Jeff Bezos talks about Amazon Web Services
Amazon's CEO wants to help you run your business, using the same technologies and operations that power Amazon.com.
In a great interview with Business Week, Jeff Bezos talks about the new services Amazon is offering to third party developers, providing computing power with its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and its hosted storage service, Amazon S3.
Some snippets after the jump...
Search startup uses blog readers to develop website
MojoPages, a new social search venture, has adopted a documentary-style videoblog to build buzz around its forthcoming launch, while engaging users even before a beta website has launched, to help with aspects such as design and usability.
The website, which will rank businesses in line with user ratings, aims to improve on standard directory-style services such as Yellow Pages.
Top ten viral marketing mistakes
Entertainment marketing outfit AzACreations has come out with a ‘How To’ guide on advergaming – not a new area but one in which campaigns still see widely varying degrees of success.
The report provides some useful tips on how to make the games themselves grab users’ attention. These include: setting targets for players, clear rules, allowing feedback, and enabling in-game characters to grow and develop.
It also offers ten reasons why viral campaigns fail, which we'll list after the jump...
Reasons to avoid Flash on your website
Web developers and businesses continue to develop Flash based websites, despite the well-documented drawbacks in terms of SEO and usability.
When used well, Flash can be a great tool for the presentation of rich content, but pure flash websites, though they may look good, can annoy the hell out of visitors.
After the jump, some reasons why...
Ordnance Survey opens up to developers
Mashup enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that the Ordnance Survey is to release an API for non-commercial applications.
The organisation – whose data access policy has long been the subject of debate – announced the move at an event in its Southampton HQ on Friday.
Will Yahoo mash-ups save us from Hotmail?
Yahoo’s decision to open up its email API is great news for web mail users and is a great example of what Web 2.0 is about. How long will it be before a major retailer like Tesco follows suit?
Yahoo! aims to foster Mail mash-ups
Yahoo! is planning to give free access to code for its Mail service in a bid to encourage mash-ups and independent application development.
The move, which will happen later this year, was announced as part of a ‘Yahoo! Hack Day’ aimed at helping programmers to build apps using the portal’s various services.
Mike Rundle throws stones at Luddite VCs, Arrington and Godin
Mike Rundle has written a post called The Catch-22 of Web 2.0 in which he says he feels like “the only person seeing certain things happen – like watching a train wreck in slow motion”.
Mike is a top web designer who makes some cynical points that don’t make too much sense from where I’m sitting.
So let’s go through them one by one…
Sites clash with measurement firms
A "cacaphony of complaints" from web publishers has prompted the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to put pressure on the industry's two major metrics firms to improve their methodologies and transparency, reports AdWeek .
The magazine says several top publishers have expressed doubts over the unique user and traffic data being provided by Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix, both of which are preparing to be audited.
Your chance to improve usability standards
I have recently returned from an international standards meeting in Washington (and that is a story in itself – I nearly had to fly without my laptop and Treo – aargh!) where we were discussing the revision of the human centred design standard ISO 13407.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
