Amazon Archive

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”
Continue reading “Here’s How To Get a 20GB Amazon Cloud Drive for $0.69” »

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.

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.