Amazon the Bellwether

On Open Enterprise blog.

Now *That's* What I Call UGC

Bic Crystal ballpoint pen, medium point, black:

Imagine a boot stamping on your face when you cry with hopes for a better World. That's what it felt like when I went about trying to actually use this pen. It mocked me. It shouted at me. It told me I was not worthy. In short, it jilted me.

...

I will still be ordering a new quill next week from a custom manufactory in Belgium, but this has been a fascinating jaunt into the future. Perhaps the pen might be more practical if some fins were attached to the sides.

...

I glanced down to my hand and there, humbly, sat the pen. I cannot reccomend this highly enough; indeed, I would say that it is the ultimate catalyst to enlightenment. Since I have owned this pen every word I have written has been like pure gold; my business ventures have prospered, my home life excelled and my pot plants flourished. Where, oh where, I hear you ask, can I purchase such a pen-sized piece of wonder? It is here, my friend, it is here.

and the coup de grace:

This Pen has been amazing, although not for its intended use, this pen has still lived up to its reputation as a solid performer.
I've used this pen to stab and kill 3 neighborhood dogs this week alone.
The pen retains its grip even when submerged in dog blood.
Thank You Amazon and Bic for creating such a useful pen!

(Via spot.)

Textbook Enterprise Open Source

There's no more powerful argument in favour of using GNU/Linux in an enterprise context than big names that are already doing so. Google and Amazon are the obvious ones, but we can now add PayPal to the list:

PayPal is currently processing $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux.

The article also gives some very concrete advantages of running a GNU/Linux-based grid in this way:

As PayPal grows it's much easier to grow the grid with Intel (NSDQ: INTC)-based servers than it would be to upgrade a mainframe, he said. In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% "is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In [PayPal's] world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions," he said.

PayPal takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and strips out all features unnecessary to its business, then adds proprietary extensions around security. Another virtue of the grid is that PayPal's 800 engineers can all get a copy of that customized system on their development desktops, run tests on their raw software as they work, and develop to PayPal's needs faster because they're working in the target environment. That's harder to do when the core of the data center consists of large Unix symmetrical multiprocessing boxes or mainframes. In neither case is it cheap to install duplicates for developers, he said.

Kindling a Conflagration

There's one of Steven Levy's finer big pieces in Newsweek about Amazon's new Kindle e-book device. It all sounds pretty cool, but for me the real showstopper is the following:

Publishers are resisting the idea of charging less for e-books. "I'm not going along with it," says Penguin's Peter Shanks of Amazon's low price for best sellers. (He seemed startled when I told him that the Alan Greenspan book he publishes is for sale at that price, since he offered no special discount.) Amazon is clearly taking a loss on such books. But Bezos says that he can sustain this scheme indefinitely. "We have a lot of experience in low-margin and high-volume sale—you just have to make sure the mix [between discounted and higher-priced items] works." Nonetheless the major publishers (all of whom are on the Kindle bandwagon) should loosen up. If you're about to get on a plane, you may buy the new Eric Clapton biography on a whim for $10—certainly for $5!—but if it costs more than $20, you may wind up scanning the magazine racks.

What planet are these people on? Amazon is shipping electrons - well known for being rather cheap (here, take a few trillion for free). When you buy a book, you're buying mashed-up trees that cost something (which in fact cost rather more than you pay). E-books will never take off until publishers are prepared to throw their analogue business models on the fire.

Update: Almost needless to say, Kindle is powered by GNU/Linux.

Letting Floggers Go Hang

This seems pretty unexceptionable, if a little hard to police consistently:

Under laws due to come into force at the beginning of next year, but likely to be delayed until April for the UK, companies posing as consumers on fake blogs, providing fake testimonies on consumer rating websites such as TripAdvisor, or writing fake book reviews on Amazon risk criminal or civil liability.

What's interesting is that blogging and its attendant problem of fake blogging - aka flogging - is considered important enough to warrant pan-European legislation of this kind. Gosh, we must be doing something right.

Amazon One-Click Patent Struck Down

Here's an amazing victory:

In a recent office action, the USPTO has rejected the claims of the Amazon.com one-click patent following the re-examination request that I filed on 16 February 2006.

My review resulted in the broadest claims of the patent being ruled invalid.

In its Office Action released 9 October 2007, the Patent Office found that the prior art I found and submitted completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.

I had only requested the USPTO look at claims 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and 22 but the Office Action rejects claims 11-26 and claims 1-5 as well!

What's particularly remarkable is that this has happened through the dogged perseverance of one individual: Peter Calveley.

Kudos, sir. (Via Boing Boing.)

New York Goes Green With Shame

Not really my patch, but I'd expected better from NYC:

But the market for Ipé wood drives much of the industrial logging of the entire Amazon, and has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. An emergent flowering tree, which peppers the canopy of the Amazonian rainforest in hues of pink, magenta, yellow and white, Ipé grows in the rainforests at densities of only one or two trees an acre. This means that vast areas of the forests are razed to the ground to feed the market for a single tree. It is estimated that, for every Ipé tree cut, 28 other trees must be cut and are thrown away. For New York City's 10 miles of boardwalk alone, over 110,500 acres (130 square miles) of old growth Amazon rainforest were logged.

Even more shocking, most of this logging is illegal. According to Scott Paul, Greenpeace forest issues specialist, in 2006 90 percent of Brazilian deforestation was the result of illegal logging operations. Many logging businesses are run by criminal syndicates and compliant government officials. This fact is hardly a secret: In 2000, the Brazilian government's own estimates indicated that 80 percent of the hardwood exported from that country was illegally harvested. Briefing papers prepared by Rainforest Relief about the criminality and environmental impact of the city's wood procurement policies were provided to the Bloomberg administration.

But despite rampant illegality, climate change and mass extinction, Bloomberg's administration persists in procuring wood from tropical rainforests. And it is not just the Parks Department, but a number of city agencies which have largely ignored proposals for existing economically and environmentally sound alternatives.

This, surely, is a case ripe for blogosphere noise. (And yes, I know Blog Action Day was yesterday, but better late than never.)

Bad Amazon, Naughty Amazon

So, Amazon's getting into the ebook business; that's nice. But:

Amazon isn’t supporting the industry’s open standard around eBooks. Instead they are using their own proprietary format from Mobipocket, a company they acquired in 2005

Bad, bad Amazon.

Amazon Goes Lulu

I'm a big fan of Lulu.com, the self-publishing company, not least because the man behind it, Bob Young, also co-founded Red Hat, and is one of the most passionate defenders of the open source way I have come across.

So the news that CreateSpace is going into the on-demand publishing business is interesting - especially since the company is a subsidiary of Amazon, which means that self-published authors will be able to hitch a ride on the Amazon behemoth. But as far as I can tell, Lulu still offers a more thorough vision, with its global reach and finer-grained publishing options. But if nothing else, Amazon's entry into this space will serve to validate the whole idea in the eyes of doubters.

Selling (Digital) Brooklyn Bridges

In a move that seems like a great model of public and private cooperation, the National Archives and Amazon.com have reached a pact under which Amazon will sell films and video footage gathering dust in the archives’ vaults. These videos and films, which capture some of our most intriguing and important moments in history, are already available at no charge to folks who want to visit the archives’ facilities in College Park, MD, but now they’ll become available to anybody via the Internet.

So let me get this straight. Amazon makes money selling digital copies of archive material, which is freely available, back to the people who own that material: and that's a great model? When will Amazon starting selling digital Brooklyn Bridges, I wonder....

Microsoft's Gambit: Patently About Patents

Well, I don't want to say I told you so, but I told you so:

Microsoft Corp. and LG Electronics (LGE) today announced that they have entered into a patent cross-license agreement to further the development of the companies' current and future product lines. Microsoft has focused on patent agreements in the recent past to develop a best-practices model for protecting intellectual property (IP) and respecting the IP rights of others, as well as building bridges with an array of industry leaders, including consumer electronics, telecommunications and computer hardware providers.

This is partly why we desperately need to sort out the mess that is intellectual property, especially in the US.

Amazon Goes DRM-free - And So Do We (Almost)

This is big news:

Amazon.com today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music's digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software.

It's important not so much because of the songs that will be freed in this way, as for the huge publicity it gives to the idea of being DRM-free. Until now, few end-users have really understood what the implications of DRM were; but once big names like Amazon start pushing the virtues of DRM-free stuff, then people will naturally demand it from other outlets - and from other labels alongside the enlightened EMI.

We're nearly there, people. (Via PaidContent.)

Time to Praise Simão Jatene?

In these dark days when everything seems to be getting worse with the environmental commons, it is rare to come across something as positive as this:

Vast tracts of rainforest in Brazil are to get a new protected status.

The segments of land in the northern Para state together cover 16.4 million hectares (63,320 sq miles), an area of land that is bigger than England.

Thousands of wildlife species inhabit the pristine forest, including jaguars, anteaters and colourful macaws.

Campaigners say the decision made by Para Governor Simao Jatene is one of the most important conservation initiatives of recent years.

If it is true, then Governor Jatene deserves to go down in the annals as a wise and great man. The only trouble is, I can't find anything confirming this wonderful news on the site of one of the organisations quoted in the story above. Instead, there is just a rather dry report on forest management.

Let's hope.

Jeff Bezos' New New Thing - the Old Old Thing

Business Week gets uncharacteristically breathless about Jeff Bezos' amazing, risky, unheard, innovative, super-duper bet:

Bezos wants Amazon to run your business, at least the messy technical and logistical parts of it, using those same technologies and operations that power his $10 billion online store. In the process, Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility.

Wow, Jeff, that's so totally, insanely, amazingly, utterly, far-outly, er, identical to an idea that IBM had four years ago:

IBM is laying down a $10 billion wager that business technology of the not-too-distant future will center on what it calls "computing on demand."

Maybe you and the Business Week team should go and take a nice long cold shower. Not together, you understand.

DRM'ing It into People

One of the central problems with DRM is that it is hard to know how to fight back. Boycotting DRM'ed goods is all very well, but needs lots of people taking part to make an impact. This means that getting out the fact that many consumer products are Defective by Design is crucially important. Against this background, here's a clever idea: tagging DRM'ed products on Amazon. Fight force with cunning. (Via Boing Boing.)

YRUHRN? - To Crowdsource a Book, Of Course

I've written about crowdsourcing before, and this is an interesting application: writing a book called "Why Are You Here - Right Now" (YRUHRN).

Project YRUHRN was started with one idea in September of 2006. It all started with a HIT posted on Amazon's mTurk offering a penny for your answer to 'Why are You Here - Right Now?'. From that HIT, over 500 answers were given in a weeks time.

We have taken those answers, and compiled them in a book that will speak to a part of everyone.

We will see if it is possible, through crowdsourcing and the power of work-at-home people, if a book can be written and published in just 30 days from idea to publishing.

Evidently it was, and the result can be downloaded for free from Lulu.com (for a while, at least).

Bubble 2.0, Meet Blodgett 2.0

Talking of the past, do you remember Henry Blodgett?

Amazon was selling for about $275 a share when a little-known analyst, Henry Blodgett, predicted it would go to $400 - even though Amazon had never made a profit. Amazon did go to $400 and beyond.

Amazon's backer, Merrill Lynch, responded by replacing its pessimistic Amazon analyst. His replacement? Henry Blodgett. While this was great for Blodgett, it proved not so good for investors, many of whom got soaked when Amazon's value fell 75 percent.

Blodgett has said his prediction was based on sound analysis using new ways to measure a company's performance. Wall Street coined a new verb: to "blodgett" a stock.

Now what do we hear?

MySpace, the social-networking Web site, could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp., a Wall Street media analyst forecast Wednesday.

Those who cannot remember the past....

Update: Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction....

Amazing Amazon Unbox - Amazingly Awful

If you still don't believe me when I say that Cory Doctorow can deliver, try this harangue, one of the finest I've read in a long time. Like Doctorow, I order a lot of stuff from Amazon; like him too, I will never in a billion February 29ths order one of these terrible un-Amazon-like miscegenations.

The difference between Amazon and Amazon Unbox is like night and day. When you sign onto Unbox, you sign away all the amazing customer rights that Amazon itself is so careful to protect. Amazon Unbox takes away your privacy and every conceivable consumer right you have, and then tells you that the goods you buy from them don't belong to you, and they can take them away from you at any time, or change the deal you get from them without any appeal by you.

Amazon Unbox's user agreement isn't just galling for its evilness -- it's also commercially suicidal. No sane person will agree to this. Amazon Unbox user agreement is only a couple femtometers more dignified than being traded to another inmate for a couple packs of cigarettes.

Amazon Goes Virtual

I was deeply unimpressed when Amazon announced its Simple Storage Service (S3), since I am not a developer, but the news that it is now rolling out a sister beta service, called the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), made me sit up and take notice. Not so much for this:

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Which is all very well, but what really interested me was something I suspected might be the case:

Q: What operating system environments are supported?

Amazon EC2 currently supports Linux-based systems environments. Amazon EC2 currently uses a virtualization technology which only works with Linux environments. We are looking for ways to expand it to other platforms in future releases.

Think about it: Amazon, not a small or unknown company, is creating an on-demand, virtualised computing facility, and it has GNU/Linux at its heart, just as predicted.

Maybe it won't take off, but if it does - or if another GNU/Linux-based company like Google, say, follows, suit - we will be witnessing yet another serious nail in the coffin of the traditional operating system as the fundamental, underlying platform for computing. And we all know what that means, don't we? (Via GigaOm.)

Good News Patently Comes in Threes

I've written often enough about patent absurdities, so it's been a real pleasure to observe this last week not one, but three promising decisions that might start to undo past idiocies.

First, the US Supreme Court ruled that patent owners do not have an automatic right to an injunction that could take out another business accused of infringement. This is fantastic news, because it delivers an extremely long-overdue kick in the corporate goolies to patent trolls, whose entire business method is to use the threat of such injunctions as a way of extorting money from companies who would really rather just get on with their business.

Next, the US Patent and Trademark Office agreed to a re-examination of Amazon.com's 1-Click patent. This is an example of an obvious idea that should never have been graced with a patent, but now it seems that there is even prior art that would argue against it. A plucky Kiwi, Peter Calveley, not only dug up the prior art, but also raised some dosh to apply for a re-examination.

Finally, one of the most idiotic patents given in recent years - for pretty much the entire idea of e-commerce, would you believe it - has finally been declared invalid. There's bound to be an appeal, but at least sense is starting to seep into the septic tank that is US patents.