Keynote from Amazon CTO on Web Services
The day began for me by attending a keynote by Allan Vermeulen, CTO of Amazon. It was fantastic! Mr. Vermeulen did a presentation where he paralleled the innovations from electricity in the late 1800’s to the birth of Web Services. The central theme was that after the initial birth of electricity, other innovations had to occur in order for it to be the necessity of the day. In the context of web services, we have seen the initial birth (connectivity, standards, building blocks of distributed computing, economic models). But Mr. Vermeulen holds that we have only begun the process of innovation for web services, and that the future holds great things with web services. He pointed out to the audience claiming that we were the next innovators of the technology.
Along the way, he showed several sites built on the Amazon Web Services. These 3rd party sites are not just storefronts, which was the Amazon’s original intent. These sites do some very interesting things with the information and statistics provided by Amazon. He also showed us some sites that used Google web services.
GoogleDuel – a site where two words are compared by looking at the numbers of hits on Google. In the demo, he allowed the audience to suggest two words for the live submission. To his shock, someone shouted out “Amazon” and “Ebay”. With some concern, the words were entered and submitted. When the page showed that Amazon was the clear winner, Mr. Vermeulen was as happy as anyone even to the point of giving his assistant a two handed high-five. He declared that this was a perfect example of using this tool. Obviously, this comparison will be the choice for future demonstrations.
All Consuming – “a website that visits recently updated weblogs every hour, checking them for links to books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Sense, and other book sites. Every book on this site has a list of all the weblogs that have mentioned it, and every weblog that has mentioned books in the past also has a page here listing which books it has mentioned. If you have a weblog, search for it here to see if we've picked anything up from it yet.” The site consumes web services from Weblogs.com, Amazon.com, Technorati.com, and Alexa.com. There are more details at the bottom of the page.
YES – this service claims to know every song played on registered radio stations every minute of the day up to 24 hours. By using the YES bar, a person can find the title of a song they heard earlier that day.
HiveGroup – Working in cooperation with Amazon Web Services, The Hive Group now offers our site visitors the opportunity to use Honeycomb to shop for products at Amazon.com. Honeycomb's impressive and useful interface tames page after page of lists, presenting 1000's of products on a single computer screen. The categories below contain more than 34,000 products from Amazon's online store. Improve your purchase power! Use the power of Honeycomb to convert endless product data into useful product information!” This UI is so cool. I highly suggest taking a look at this.
Grokker from Groxsis – “Grokker builds precise and detailed knowledge maps containing visual cues to the relationships between the data. The map itself contains powerful metadata that vividly describes the “nature” of the data collection. Grokker enables map generation and the ability to collaborate, extend, edit, delete, save, and share any attribute or subset of the map.” This is another cool mechanism for looking at sets of data. The connection to the presentation is that the data for the graphs are required by web services. My explanation will not do it justice so see this example.
For more information on Amazon's use of web services, see www.amazon.com/webservices.
For a report from Sys-Con's Group Publisher, see http://www.sys-con.com/Dotnet/article.cfm?id=408
1:39:34 AM 
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