The new outbound data transfer pricing will be:

• First 10 TB per Month: $0.15 per GB
• Next 40 TB per Month: $0.11 per GB
• Next 100 TB per Month: $0.09 per GB
• Over 150 TB per Month: $0.08 per GB

Amazon CloudFront, their content delivery network (CDN), has also reduced rates for the service by $0.02/GB. Amazon’s Jeff Barr noted, “We are constantly working to drive our costs down and become more operationally efficient. We then pass on those cost savings to our customers in the form of lower prices.”

In other cloud computing news, last month Rackspace raised their cloud service monthly base pricing by 50% to a base rate of $150/month and reduced their overage charges.

Update: Om Malik has a related post from a chat he had with the Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in Munich.

Just add the code “AVODGIFT” and you can grab $4 in free movies. Load this Amazon page and in the middle a box will appear for a code – enter the code above. It looks like most movies are $2.99 and there are a bunch of free holiday movies as well. It looks like the video on demand is about a month behind the rental business. For example, my Blockbuster Express machine notes that District 9 is available today to rent but Amazon shows it as available on January 19,2010.

If you download a movie or television show, leave it in the comments with a brief review.

Coupon Terms:

• This amount reflects all of the credit you have on Amazon’s Video On Demand and MP3 stores plus any Gift Card credit you may have. Some of your promotional dollars may be restricted to particular stores within Amazon. Gift Card dollars are applicable to all Amazon products.
• Pending orders may not be reflected in the amount presented.
• Promotional codes for all Amazon promotions may be entered in the text field. Be sure you enter the appropriate code.
• We’ll charge your default credit card for any portion of the order not covered by your claim codes and gift balance.
• A US credit card is required for verification of residency for all digital purchases (even when you pay with a claim code).
• To confirm that your gift card or promotion was applied, please check your order confirmation, which will be sent to you by e-mail.

Earlier this month Amazon announced the launch of their textbooks trade-in service. This new textbook service is different than the normal Amazon used book sales option.  The textbooks must be in good condition. Once you mail the books to Amazon, you receive a credit in your Amazon account — no cash is provided. Since textbooks and typically heavy, you should factor in the shipping costs as part of the trade-in.

The big player in the textbook space is Chegg – you can rent textbooks and also sell your books to Chegg for cash or credit. Chegg has raised over $160 million since 2005 which includes $57 million in funding last month.

Here’s an Amazon pricing example using the fabulous Intermediate Accounting textbook:

• New – $155.10
• Used – starts from $120
• Trade-in price – $83.80

Check out more about the Amazon textbooks trade-in program on Webpronews and Walletpop. Walletpop also has a chart of 10 books and their prices across a variety of services.

Today Amazon has made two announcements regarding pricing for the S3 storage service. First, Amazon has setup a dedicated “sales” site to help convince business users to switch to Amazon cloud computing services. It’s called the AWS Economics Center and has lots of charts and graphs.

The other change Amazon has made is regarding the pricing for S3. Pricing for the largest users — those using multi-petabytes will see a 15% reduction on their usage fees. The discount is for the US and EU regions. The EU region is also receiving a discount for overall S3 usage at any level and EC2 computing usage as well.

The other change applies to all customers through June 30, 2010, “data Transfer into AWS will be free of charge from now through June 30th, 2010, making it even easier for customers to get their data into AWS.”

Looks like Amazon is on a mission to acquire customers.

Just add the code MP34FREE to your account and you can grab $3 in free MP3 music.

Here are the terms of the offer:

• Promotional offer valid for a limited time only and subject to change. Promotional offer is valid from November 23, 2009 12:00 AM PST through November 30, 2009 11:59 PM PST. You must redeem the code by November 30, 2009 11:59 PM PST.
• If you’ve previously entered a promotional code, clicking the “Enter Your Code” button above will show your remaining balance.
• After your purchase, you can confirm the dollar amount of the code was applied by checking your order confirmation, which will be sent to you by e-mail.

The popular songs list shows most songs at $0.99 so you could grab 3 tracks although some are priced at $1.29. If you redeem the code, leave a comment with the songs you picked up!

So many startups I talk to are using Amazon’s cloud computing services in some fashion. For example, Twitter uses S3 for icon storage. We use S3 for storage on all of our projects including all static images and files on CenterNetworks.

• GetGlue destination site goes live – ReadWriteWeb and Mashable
• New FBFoundations Features and Updates – Stay n Alive
• Amazon AWS launches New EC2 High-Memory Instances – Amazon
• A simple flowchart on Creately about Creately – Creatly
• Cart Cobranding, Old Journal-Style Love, bug fixes – Smugmug

Amazon expects the acquisition to close this fall. Hsieh notes that there are no plans to cut headcount and he and the other executives plan to stay on at Zappos.

From Marketwatch, Amazon said in a statement that under terms of the deal, it will buy all outstanding shares, warrants and options of Zappos in exchange for roughly 10 million Amazon shares with their value based on average closing prices in June and July. In addition, Amazon “will provide Zappos employees with $40 million in cash and restricted stock units,” Amazon said.

Update: Based on today’s Amazon share price, the deal is worth more than the $807 million reported in the Amazon release. It looks like the final price will be determined when the deal closes.

One can only wonder if Zappos awesome usage of Twitter played a part in the acquisition. Will Netflix be next?

“There’s heavy call buying and the stock is up on renewed takeover talk, with Amazon being mentioned specifically,” said Fred Ruffy, the senior options strategist at WhatsTrading.com, a New York-based provider of options market analysis. “It’s pretty typical of speculative call buying.”

From Bloomberg, “Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation. Patty Smith, a spokeswoman for Seattle-based Amazon.com, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. ”

Amazon stock is up as well today although the market is up overall.

(side note – it’s nice to see Bloomberg listing the email addresses of their journalists at the end of the story. It would be great if all newspaper/magazine sites did this as well.)

Today Amazon has announced their third annual “Startup Challenge” which offers startups that are using AWS a chance to win a variety of prizes and service credits. Startups in United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Israel are eligible to enter and the entry period ends on August 25th. Also, startups must have earned no more than $5 million in annual revenue and/or raised more than $5 million in venture capital funding.

The top prize is $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits, mentoring sessions from an AWS technical expert, and premium gold support for one year. There are a variety of other winners as well.

What’s great about the Startup Challenge is that unlike many startup contests, it doesn’t appear that Amazon is taking any equity for the prize amounts (of course you should check the rules to verify). My take is simple – if you use AWS in any form, submit your entry because, at a minimum, you get a $25 credit (which for CN is like 6 mos free service).

It appears the free processing was initially available only to non-profit organizations but is now open to any business.

There are a few restrictions:

• you can only sell up to $2 million – after that you pay fees
• you must have an average order size of more than $5
• the account must be new – created after April 29, 2009

One additional thing to consider if you use the service as a trial for subscriptions (where you charge your customer monthly/yearly/etc.). You will need to stay with Amazon for as long as the customer wants to remain a paying customer or you will need to ask them to move to whatever other service you use. This is something I’ve thought a lot about as I look at billing options for my startup. It might be worth testing Amazon on a one-time billing option only.

An Amazon judging panel will review all contest submissions and select five finalists based on:

• Creativity
• Overall appeal
• Likelihood of inspiring viewers to shop with Amazon

Amazon notes “suitable to air to a family audience on a national network.” Apparently they will pick finalists and let viewers pick a winner. One winner the Amazon judges picks will win $10k and the user winner will win $10k as well.

This type of “crowdsourced” ad creation seems to be pretty popular these days. For a small prize, Amazon gets press and interested customers – it’s a smart move. The customers who create videos will also pimp them around providing for even more awareness of the contest and Amazon.

The top 10 (in order) are: Amazon, Oracle, SAP, Inventec, IBM, Bharti Airtel, Quanta Computer, Wistra, Tencent and Acer. Other notables: Microsoft (22), Verizon (32), Google (37), and Adobe (99). Apple fell 17 positions from 2nd to 19th and Google dropped from 11th to 37th.

I am wondering when Amazon’s Web services business will pass the product sites in annual revenue.

Amazon explains that if the import or export is set to take a week using your Internet connection, the Import/Export option might be the answer. They continue, “If you have large amounts of data to load and an Internet connection with limited bandwidth, the time required to prepare and ship a portable storage device to AWS can be a small percentage of the time it would take to transfer your data over the internet.”

The cost is $80 per drive plus $2.49 per hour of data loading. Amazon will ship the drive back to you at their expense.

As a heavy user of S3 – this is an awesome option – especially for creating off-site backups. For a couple hundred dollars, you get an external drive with all of your data which you can store offsite. Since it’s a one time import or export, I guess the idea is that you hook up the new drive to the Internet for partial backups after the initial export is completed.

Twitter

I posted some issues I had (am having) with my Twitter account for my startup. I still have not received any sort of reply from Twitter staff to my post or my trouble ticket in their system. I asked Twitter investor Fred Wilson for an update and he told me to go to Get Satisfaction as "some users seem to like it".

Amazon

I had an issue with Amazon Web Services and after clicking help, I posted a message to their customer service form. About 24 hours later I received a very generic reply that the person was going to have to investigate my issue further but he did note that I can’t reply to that email. So that left me with nowhere to turn as the days clicked by without a resolution.

After multiple days I turned to my friends and asked for help. I was able to chat with an Amazon executive (who actually helped me on the weekend while he was on a business trip!) and he got the case moving. I can say that the issue has been resolved to my satisfaction. I would suggest that Amazon look at how they handle support emails on the web services side – it’s a bit odd to me to have such poor email customer service on the web services side when the product side (normal amazon.com) has always worked so well.

Update: one note, the email from the support person who resolved the issue also comes from a no-reply mailbox. I have a follow up question regarding how to handle part of the problem and now I am back to square 1.

Google

I realized about two weeks ago that I never received a required form from Google AdSense. I headed over to the support section for Google AdSense and was promptly told that there is only "limited" email support for Google AdSense. I honestly have no idea what limited means but I learned that I will never know. No matter what I tried, I was never able to reach an email form to even ask for help – all I got was the run-around inside Google’s supposed help section.

After a friend provided me with an email address for a person in the AdSense team, I sent off an email and received a reply pretty quickly stating that I would get a followup from someone who could help me. It has now been 10 days without a response.

Summary

I do wonder (especially on Twitter) if the so-called celebrities receive actual support when needed. Does Shaq or Britney have a hotline for support when or if there’s a request?

If you read CN you know that I put customer service at the top of the list when it comes to a product or service. One of the first posts on CN was a web apps customer service face-off (Dogster received the only A grade). It’s certainly disappointing that it seems like to get any sort of help from the companies I’ve listed you need to know someone.