Next Tuesday is the annual holiday known as Valentine’s Day. The day is named after St. Valentine and over 150 million cards are exchanged – here’s the full history of this very special day. This year the new deal sites are holding a cage match with each site offering a deal with a national floral delivery service. Most of these deals expire asap so you should be quick if you want to grab some flowers for your sweetie. Also note that the delivery fees are higher for a delivery on Valentine’s day. Lastly, I see some of the local cities within the deal sites are also offering flower deals so make sure to check your local city before purchasing a national deal.

If you want to pick up flowers yourself, I am hearing the best deal for super fresh roses is Whole Foods with 2 dozen for $19.99. Make sure to call your local store to get current pricing. If you don’t have a Whole Foods in your area, Walmart is offering 1 dozen roses for $15 beginning today.

LivingSocial – offers $25 for $50 credit at Teleflora. I used this deal yesterday for some flowers for my mom who is recovering after some surgery – note, there is a $15 or more service fee and Teleflora added me to their email marketing list even though I specifically unchecked the boxes to be added to their lists. Voucher may be applied towards service costs.

Groupon – offers $20 for $40 credit at FTD.com. Voucher may be applied towards service costs.

Google Offers – from what I can tell, this deal has now expired but they were offering 2 dozen roses, vase and shipping for $45.

Amazon Local – offers $15 for $30 credit at ProFlowers. Voucher may be applied towards service costs.

Eversave – offers $25 for 2 movie tickets and a $10 gift card good at 1-800-flowers.com.

It’s important to note that there are tons of discount codes available for most of the online florists so make sure to spend a few minutes to find the best deal for the floral arrangement you are interested in.

(note: links to Groupon and LivingSocial contain affiliate code)

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Last week I was shopping at Staples and I played with the Amazon Kindle Fire. It really is a nice looking device, it’s thin and the 7″ size seems like a good portable tablet compared to the Galaxy Tab 10.1″ which I use nearly exclusively at home. Eventually I think I will get a 7″ tablet so that I can keep it in my car’s glove box for on-demand meetings and on-the-go connectivity (unless I finally upgrade my Windows Mobile 6 smartphone). There have been some posts about security issues and other flaws with the Kindle Fire but Amazon appears to be working on fixes. Marco Arment has a thorough and very critical review of the device.

If you want to get the Kindle Fire, I think today is your best chance to get a good deal. It’s been nearly impossible to find a good deal on the Kindle Fire since retailers other than Amazon (e.g. Staples, Office Max, etc.) don’t allow coupons to be used on Kindle products.

The deal is available today only and you need to have a Mastercard. Amazon and Mastercard are running a deal, for today only, that offers $10 off a $100 purchase and then an additional $10 certificate will be sent to you to use in the future on a $50 purchase. Make sure to read the terms and conditions of the offer.

So you can pick up the Kindle Fire for a net of $179 with free shipping and no tax for most.  The coupon can also be used on the Kindle Touch 3G and Kindle Keyboard 3G since they are over $100. If you want the Kindle Touch or basic Kindle, you will need a filler item to get over the $100 mark.

Find more stories about: Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Fire, tablet

The most popular deal request I am asked for help with continues to be the Apple iPod Touch. Even with this year clearly being the year of the tablet, it seems like everyone still wants to get an iPod Touch as a gift for a friend, colleague or family member. Last week I learned that HTC offers a similar device called the “Flyer” which is like an iPod Touch except that it is based on Android instead of iOS – I wonder why this hasn’t seemed to catch on as of yet (at least it’s not a popular item on the deal boards.

Here are this week’s top deals for the iPod Touch – frankly the Amazon deal is the best one because, for most, there is no sales tax. The key is that you should absolutely not purchase the iPod Touch at the Apple Store – save the cash and use it for apps or music!

Best Buy – Here the deal is on the 8GB model – for $189 plus a free $30 Best Buy gift card. (deal details)

Amazon – It seems Amazon has matched the deal from Best Buy (they seem to be matching a lot of electronics prices as of late) – purchase the 8GB model at Amazon for $189 and get $30 to use towards MP3 songs from the Amazon Music Store. Smart move here by Amazon because it gets you to buy songs from Amazon versus from iTunes. (deal details)

Target – If you want a larger iPod Touch, Target will be your best option. Purchase the 32GB iPod Touch for $295 and get a $40 Target gift card. (this is an in-store deal)

I have a 8GB iPod Touch and I really like it for walking – the Galaxy Tab has replaced most of my at-home general game playing.

Note: Amazon link is an aff link.

Find more stories about: Amazon, Apple, iPod, mp3

This might be the biggest deal of all of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. Amazon, the company known most recently for the launch of a brand new tablet called the Kindle Fire, is running a lightning deal for VHS tapes. Amazon, the company that powers the web infrastructure for thousands of major Internet companies through Amazon Web Services, is running a lightning deal for VHS tapes. Amazon, the company that allows you to watch television shows and movies instantly, is running a lightning deal for VHS tapes.

Specifically, the lightning deal is for, “Maxell T120GX/8PK VHS Cassette Standard Grade T-120, 6 Hour, 8 Pack”. I would be all over this but the tapes are only standard grade. I always look for premium grade in my VHS tapes.

I don’t know about you but when I think VHS tapes the first thing that comes to my mind is recording Kelly Kapowski on Saturday mornings back in the late 80′s.

You might be wondering why anyone would want to buy this 8-pack of VHS tapes. Well, first, they make great stocking stuffers. Second, they are great to teach your children about what life was like pre-Netflix. Thinking creatively, you could use the film as party poppers by offering a tape to each of your New Year’s Eve guests!

If you want in, you better hurry – the lightning deal ends in just about one hour! And in a shocker, over 15% of the quantity is already gone!

Note: The link to the VHS tapes is an aff link.

Find more stories about: Amazon, Black Friday, Video

Here’s an interesting offer that Amazon is making on some products for Amazon Prime members. If you aren’t in a rush to get your product, Amazon will give you a $1 coupon to use in their MP3 store instead of the free two-day shipping that comes with an Amazon Prime membership. The items will be delivered in 5-7 days which is the standard shipping option generally offered on an Amazon product.

It looks like this trade offer is only available in the U.S. and the coupons for the MP3 songs must be used by the end of January so I assume this offer will be available until the end of the year. You can read the full terms here.

My guess is that the products that will offer this shipping-for-mp3 trade will be those where Amazon has to use the real 2-day Fedex/UPS shipping rather than the ground shipping they use for a lot of their 2-day deliveries. For example, I ordered an ink cartridge for my Canon printer with 2-day shipping. The ink showed up in 2 days but was shipped from a very close location so Amazon was able to effectively ship it overnight to me (they shipped it after the first day) using the UPS Ground delivery method.

Someone on one of the deal boards said, “sell people Amazon Prime and then pay them not to use it.”

Find more stories about: Amazon, Black Friday, mp3

Amazon entered the daily deals space last month with their launch of AmazonLocal. The service launched on June 2 in Boise with deals sourced from LivingSocial (Amazon is an investor in LivingSocial). At the end of June, AmazonLocal added the following cities: Tacoma, Seattle and Bellevue in Washington State.

Today the AmazonLocal service has expanded into Southern California – the Los Angeles and Long Beach regions. The first deal in LA is for a canvas print (those sure seem popular on the daily deal sites!). Long Beach launches with the ever popular tanning session. So far 379 vouchers for the canvas prints have been purchased.

I like that AmazonLocal just provides the information about the deal and none of the “extra content” that Groupon does – content which I believe is a complete waste of money to build. People want the deals period.

You can use your Amazon account to check out and apparently the customer service is provided directly by Amazon — which is a good thing considering how super-responsive Amazon is when there is an issue.

Find more stories about: Amazon, AmazonLocal, daily deals, group buying

On Tuesday morning, hosting service Media Temple was out of service while the company dealt with a DNS resolution issue. Media Temple staff provided an overview of what happened in the comments section of my post.

Now today Amazon Web Services is down — actually only parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing offering is down. I use their S3 storage service and that is up and running. As of 9:00AM Eastern, the following message provides the current status related to the downtime, “6:09 AM PDT EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards resolution.”

It’s interesting to watch bloggers including Martin Bryant and Mike Butcher only point to the same set of sites (Quora, Foursquare, Reddit and Hootsuite) that use Amazon’s EC2 and are down. There are plenty of other sites that are down including Easybib, a site run by a close friend of mine that is the largest online bibliography site in the world. And Easybib is just one example of time-critical services that are affected. So while it’s easy for us to look at a few social media services that are affected, just think about all of the business, professional and utility services that are also currently down.

Update 10am Eastern – it looks like the problems are expanding – here’s the latest update:

6:59 AM PDT There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Launches of instance store AMIs are currently unaffected. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue.
7:40 AM PDT In addition to the EBS volume latencies, EBS-backed instances in the US-EAST-1 region are failing at a high rate. This is due to a high error rate for creating new volumes in this region.

You can follow the updates around the Amazon EC2 issues on the Amazon Health Dashboard. As with all downtime, please feel free to report in the comments if your site is down due to the Amazon issue.

Find more stories about: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, ec2, Web Hosting

This is no April Fool’s joke – this is damn serious. To celebrate the launch of the Amazon Android Appstore, Amazon is offering one application for free each day. Earlier this week Amazon offered the SwiftKey Keyboard for free — now it’s back to $1.79.

Today Amazon is offering the popular game Fruit Ninja for free. The Fruit Ninja team of ninjas note that they have sold over six million copies of the game worldwide. The game creators describe the game as, “a juicy action game enjoyed by millions of players around the world with squishy, splatty and satisfying fruit carnage! Become the ultimate bringer of sweet, tasty destruction with every slash.”

Amazon is also offering Angry Birds Rio for free — this appears to be a longer running deal but if you want the game, I’d suggest downloading soon because there is no specific end date listed. The game is basically the same as the Crush the Castle except instead of chucking rocks and bombs you chuck birds. The free game is ad-free and contains all 60 levels.

To get the free games, you need to install the Amazon Android Appstore onto your Android device. Here’s an overview of how to install the Appstore.

You can download both Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds Rio from the Amazon Android Appstore homepage or from within the Appstore after you load it onto your Android device.

If you are on an iPhone, sorry this deal isn’t for you. You can purchase both games from the iTunes App Store for $0.99 each.

Find more stories about: Amazon, Android, casual games, games, mobile

Earlier today Amazon announced the launch of their Cloud Drive service. Amazon describes the service, “these services (Cloud Drive plus their player apps for web and Android) enable customers to securely store music in the cloud and play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free.”

MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka notes that the launch, “isn’t earth shaking”.

The Amazon Cloud Drive service comes with 5GB of storage at no cost. You can upgrade to 20GB for $20/year, 50Gb for $50/year and up to 1TB for $1,000/year. If you purchase a MP3 album on Amazon, you get a one-year upgrade to the 20GB level for free.

Here’s how to get the upgrade to 20Gb for only $0.69 — purchase the Trouty Mouth Glee album on Amazon. If Glee isn’t your cup of tea, you could purchase a Beethoven album for $0.89. The Glee album is already up to the #6 paid MP3 album on Amazon – let’s see if we can push it to #1!

The upgrade should be instantly added after you purchase an album. Here’s the email I received after I purchased the Beethoven album, “Thanks to your recent purchase of an Amazon MP3 album, you have qualified for a free year of the Amazon Cloud Drive 20 GB storage plan starting today for one year. You can find details about Cloud Drive at: (url removed). This storage plan is not set to renew automatically and will be reverted back to the free 5 GB plan at the end of the promotion. If you have already upgraded your Amazon Cloud Drive account to a paid storage plan of 20 GB or higher when you qualified for this offer, this offer has been saved to your account as a $20 credit toward future Amazon Cloud Drive fees you may incur due to the renewal or upgrade of your existing plan. If you elect to downgrade your plan to a free plan at the time of renewal, your upgrade offer will be automatically applied to the 20 GB plan at that time.”

Note: the two links to Amazon are affiliate links.

Find more stories about: Amazon, Amazon Cloud Drive, cloud computing, mp3

Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of CloudFormation today. No we are not talking about cirrus clouds here.  The blog post announcing the launch, written by Amazon’s Jeff Barr, talks about baking and recipes and the difference between a cook and a baker. I guess today if you use Amazon Web Services, you can become a baker.

Becoming a baker means, “you can create an entire stack with one function call.” You setup a template of services and then when you run the job, Amazon will create and setup everything to your recipe. The recipe can include pretty much all of Amazon Web Services offerings including EC2, load balancers, Simple DB, SQS (Simple Queue Service), SNS (Simple Notification Service), etc. The template is written in JSON.

The blog post provides a sample template which “bakes” a WordPress setup on Amazon Web Services. It appears that if your goal is to run WordPress on Amazon, you could use their template, make your specific changes, and be up and running in minutes.

Jeff has another blog post showing how the CloudFormation process works within the admin console. Some of the sample templates include: Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, PHP Hello World and Rails Hello World applications.

Find more stories about: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, cloud computing

Last month there was chatter that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) would launch a new streaming option for paid Prime customers. Amazon Prime is a shipping upgrade service that offers free 2-day shipping on items sold on Amazon and $3.99 for overnight shipping.

Today Amazon has taken over their homepage (similar to their Kindle launches) to promote a new feature of the Amazon Prime program. No longer just a shipping service, you can now stream 5,000 movies and television shows for free. I’ve scanned the available free streaming selection and found that while there aren’t any true new releases, there is plenty to watch.

Amazon notes that you can stream the movies and TV shows to your computer or to Internet-connected devices including blu-ray players and Internet-connected televisions.

On the television side you can watch a variety of series including:

• The Legend of Zelda: The Complete Animated Series
• Big Cat Diary Series 1
• All of the seasons of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood!!
• Unfortunately Silver Spoons, Transformers, Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes, and the A-Team are not included

On the movies side, you can watch Steven Seagal’s Hard to Kill but you have to pay to watch Above the Law.

I don’t think today’s announcement and launch by Amazon will affect RedBox and Blockbuster Express but it does target Netflix’s streaming service.

It does appear this new free streaming option is only available for paid Prime customers – so  if you are on the free Mom or Student programs, you are out of luck. You can signup for a free trial of Amazon Prime and the free trial does include the streaming option.

I am no longer on Amazon Mom but with this new streaming option, I am seriously considering purchasing an Amazon Prime subscription.

Find more stories about: Amazon, livestream, TV

In Seattle, Amazon has been offering groceries for delivery since late 2007. They have apparently been slowing expanding the reach within Seattle over the past few months.  The service, AmazonFresh, reminds me of FreshDirect in NYC. I used FreshDirect a few times while in NYC and the service was good but you trade a higher price for convenience. The buildings I lived in had “FreshDirect freezers” so you could get your deliveries while at work and the food would be kept at a safe temperature until you arrived home. It’s hard for me to provide feedback on pricing on AmazonFresh since I don’t live in Seattle. A quick search shows a 2-liter Coke for $1.99 and a bottle of All detergent for $6.99. These prices are significantly higher than purchasing at the supermarkets in Texas and New York.

What makes AmazonFresh really special is that you can also purchase a very large selection of amazon.com products which can be delivered with your food order for no extra charge. Amazon refers to this product lineup as AmazonNow! The AmazonFresh site notes, “Although Amazon.com founded AmazonFresh, AmazonFresh operates as an independent grocery delivery business.”

Below is the special deal AmazonFresh is running for Seattle residents. What I find very interesting about this deal is that they didn’t use LivingSocial (or Groupon) to manage this deal. I’ve been thinking a lot recently (and will write up a post this week) around whether large merchants like Amazon need to use the new crop of group buying services or if they can go at it alone. From what I can tell by looking at the deal boards, Amazon can push a deal without the group buying services.

For new AmazonFresh customers, Amazon is offering 50% off your first order up to a $50 discount. The catch is that the deal is only valid until tomorrow at 4pm PST and only valid for new customers. The coupon code is sunshine.

You know what I really miss…Kozmo! It was great to get a box of donuts and a movie delivered at midnight.

Find more stories about: Amazon, AmazonFresh, food, Seattle

I remember back in the late 1990s and early 2000s — we sent millions of emails every week and used an outsourced provider to handle sending the email. Back then there were no API email services and we paid an arm and a leg to the email providers to handle the sending and whitelisting of our customer emails. Today there are a number of companies in the email API space.

Today I received a note from Amazon Web Services that they have launched a new email service called Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). Amazon notes, “(Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service.”

Basically the Amazon Simple Email Service is an API that developers can call to send emails. Pricing for SES is $0.10 per thousand emails sent. It appears there is even a simple whitelisting function which will process the email messages to make sure they will pass the filters on the recipient side. Amazon also provides email stats including bounced message rates, spam complaints, etc.

Amazon SES ties in to other Amazon Web Services including EC2 and the new (jack and the) beanstalk products. The service is in beta and you can signup here.

Find more stories about: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, API, email

Alright deal hunters of any level, here’s a deal you will want to jump on asap. Group buying service LivingSocial is offering a nationwide deal on an Amazon gift card. The deal offers a $20 Amazon gift card for $10. What makes this deal even better is that you can use any “deal bucks” you have in your account towards the purchase. Most buyers (including myself) have purchased the deal for $5 instead of $10.

Update 7am Eastern: The deal counter is now nearing 110,000 gift certificates sold.

Update 9am Eastern: The deal counter is now over 175,000 gift certificates sold for a total value of $3.5 million although many are reporting purchasing tens of deals which LS may very well cancel. It’s also important to note that LS has changed the terms of the deal after the start by removing the ability to use “deal bucks” – I hope this does not impact my transaction from early this morning.

Update 9:30am Eastern: Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Venture Partners calls today’s deal, “the first step of operational integration from that investment.” He’s referring to the investment Amazon made in LS late last year.

Update 10:30am Eastern: We are now up to over 300,000 gift cards ordered. I can absolutely confirm that it’s not 300,000 customers that have ordered as many are reporting ordering up to 100 (!) cards.

Update 1:30pm Eastern: We are now over 550,000 gift cards ordered which is over $10 million in total gift cards.

Update 3:00pm Eastern: We are up to 700,000 gift cards for $12 million in total gift card value.

Update 6:00pm Eastern: We are now over 900,000 gift cards worth $18 million in card value.

Update 8:00pm Eastern: Just hit 1 MILLION GIFT CARDS SOLD!

As of 5:30AM Eastern, LivingSocial shows their purchased counter reaching nearly 100,000. I am unsure of what the maximum number of gift cards they will sell so that’s why I am suggesting you act fast if you want in on this deal.

My question with this deal is just how much is LivingSocial losing on the deal?

• LS clearly notes that Amazon is not a sponsor of this promotion so how much did LS purchase the gift cards for? As Chris points out in the comments, Amazon is a major investor in LivingSocial.
• Most LS customers will have some amount of “deal bucks” in their account so the average purchase amount will be much closer to $5 than $10
• There’s a lot of talk about how to get more than one deal per person – basically you create multiple email addresses and use multiple credit cards. Most times this isn’t an issue as people don’t want 10 (or 100) massages or ribeye steaks but for deals like this there will be more people looking to buy multiple offers – and remember, each email is forwarding the deal on so they are getting “deal bucks” as they refer themselves over and over.

Wondering if this is considered big in deal land? The SlickDeals thread discussing the deal has 150 pages with over 2,250 replies since 12AM this morning!

Here’s a link to the deal – ignore whatever city is listed since the deal is nationwide. (note: if you use the link in this last sentence, I get a referral credit towards my purchase which is appreciated.)

Find more stories about: Amazon, gift cards, LivingSocial

Amazon is offering a free $5 in video credit if you click their special follow button. I say special because not only does the button do a typical follow function, it also sends the following tweet automatically, “I just got a $5 credit for instant movies and TV shows @amazonvideo. Click (url) to get yours. #get5″. Go here to get the credit.

If you search for the term get5 on Twitter,  you can see that a large number of Amazon customers are clicking the button to get their $5 video credit. Funny points go to Twitter user Mobile Jones who clicked the Amazon button and when I questioned him, he replied, “Yeah, but then I immediately revoked the connection to my acct. ;-)”

I think this type of deal works is a much stronger way to build a Twitter user base than buying a “promoted” ad on Twitter. The deal has already spread to all of the deal boards. What’s smart with Amazon’s offer is that it gets people who probably aren’t using Twitter on a regular basis to follow their Amazon Video account. This is different than buying an ad on Twitter for an account on Twitter when you are already on Twitter.

If you aren’t sure what movies to use the $5 Amazon video credit on, here’s a big list of movies and television shows for $2.99 or less.

Find more stories about: Amazon, social media, Twitter, Video