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Tag: amazon

  • Amazon Launches Cloud Drive SDK For Developers

    Amazon Launches Cloud Drive SDK For Developers

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    Amazon has recently made a few changes to its cloud service, giving it more robust capability.

    Earlier this year Amazon announced a Cloud Drive option that allowed users unlimited cloud storage and recently the company released an SDK for their cloud storage service that gives developers a chance to build Cloud Drive storage options into their applications.

    With this new update app developers can now easily integrate the storage service to their apps.

    The SDK is already available for both iOS and Android, so developers can get down to working on their apps without worrying about compatibility.

    This update is also beneficial to end-users as they can now easily use Amazon Cloud Drive through their favorite apps.

    Amazon says that developers can utilize the new SDK on existing apps, apps they’re developing or even add the integration to new apps.

    There are already a handful of Android apps that are already using the SDK and these include Presentations HD Basic, PlanMaker HD Basic, TextMaker HD Basic and A+ Gallery. These are just a few that were highlighted by Amazon but as we speak, more developers could already have integrated this service on their apps.

  • Ooma Telo Air VoIP Phone with Bluetooth Adapter is 50% off at Amazon

    Ooma Telo Air VoIP Phone with Bluetooth Adapter is 50% off at Amazon

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    Today’s Bonus Gold Box Deal of the Day at Amazon is the Ooma Telo Air VoIP Phone with Bluetooth Adapter for $89.99 shipped (50% off).

    Ooma Telo lets you make free U.S. local and long distance calls over the internet. It includes the Wireless + Bluetooth Adapter, enabling your Ooma Telo to connect to the internet wirelessly using your Wi-Fi network. The built-in Bluetooth function also links your mobile phone to your Telo to receive incoming calls through your home telephones, giving you an additional level of convenience.

    PureVoice HD technology allows Ooma to deliver clear audio even when the internet is busy. Packet loss causes VoIP phone calls to sound stuttered or garbled. Ooma’s Adaptive Redundancy detects packet loss and automatically sends redundant packets for better sounding phone calls and fewer dropped calls.

    Ooma works with Nest

    Ooma securely interacts with Nest devices for convenience and peace of mind never before possible with a home phone (premier service required).

    • Automatically forward home phone calls when you leave the house.
    • Receive a call from home when your smoke alarm detects smoke or CO and have the option to contact your local emergency services
    • Receive a call from home when things don’t go as planned

    Features included with free calling service:

    • Free U.S. calling
    • Caller-ID, call-waiting and 911
    • Low international rates
    • Wireless and Bluetooth Connectivity
    • PureVoice HD technology for clarity and reliability
    • Text alerts when 911 is called
    • Online portal with call log, preferences and contacts
    • One-touch voicemail audio playback
    • Remote voicemail retrieval
    • Fax mode
    • Free Ooma-to-Ooma calling worldwide
    • Choose almost any area code

    Get it now for just $89.99.

  • Amazon Makes Its Enterprise Cloud Storage Service Zocalo Available For All

    Amazon Makes Its Enterprise Cloud Storage Service Zocalo Available For All

    amazon-zocalo

    Amazon recently announced that they are making their secure document sharing and storage enterprise service Zocalo available to all.

    This news was released on the same day when Dropbox, their cloud storage competitor, announced increased storage and lower prices for their pro customers.

    Zocalo last month sprung into a limited preview with very belligerent price points. An end user receives 200 GB in cloud storage for $5 per month per user. The user can then take advantage of the service to upload new versions, store all sorts of files, comment within and on files, and much more, from any device including Macs, PCs, and other iOS and Android powered devices.

    In the meantime, Zocalo is being managed by IT admins who are integrating the service with surviving corporate directories like the Active directory, allowing the users to first sign in with their surviving Active Directory authorizations.

    In a recent blogpost, Amazon confirmed that the Zocalo service is now available to all their AWS customers including a free trial period of 30 days.

    Even though Zocalo is designed for the enterprise crowd, most of whom are on-premise solutions and still paying for legacy, to some extent, it is a competitor of other consumer-first services including Dropbox, which is not is not aiming to stretch further into the expert business markets, where it is in tough competition with other cloud storage rivals, including Google Drive and Box.

    Zocalo is not Amazon’s first cloud storage service: the company also offers consumer grade service like Amazon Cloud Drive, whose greatest advantage is its assimilation with Amazon’s Fire phone.

  • IFA 2014: Samsung To Incorporate Netflix and Amazon 4K Ultra HD TV Apps

    IFA 2014: Samsung To Incorporate Netflix and Amazon 4K Ultra HD TV Apps

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    Samsung are partnering up with Netflix, Amazon, Maxdome, Chili, and Wuaki.tv with the intent of incorporating loads of 4K Ultra HD content to their smart TVs. The South Korean electronics giant is expected to launch Amazon’s Ultra HD service in October. Meanwhile, Netflix’s 4K app is going to be stretched to Europe later this year, making a debut with “House of Cards”, the political drama.

    Samsung also reinforced its cooperation with major European content partners, including maxdome, Wuaki.tv, and CHILI “to secure more UHD content to work towards a more robust UHD ecosystem.”

    According to the visual display’s executive vice president at Samsung’s electronics, Won Jin Lee, the UHD era has begun making it important to provide customers with more options as far as the UHD content goes. This will help in continuing the widespread adoption of UHD content. Won further added that Samsung offers its consumers with a wider range of UHD content for them to enjoy on their immersive Curved Ultra HD TVs.

    This is definitely not Samsung’s first venture into the 4K UHD content market. Prior to World Cup, Samsung partnered up with Portugal Telecom and with RTP, the Portuguese broadcaster to show live warm-up matches employing the MEO content service on 4K TVs across the world.

    The next big step for the excellent quality TV revolution is to come up with a secure UHD content distribution solution with the SCSA (Secure Content Storage Association). Samsung is working with SCSA’s founding partners including Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Western Digital, and ScanDisk and have sprung a 500GB external hard drive which is pre-loaded with 40 tiles having 4K picture quality that includes ‘life of Pi’ and ‘ Star Trek Into Darkness’.

  • Amazon Lowers Its Cloud Prices after Google Slash

    Recent cut by Amazon of its cloud prices are still not enough to rival Google's cloud storage prices. The slash by amazon comes after Google announced a reduction of its storage costs – Google made a reduction on its pricing by a very high margin compared to those of their competitors such as Microsoft, Rackspace, and HP.

    Google newly introduced "sustained use" pricing model has enabled it to pass savings onto users of its cloud. This compares to Amazons model, which guarantee customers saving after they pay upfront.

    Amazon`s senior vice president defended its stand on not responding to Google new model. He said that the company lowered their prices on many occasions without any external or competitive pressure.

    Amazon and Google seem to be at the same level though their prices on key areas such as storage are still significantly different. Google has a flat rate pricing for storage while Amazon does tiered pricing.

    Amazon`s price change indicates an emerging competition among businesses offering cloud computing services. Amazon's strategy, using lower prices, has enabled it to build a successful brand. Google price change is a threat, one that deserves a response, to its cloud business margins. This comes at a time when Google and Microsoft have made continuous investment aimed at grabbing a portion of the revenue streaming into Amazon Web Services.

    Both companies have being experiencing problems that affect their core businesses. Google, for instance, has closed some of its business such as Google Reader and Wave and at times made price changes without warning their customers. This has negatively affected their customers who are now skeptical of their innovations.

    Microsoft despite having the most successful software business customers are suspicious of their products as they will be difficult to license or be costly.
    Amazon`s core business-retail- ensures use of cheap storage, ideal cloud computing, and relatively low margins.

  • Amazon Steps up the Pressure with More Storage Price Cuts

    In a move that has left many of their competitors stranded, Amazon has announced that it will reduce the prices for two of its most popular storage products. The announcement that was made by the public cloud leader through a blog post will take effect from February and will affect the S3 storing of files service and the Elastic Block Store that holds information from databases. These price drops might seem too little but is actually substantial.  The customers who store more than 5000 TB on S3 a month will receive a 22 percent decrease, which is a reduction in cost per gigabyte from 5.5 cents to 4.3 cents.

    Two new slices of physical servers that are able to handle computing workloads were also announced. These options are m3.large and m3.medium.They are good not only for legacy applications and databases, but they also have many other uses. The good thing about these instances is that they can be used on any applications not those that require heavy duty graphics or memory resources.

    This drop makes it the 40th price drop by the company. The lowering of prices and launching of new features is a strategy Amazon frequently uses. This is because many companies choose it, thus they are able to buy the products in bulk and later customize it to suit the customers’ needs. The reduction of price mostly helps to make the company more attractive to  the customers .Other companies like Rackspace, Microsoft and Google also try to play the price reduction card  but  Amazon always tops them by coming up with new things that pose a great challenge to the competition. With this latest reduction, Amazon has made things worse for the other companies.

  • Amazon Upgrades its Virtual Private Cloud Technology with IP Configurability


    Amazon Web Services has extended IP configurability across its virtual private cloud technology hence giving developers more control over how they configure IP addresses for rented virtual machines within the cloud.

    Announced last week on Wednesday, this advance means that admins now have greater IP allocation options in the premier cloud technology. They can choose whether to allocate public IP addresses to rented virtual machines when instances are deployed in their default Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subnet or not. It also means they are allowed to give instances in non-default subnets public IPs preceding launch.

    Amazon's Management Console supports this public IP feature, so GUI aficionados will be granted access to the features during the instance creation wizard via tickboxes.

    The capabilities of these changes bring with them potential uses in isolation of apps from each other through separate subnet placement, for example, and allocation of a separate public IP to each in order to feed out separately to the Internet.

    With all VM instances functioning within a VPC, developers are getting a more controllable network substrate and – theoretically – an easier-to-handle security model. The changes come as the company is in the process of elevating VPC to the default AWS environment. This makes the default operating environment for every new elastic compute (EC2) instance a private network.

  • Google Upgrades Platform Cloud and Joins Microsoft and Amazon's Cloud Level


    Google has upgraded its platform cloud to include a dedicated memcache, rendering the company's technology characteristically akin to the floating silos operated by Microsoft and Amazon. The open source object caching system, Memcache, is a dedicated serviced for storage of key-value data from multiple servers in pooled RAM. Its adoption by Google App Engine (GAE) comes packaged in the 1.8.2 release of the platform cloud.

    Alongside the dedicated Memcache is support for Git Push-to-Deploy, which allows developers to use the Git code management service. Google has also introduced updates relating to App Engine Modules, which enable developers to break large applications into modular components capable of sharing services. These updates also include Eclipse and PHP support.

    Dedicated memcache will bring developers performance and capacity guarantees for $0.12 cents per gigabyte per hour. They will be able to purchase in-memory data caching capacity leading to more data being cached, and with a higher cache hit rate the applications will be faster and Datastore costs reduced. This is according to a blog post Google cloud product manager Chris Ramsdale wrote.

    Google's service will be competing with Microsofts's Windows Azure Caching with memcache protocol support and Amazon's Amazon ElastiCache. Websites that use Memcache are Craigslist, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

  • Facebook, Google and Amazon reportedly outsourcing new storage product orders to Taiwan-based ODMs

    Inexpensive data storage boxes from Taiwan are being picked up in lieu of storage arrays from Dell, EMC, HP and NetApp by Facebook and other vast data-centre operators such as Google and Amazon.

    Supply chain insiders say that the juggernaut that is Facebook is about to buy bargain storage kits from original design manufacturers, or ODMs, based in Taiwan. Original design manufacturers work with customer specifications to design and produce hardware. Both Quanta Computer and Wistron will be likely bidders for Facebook's supply contracts.

    Facebook looks to save a small fortune by using arrays defined by its Open Compute Project standard and running its own software. It's quite possible this may not even occur, as reports from Far East supply chain sources tend to be a little questionable, but the information is interesting nonetheless.

    Using ODMs for storage gear doesn't come as a big surprise; Facebook is merely following a trend. According to Digitimes, Google buys all its servers from ODMs and Amazon follows suit about 30 per cent of the time.

    Sales of standardised hardware via distribution channel partners to the West and beyond could start happening anytime. Amazon, Baidu and other cloud giants are likely to expand their services into the cloud; businesses are purchasing fewer storage arrays because of the cloud, so it's no surprise that Amazon, Baidu and others are making forays into this area.

    DEY Storage, a startup company, claims it can follow the trend started by Amazon, Facebook and Google. The company claims they can unbundle "storage management from the physical layer to provide customers with a storage system which is massively scalable and designed to align and integrate with their services-based infrastructures".

    The current crop of servers, storage and network switch vendors may have to look to Taiwan for a new model if they want to continue to be successful.

  • Cloud Storage Vendors Aggressively Slash Prices Again

    Since November, the three leading cloud storage vendors have slashed prices for data storage per month, offering massive discounts for the first terabyte. Amazon Web Services reduced prices by up to 28% to 9.5 cents, extending reductions to its nine regional centers. Google Cloud Storage dropped data rates by 30% to 8.5 cents. Microsoft Windows Azure slashed its prices by 12% to 8.5 cents.

    Vendors are cutting prices to attract as many early cloud adopters as possible, with the knowledge that switching service provider later might prove to be difficult for customers.

    "It's definitely a race, but it's a land grab," said Terri McClure, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "The race is to the bottom to get more data into the cloud. They are trying to accelerate adoption because the service is very sticky. Once data is in the cloud, it's hard to switch providers."

    Steve Zivanic, vice president of marketing at Nirvanix, a San Diego based cloud storage provider, said the three dormant cloud providers keep competing on price because their services are similar.

    "If you have no technology differentiation between clouds, then it's the same as disk-drive vendors waging a war for the lowest price per raw drive," said Steve Zivanic, "The key is to wrap advanced storage services around the physical drive and sell business value of that overall service. The price cuts between Amazon, Google and Azure are basically battles for cheap, raw online disk."

    An analyst for IT infrastructure and cloud at 451 Research Cloud, Carl Brooks said that while storage prices have come down, the costs of bandwidth, replication, security, compliance and maintenance, make the price of cloud storage high compared to on-premises storage.

    "Cloud providers are well over the cost of actually provisioning on-premises storage," said Carl Brooks. "Hard drives are almost a commodity at this point. We have not seen that in the cloud market. The trend behind the price cuts are more about cloud providers trying to get ahead of the trend. They don't want to be undercut by other vendors."

    "Amazon, Azure and Google cut prices to continue to be relevant," Brooks said further. "You are going to see price competition for a couple of years, and you will see cloud service providers go out of business.