle.

PC Mag said that  that one digital media company, which asked not to be named, said Eyeo had asked for a fee equivalent to 30 percent of the additional ad revenues that it would make from being unblocked.

What this means is that all you need to do to make a bit of dosh is write an ad-blocking code, it does not even have to work that well, and show up at the Big IT companies and say: “That is a nice bit of advertising, it would be terrible if something happened to it” and collect your cheque.

PC Mag ummed and ahed about how advertising drives the free Web and sites were not staying in business long these days, but the fact that you have to pay people who write anti-advertising software to look the other way does strike us as the central part of the story.

What this means is that the big companies who can afford to pay,  can run adverts while the smaller magazines will see their sites blocked.  In short the big guys win and the little sites are stuffed.

Lenovo pips Amazon at the tablet game

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

cheap-tabletsApple continued to be the market leader for tablets in 2014 but it, in common with other vendors, showed a drop in sales.
A report from Trendforce said that the tablet industry has no reached the maturity point with shipments globally totalling 192 million units. That’s a fall of 2.2 percent compared to 2013.
Apple fared rather worse, it shipped 63.4 million units, a drop of 13.6 percent.
Number two in the pack was Samsung, but its shipments at 41 million units dropped only 2.5 percent.
Lenovo beat Amazon to take third place, and now has 5.6 percent market share.
Both Amazon and Google trailed behind, and Microsoft hasn’t really hit the numbers with its Surface Pro 3.

 

Some analysts believe that not only has the market reached maturity, but it’s hard to persuade people to upgrade.  Others think that tablets are being squeezed on the one hand by larger screen size smartphones and others by low cost notebook PCs.

People keep taking the tablets

Posted on January 29, 2015 by - News

ipad3Despite reports suggesting that the market for tablets is in decay, fresh data shows that it ain’t necessarily so.
Digitimes Research said that overall global tablet shipments in the fourth quarter last year grew by 16.9 percent to total 74.77 million units, mostly down to Apple and first tier vendors good performances.
But so-called “white box” tablets declined in the fourth quarter.
The survey said these white box tablets, using the Android operating system, offer very slim margins and many vendors have given up on manufacturing.
Apple managed to ship 21.9 million iPads in Q4 2014 and was the largest tablet vendor.
Samsung failed to introduce new tablet products in the second half of last year and so it say some stagnation.
Third in line was Amazon, displacing Lenovo from that position in the marketplace.