Amazon

Reflexive has announced that they have been acquired by Amazon. Reflexive is a maker and distributor of casual games and apparently Amazon will help Reflexive reach a new set of customers for their games. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Reflexive CEO Lars Brubaker noted on the acquisition:

As I'm sure you can all imagine this is a very exciting day for us at Reflexive. It means we'll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon's amazing distribution channel. With Amazon we will bring a huge new group of customers into play.

At Reflexive we have always prided ourselves on maintaining good relationships with everyone in the industry, and are excited that Amazon shares that philosophy. We intend to provide the best distribution platform anywhere, and to continue working openly with all the participants of the casual games space. Together it is our priority to continue this inclusive attitude going forward.

What this means for all you developers is that it's time to get excited about your future with Reflexive. We can't talk about everything yet, but we'll be in touch shortly with more information. All of the features that you know and love about GameCenterSolution will still be available to you now and in the future, and you can continue to submit games through the Reflexive site. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us at developersupport@gamecentersolution.com.

I've created enough casual games in my career to know that they were hot, are hot and will continue to be hot. They bring together players, developers, aggregators and advertisers into a unique opportunity where everyone benefits. SellMoreGames and Gamezebo have more details on the acquisition.

Last April Amazon reduced pricing on data transfer on their Amazon S3 online storage service. Yesterday Amazon announced plans to reduce the price for the storage portion of S3. Basic users won't see a change as the base price remains 15 cents per TB.

For heavy users, the pricing moves to a tiered model. Over 50 TB of storage is 14 cents/TB and it gradually lowers to 12 cents/TB over 500 TB of storage. I wonder how many Amazon S3 clients are using over 500 TB of data storage. It's like saying if you drive more than 30,000 miles in a month in your car, we will give you 20 cents off each gallon of gas.

We were using S3 for all static files on CN but I've found in my travels that the domain didn't resolve correctly so images and CSS files would appear broken. I must have set something wrong in the DNS.

This morning Mike Arrington wrote a great advice piece to Amazon on the Kindle.

The gist of Mike's argument is that Amazon should offer Kindle up as an operating system and reference design. This would allow third parties to create Kindle compatible devices in the same way that Dell, for example, makes PCs compatible with Windows. This would create an ecosystem around the product which would be incredibly powerful. And at the same time, Amazon would still be doing what it really wants to do, which is to sell books. By offering their own product which they should continue to sell, they get to work out all the kinks without any meddling third party companies telling it what to do. But by opening up the platform, they really get to have their control cake and to eat their large marketplace cake too.

Interestingly, this is really what Google should be doing with Android. Google is indeed licensing the Android OS to third party phone manufacturers, but by not creating and controling an initial reference design they are leaving important pieces of the design to third parties, in a field (mobile phones) where important design elements can be critical.

Anyway, getting back to Kindle, I have been a fan of the product concept but I do believe it will be very hard for Amazon to build up the kind of market that they really need and should have with such a device without getting some help. I hope they take Mike's advice.

Amazon has announced this morning their acquisition of AbeBooks. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. AbeBooks is a marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books. AbeBooks reports over 110 million books listed for sale and "tens-of-thousands" of sales every day.

Think of AbeBooks in the same way you think of purchasing from a third-party dealer/seller on Amazon's books category. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2008.

Amazon and AbeBooks have worked together for years now. AbeBooks began online operations in 1996 and is based in Canada.

AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand-alone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia. AbeBooks will maintain all of its websites, including its Canadian website with Canada-specific content, such as reviews of Canadian-authored books and interviews of Canadian writers.

Amazon has posted an announcement regarding what happened last weekend with their S3 storage service and the downtime of nearly 8 hours. We covered the outage extensively here on CenterNetworks. Overall the downtime ran from 8:40am Pacific Time to 5:00pm Pacific Time. It's cute how they call it an "availability event" - I need to add this to my list of synonyms for the words dead, down, outage and not working.

Here's their final conclusion:

We've now determined that message corruption was the cause of the server-to-server communication problems. More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single bit corrupted such that the message was still intelligible, but the system state information was incorrect. We use MD5 checksums throughout the system, for example, to prevent, detect, and recover from corruption that can occur during receipt, storage, and retrieval of customers' objects. However, we didn't have the same protection in place to detect whether this particular internal state information had been corrupted. As a result, when the corruption occurred, we didn't detect it and it spread throughout the system causing the symptoms described above. We hadn't encountered server-to-server communication issues of this scale before and, as a result, it took some time during the event to diagnose and recover from it.

Overall I would say that Amazon did a good job in keeping everyone informed via their health status page. They have made some changes that will let their servers become more "chatty" in the future and hopefully prevent this type of outage and severe downtime from happening again.

As most of the Internet world knows (or saw), yesterday Amazon's S3 cloud storage was down for over 8 hours. We reported on the S3 downtime scene as updates were provided. We are waiting for official word from Amazon on what happened, why it happened and what the Amazon Web Services team is doing to prevent future issues from taking down the ultra-popular storage service. My guess is that we won't hear anything until mid-week.

In the meantime, Om Malik of GigaOm has been able to get an update from Amazon. Here's the statement:

As a distributed system, the different components of S3 need to be aware of the state of each other. For example, this awareness makes it possible for the system to decide which redundant physical storage server to route a request to.

We experienced a problem with those internal system communications, leaving the components unable to interact properly, and customers unable to successfully process requests. After exploring several alternatives, the team determined it had to take the service offline to restore proper communication and then bring service online again.

These are sophisticated systems and it generally takes a while to get to root cause in such a situation—we will be providing our customers with more information when we’ve fully investigated the incident. We’re proud of our operational performance in operating S3 for almost 2.5 years, and our customers have generally been pleased with the reliability and performance of the service. But any downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until it is perfect.

Amazon S3 is used heavily by a number of services behind Amazon’s retail websites. Those services were impacted, but the retail website did not show noticeable problems because it mostly uses cached data.

So what it sounds like is that people stand on each corner and yell from one to another. If the 3rd person in line doesn't hear the 2nd, they take the service down because something might be wrong at the 2nd person's station.

It's good to hear that Amazon uses S3 for storage on their own sites. They should feel the same pain that other publishers do. Check out all of our Amazon S3 coverage.

Amazon's S3 storage service appears to be down. CenterNetworks images are broken because of it and I had to move the style sheet back so the site at least renders correctly. Sites like Twitter have massive broken images currently because Amazon S3 is down.

We will keep updating this post until the service has recovered. As of Noon Eastern time, the S3 service is down.

Amazon's S3 service was also down this past February and Amazon explained the reasons for the outage and downtime a few days later. There has to be a way to failover when S3 is down.

As always report in if you are having issues with Amazon S3.

Update: Amazon S3 clients are now posting outage messages on the forums. It appears EC2 is working ok.

Update 2: Amazon is now reporting on their health dashboard that Amazon S3 has "elevated error rates".

Update 3 - 12:55pm: Now down over an hour, Amazon says they are "pursuing several paths of corrective action. Sites affected include SmugMug and Twitter. Twitter is up with no images while SmugMug had to take the service down since so much of it relies on Amazon's services.

Update 4 - 1:55pm: Amazon now reporting, "10:33 AM PDT A quick update that we believe this is an issue with the communication between several Amazon S3 internal components. We do not have an ETA at this time but will continue to keep you updated."

Update 5 - 3:45pm: We are now down over 3.5 hours - Amazon's latest update, "12:25 PM PDT We have restored communication between additional hosts and are continuing this work across the rest of the fleet. Thank you for your continued patience."

Update 6 - 6:00pm: Here's Amazon's last update, "2:36 PM PDT We have restored all internal communication across Amazon S3 hosts. We have started the multi-step process to begin accepting requests across Amazon S3 locations."

With Yahoo signing away their advertising business today to Google, I thought it would be interesting to look at the major search engines and see who handles their advertising. Have a look at the list below and check out just how dominant Google is. You wonder why no one is using the other search engines -- it's easy, if the search engine can't sell ads, perhaps their technology isn't as good either, right? Please add other engines in the comments and I will add them to the list.

	Company	Advertising Partner	Notes
	Google	Google
	Yahoo	Yahoo/Google	Google ads to begin in three months.
	Ask	Google
	Microsoft	Microsoft
	YouTube	Google
	AOL	Google
	Facebook	n/a	Facebook runs their "social ads".
	hakia	Yahoo	Per the conference call today, hakia will now be able to run Google ads as well
	Mahalo	Google	Mahalo no longer claims to be a search engine
	Wikia	n/a	No ads are displayed currently
	Twerq	n/a	No ads are displayed currently
	MySpace	Google
	a9	Amazon	Ads are related items from Amazon.com

The Talk Market believes eBay is so yesterday with its text and picture auctions. The Talk Market is a video marketplace. Think of it as short infomercials for the products listed on the service. The ordering process utilizes Amazon Web Services Flexible Payment Service and that's a good thing. Today Amazon has announced an investment in The Talk Market.

The company notes that their "patent-pending user-generated TV shopping channel platform enhances sellers' video presentations with dynamic graphic overlays, custom motion graphics and soundtracks." After viewing their jewelry videos, I can say that this might actually have potential to be a success. When buying an expensive piece of jewelry, it's good to see what it looks like "in-person" rather than just a few photos and some text. The jewelry is modeled and you can see what it looks like on a person. Naturally this isn't needed for a category like electronics.

The amount of the investment was not disclosed and the transaction closed last month. Sadly there's no embed option on the videos so you will need to check out their site to view the product videos.

Today was the "Day Of Outages" with Amazon down, Twitter down, and even comment replacement system Disqus had some outages. I was able to find the video below from the "cash money playas" which describes how to make money when your service is down. I am not endorsing these tactics, just sharing for educational purposes only.

view the video »