OMG, can you imagine if Amazon let you rent DVDs?

There is huge amount of news on Amazon's Kindle release.  i have ordered mine.  It is hard to argue with $199 especially if you already are an Amazon Prime user.  Amazon is figuring out that Prime is its money making user base.  As ZDNet points out the Amazon Prime users are where the money is for Amazon.

2x to 5x: Spending levels of Amazon Prime subscribers over non-Prime subscribers.

Here is the Kindle Fire Commercial.

But, here is a good question to think about.  Given Netflix self-inflicted wounds of separating DVD Rental from streaming, what happens if Amazon Prime starts a DVD Rental business?  You can rent movies from Amazon through streaming.  Why couldn't Amazon have yellow envelopes to compete against Netflix's Red envelopes.  Sorry Qwikster's red envelopes.

Amazon has distribution warehouses around the world.  Now you could say why waste the time to rent DVDs.  Streaming is the future.  If this was true why doesn't Amazon get out of the business of selling DVDs?  This is all about economics and business models.  Reinventing Retail!!!

Can Amazon Prime be in the same business as Qwiksterh (Netflix) DVD rental?  Yes.  Will they.  If the numbers make sense.  Why not?

Amazon Silk Browser, technical explanation and where the Amazon Silk name came from

Watch this video to get an explanation of how Amazon Silk has been designed to leverage Amazon's Cloud.

And, where does the Silk name come from?

A thread of silk is an invisible yet incredibly strong connection between two different things.  In our case it is the connection between your kindle fire and Amazon Compute Cloud.

Here is the consumer explanation of Silk.

Amazon Silk

What is Amazon Silk?

Amazon Silk is a new kind of web browser, built from the ground up to leverage the power and capabilities of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to fundamentally rethink the level of performance and functionality that a browser can provide.

Do people really need another browser?

Browser development has really accelerated in recent years, with new entrants emerging and big upgrades from legacy browsers.  If we only thought we could deliver “another” browser, we wouldn’t have bothered.  In the case of Amazon Silk, however, we are very excited about the potential for this “cloud-powered” browser to truly delight our customers.

How does “the cloud” make this browser faster?

With Amazon Silk, most of the heavy-lifting is shifted from the processor on your device to our powerful AWS servers.  Access to such lightning fast CPUs, expansive memory, and huge network connections allows the performance of Amazon Silk to transcend the capabilities of your local device.  Amazon Silk isn’t just about massive computing power, however.  Because much of the intelligence of the browser is in the cloud, a number of performance enhancements become possible, including squeezing the utmost throughput out of your “last mile” connection, smart caching both on your device and on our servers, and on-the-fly content optimizations.  In addition, Amazon Silk has the ability to learn about traffic patterns on individual sites over time, allowing it to begin fetching the next page that users may wish to visit.

Is Kindle Fire like the Wii of Game Systems, simpler and cheaper? with a bit of help from the Cloud

I've placed my order for a Kindle Fire.  Some iPad users will make the point the Fire has no 3G, only 8GB of memory, no camera, and no microphone. But, who can argue with a $199 price point?  This is like the Xbox/Playstation vs. Wii where a simpler cheaper device enables a lower price point.

Some apps are mentioned as being evangelized for the platform.

Amazon will go through its Appstore for Android, which has more than 15,000 apps, and filter out those apps that won’t work on the Kindle Fire for users who visit the store from a Kindle Fire. The company is approaching app developers to build new apps and optimize existing titles for the Kindle Fire, but it’s not putting out its own SDK. Instead it will encourage them to use Google’s existing tools. Amazon has started talks with Twitter, Facebook, Pandora and Netflix to optimize apps for Kindle Fire, but it’s too early to say what will happen.

But, I wouldn't hold your breath for Netflix optimized for the Kindle Fire.

What the Kindle Fire Silk browser does is enable Amazon to conduct analytics on the browsing experience that few can see.

Finally, Silk leverages the collaborative filtering techniques and machine learning algorithms Amazon has built over the last 15 years to power features such as "customers who bought this also bought..." As Silk serves up millions of page views every day, it learns more about the individual sites it renders and where users go next. By observing the aggregate traffic patterns on various web sites, it refines its heuristics, allowing for accurate predictions of the next page request. For example, Silk might observe that 85 percent of visitors to a leading news site next click on that site's top headline. With that knowledge, EC2 and Silk together make intelligent decisions about pre-pushing content to the Kindle Fire. As a result, the next page a Kindle Fire customer is likely to visit will already be available locally in the device cache, enabling instant rendering to the screen.

And, there is the cloud.

With Kindle Fire, you have instant access to all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, the convenience of Amazon Whispersync, our revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser, the speed and power of a state-of-the-art dual-core processor, a vibrant touch display with 16 million colors in high resolution, and a light 14.6 ounce design that's easy to hold with one hand - all for only $199. We're offering premium products, and we're doing it at non-premium prices."

Can you imagine if Netflix shipped the Kindle Fire.  We'll charge you for your cloud usage, separate your shopping from your video watching, and Games are on a separate website you need to subscribe to.

Bundling services in interesting ways is what customers want.  Amazon wants the data that allows them to create new services.

High Temperatures in Amazon.com Warehouse send employees to hospital, when will this happen in a data center?

Everyone is excited about raising temperatures in the data center to reduce cooling requirements.  Well not everyone.  The people who work in the data center can't be too thrilled.  Don't think this is a problem.  KomoNews reports on amazon.com warehouse employees going to the hospital for heat-stress.

Report: Amazon.com warehouse heat sent several to hospital

By Associated Press Published: Sep 20, 2011 at 2:53 PM PM

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) - A newspaper says sweltering conditions inside an Amazon.com warehouse in eastern Pennsylvania over the summer sent several employees to hospitals and led to a federal inspection.

The (Allentown) Morning Call reports that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued no fines but made recommendations on how the company could improve its heat-stress management plan at the Breinigsville warehouse.

If you think you can hide information like this.  Consider the newspaper received the information as part of the Freedom of Information Act.

The newspaper cited documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request in reporting that an emergency room doctor at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest called an OSHA hotline in June after seeing several workers. A company official later said 15 employees had heat-related symptoms, and six were treated at a hospital.

AWS launches US Government Region - GovCloud

AWS announced GovCloud a new AWS region specifically designed for the US gov't users.

AWS GovCloud (US)

AWS GovCloud is an AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. Previously, government agencies with data subject to compliance regulations such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs how organizations manage and store defense-related data, were unable to process and store data in the cloud that the federal government mandated be accessible only by U.S. persons.

Part of what AWS has done is isolate the Region to have only US citizens.

Because AWS GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by U.S. persons only, government agencies can now manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with strict federal requirements. The new Region offers the same high level of security as other AWS Regions and supports existing AWS security controls and certifications such as FISMA, SAS-70, ISO 27001, FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, and PCI DSS Level 1. AWS also provides an environment that enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations.