The introduction of Amazon Key as an in-home delivery service stretches trust just a bit too far.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Tag: amazon
Justin Trudeau Sends an HQ2 Love Letter to Amazon

No tax breaks, but Canada offers a valuable perk: Universal healthcare.
Canadian cities are going all out to woo Amazon’s second headquarters, including a “Dear Jeff” letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the company’s CEO Jeff Bezos.
In his letter, which comes on the final day of a competition for cities to make their case to Amazon, Trudeau reminds Bezos that “it is in one other that Canada and the United States have found their closest friend and ally.”
If that’s not enough to tell Bezos where Amazon’s loyalties should lie, Trudeau adds “[W]e enjoy the longest, most peaceful and mutually beneficial relationship of any two countries in the world.”
The Prime Minister did not, however, specify exactly where in Canada that Amazon should set up shop, though most of the country’s major cities—including Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary—have put their hat in the ring.
Amazon set off a frenzy among city governments this summer when it announced it was seeking to open a second headquarters outside of Seattle, and could create as many as 50,000 high paying jobs in coming years.
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As the competition came to a close on Thursday for cities to make their case, one research firm cited Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and Washington D.C.—but not one of the Canadian ones—as the leading candidates.
Nonetheless, Trudeau’s letter makes some strong economic arguments, along with the sentimental ones, for Amazon to make its second home north of the border.
“Canadians enjoy a universal health care system and a robust public pension plan which help support our excellent quality of life and lower costs for employers,” he states, while also talking up the country’s universities and policies to attract high-skilled immigrants.
Trudeau’s letter also appeared to include a subtle swipe at the nativist policies of the Trump Administration:
“As the first country in the world to adopt a policy of multiculturalism, we have shown time and again that a country can be stronger not in spite of its differences but because of them. Diversity is a fact but inclusion is a choice.”
One other notable feature of the Canadian cities’ pitch is they don’t offer tax breaks, which have been a controversial feature of the bids of a number of U.S. cities. Instead, the suitors have Canadian have emphasized the savings Amazon would incur from Canada’s public health system.
You can read Trudeau’s letter in full here.
While AWS and VMware Draw Closer, Amazon Still Looks to Dominate
AWS and VMware now are partners but it might be only a matter of time before AWS moves to take its own path.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Amazon Positioned to Use Data to Dominate Where It Wishes
If Amazon expands into food delivery, it will obtain a treasure of consumer information that it can use for its next expansion.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Amazon Alexa is so smart it’s stupid
The Amazon Alexa platform is on a roll, now crammed with more than 15,000 “skills,” up from 10,000 in February, as reported by Voicebot. While this sounds amazing, the reality is that the vast majority of Amazon Echo customers don’t know 99.999 percent of those skills exist. Worse, there seems to be no viable way for anyone to discover what all those skills are.
So while Amazon keeps fanning the flames with developer outreach like the upcoming Alexa Dev Days, Amazon’s far larger problem is Alexa skill discovery, not skill development.
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Amazon, VMware rumored to be developing data center software
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are reportedly in talks about possibly teaming up to develop data center software products, according to The Information, which cited anonymous sources.
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t have much if any detail on what that product would be. The speculation is it might be a stack-like product, since VMware already provides what would be the base software for such a product and stacks are becoming the in thing.
Already there is OpenStack, the open-source product that runs cloud services in a data center, and Microsoft just shipped Azure Stack, its answer to OpenStack that will allow the same features of its Azure public cloud to run within a company’s private data center.
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Amazon Web Services sets a lure for Java programmers
Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java.
Gosling revealed his new employer on his Facebook page with the words: “It’s time for a change. I’m leaving Boeing Defense (nee Liquid Robotics), with many fond memories. Today I start a new Adventure at Amazon Web Services.”

On May 22, 2017, James Gosling announced on his Facebook page that he is joining Amazon Web Services.
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IDG Contributor Network: Can Amazon be stopped?
Prime retail space is going vacant. The latest example of yet another retailer closing its doors is Payless Shoe Source. Payless has filed Chapter 11 and will be closing 400 stores. It’s ironic really, because their whole premise is Americans want to pay less for shoes, but the retailer can’t match the price or experience of online options. It’s one more example of the epidemic hitting brick-and-mortar retailers.
Last year (and again this year), it was Radio Shack that prompted the headlines. Sears has been in decline for decades. The Limited is even more limited now that it has filed for bankruptcy and has begun closing 250 of its stores.
Macy’s and Sears alone will be abandoning 28 million square feet of retail space. The loss of these anchor stores is what starts the dreaded domino effect at the mall. If the mall can’t back fill that space, reduced numbers of shoppers impact the demand for sunglasses, cinnamon rolls and all the other small businesses that survive on the other brands’ crowds. When they fall, so does the mall.
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After Amazon outage, HealthExpense worries about cloud lock-in
Financial services companies as popular targets of cybercriminals for the obvious reason — they’re where the money’s at. And health care companies have medical records, which are very valuable on the black market since the information there can be abused in so many ways, and doesn’t expire.
HealthExpense, which provides health care payment services to banks and their enterprise customers, straddles both worlds.
“When we started, every new client asked us about security,” said Marco Smit, CEO at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Health Expense.
“It has to do with the data we’re collecting,” said company CSO Ken Lee. “We are definitely bound by HIPAA compliance, and we hold all the personal health information and financial information.”
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Inscrutable Amazon Bill: Behind It, a $1 Million Savings
When Segment found its AWS bill going up unexpectedly, it did a deep dive to find the cause and realized a $ 1 million annual savings.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Amazon shows why you shouldn’t put all your tech eggs in one cloud basket
When Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service at Amazon’s US-EAST-1 data centers went down, things went bad. Very, very bad.
How bad? Popular sites such as Quora, Business Insider, Netflix, Reddit and Slack either crashed entirely or were broken. By SimilarTech’s count, over 124,000 sites were affected. A college student told me, “It’s knocked out my school’s technology back end. Students are freaking out because they can’t access assignments.” A cloud consultant told me his phone was ringing off the hook by Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers who wanted to switch to Azure.
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Battle of the clouds: Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform
Amazon Web Services is the consensus leader of the IaaS public cloud computing market according to industry watchers, but they credit Microsoft for closing the gap with Azure and say Google with its Cloud Platform has made considerable strides as well.
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(Insider Story)
Computerworld Cloud Computing
Apple, Microsoft and Amazon offer fairer deal on cloud storage
Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to give cloud storage subscribers fairer contracts after intervention by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority.
Such cloud storage services are typically used to store photos, videos, music or digital copies of important documents.
If the services shut down or vary their capacity or prices without notice, customers can lose their data, or be held hostage.
The CMA asked the storage service providers to give adequate notice before closing, suspending or changing services, and to allow customers to cancel their contracts and receive a pro-rata refund if they didn’t accept service changes.
The regulator last year obtained similar undertakings from Google, Dropbox and five other cloud storage providers.
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Amazon Chime goes after WebEx, Skype for Business and more
Companies looking for a new video- and teleconferencing system have a fresh face to turn to in the market: Amazon Web Services.
On Monday, the public cloud provider announced the launch of Amazon Chime, a new service that’s designed to compete with the likes of WebEx, Skype for Business and GoToMeeting. It’s a powerful swing at some very entrenched enterprise software players by the public cloud provider.
AWS launched the service with native applications for Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android. Chime’s infrastructure is based in the U.S., but Gene Farrell, AWS’s vice president of enterprise applications, said that the service can be accessed worldwide.
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How to find, view, and delete everything the Amazon Echo and Google Home know about you
Has Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Google Home taken up residence in your home? If not, you’re probably at least considering adding one of these digital helpers. They are supremely useful after all, providing assistance with everything from weather forecasts to smart-home control. All you need to do is ask.
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(Insider Story)
CIO Cloud Computing
Enel Moves Onto Amazon To Implement New Utility Strategy
The giant Italian utility, Enel, is moving to the cloud to support it’s Open Power strategy around the world, adding green power sources.
InformationWeek: Cloud
How Amazon Kinesis can help you leverage real-time data
This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editors
The more real-time data about customers, processes or competitors you can capture and analyze, the better you’ll be able to react quickly to important events. Amazon Kinesis is a cloud tool we really like because you can use it to leverage your business’ real-time data without having to worry about having enough storage and server capacity to process all of that data.
Amazon Kinesis is a suite of tools from Amazon Web Services that makes it easy for companies to capture, process and analyze real-time streaming data. Kinesis has three components:
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How Rackspace will stay alive in cloud: Stop competing with Amazon, start partnering
In August, 2016 months of speculations ended when Rackspace announced that an investment management group would purchase the 18-year-old company. Rumors have been swirling that the company may be acquired, but instead Rackspace took the route that Dell, Riverbed and BMC have and went private.
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Amazon Tests New Retail Consumer Checkout System
A store in downtown Seattle lets shoppers pull items off shelves and exit the store, with the cost of the items automatically added to their account.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Up close with Amazon Snowball: Cloud migration for the data center
At the AWS re:Invent show, Network World’s Brandon Butler takes a closer look at the AWS Snowball offering. The ruggedized appliance helps enterprises migrate very large amounts of data to Amazon’s cloud.
Computerworld Cloud Computing
FINRA Commits Mission-Critical App To Amazon Cloud
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority moved its key market surveillance functionality onto EC2 in 2014, and is making plans to migrate the Oracle database it uses for registration from an internal data center to an AWS service.
InformationWeek: Cloud
MySQL face-off: Amazon outscales Google
Many web applications have been built on an open source stack that included MySQL. Despite its limitations, MySQL managed to become the world’s most widely used open source RDBMS. What limitations, you ask? Out of the box, MySQL does not scale all that well and, in particular, cannot handle a lot of simultaneous clients compared to commercial databases.
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(Insider Story)
Computerworld Cloud Computing
Does Oracle have a shot in the public cloud vs. Amazon and Microsoft?
Larry Ellison has voiced fighting words at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference this week, announcing that Amazon Web Services’ lead in the IaaS market is over and that AWS will have “serious competition going forward.”
But does Oracle actually have a shot versus AWS and the company many see as the second place vendor, Microsoft?
“It depends,” says Gartner distinguished analyst Lydia Leong, author of the annual Magic Quadrant benchmark report for the public Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud market.
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Oracle CEO Mark Hurd says he has the whole cloud stack +
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$29 for This Premium 4-Course Training on Amazon Web Services- Deal Alert
AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is the premier cloud computing platform that services companies worldwide. Master this in-demand platform, and you’re certain to command a hefty paycheck.
Unsure where to start? The AWS Mastery Bundle is a 4-course bundle certain to make you an authority on all things AWS–and turn you into a certified cloud guru.
The following courses are included in your bundle:
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With Amazon Kinesis Analytics, devs can analyze real-time data with SQL
Amazon launched a new tool on Thursday aimed at helping developers build applications that offer insights from a firehose of data in real time. Kinesis Analytics will let users set up SQL queries that run on data that’s constantly updating, expanding the reach of the popular data analysis language beyond traditional database applications.
Once a user has set up a Kinesis Analytics stream, the results can then be routed to up to four different services, including Amazon S3, Redshift, and Elasticsearch Service.
It’s a service that’s useful for bringing in data from sources that are rapidly shifting in real time, like sensor information from the internet of things, or live data from a stock market. That’s key as more and more companies start leaning on big sets of live data to help drive business applications.
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Facebook’s beefing up its huge army of Messenger bots as Google and Amazon catch up
The bot revolution is happening fast for Facebook. After launching third-party bots in April offering everything from forecasts to your boarding pass, the social network says there are now more than 11,000 bots active on Facebook.
To celebrate, Facebook is adding a bunch of new features that could show up on your favorite bots soon—if developers enable them, that is.
Persistent menu

Persistent menus for the Poncho bot on Facebook Messenger.
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Amazon Investing Additional $3 Billion In India
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced this week that the company will expand its investment in operations in India from $ 2 billion to $ 5 billion. The money will expand Amazon’s cloud and retail operations in India.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Microsoft and Amazon look to scoop up SAP workloads headed to the cloud
As SAP holds its annual Sapphire Now user conference in Orlando this week, two of the leading IaaS providers are making the case for running SAP apps on their public clouds.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined SAP CEO Bill McDermott during the Sapphire keynotes on Tuesday to announce a broad partnership between the two companies that will optimize the Azure public cloud to run SAP workloads.
Not to be outdone, early this morning before the keynote even kicked off Amazon Web Services issued a press release announcing a handful of customers – including General Electric, Brooks Brothers and Lionsgate are running SAP apps on its public cloud.
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Apache Spark 2.0 Preview, Google’s Amazon Echo Rival: Big Data Roundup
Apache Spark 2.0 preview is released for Databricks customers. Google preps a stationary personal assistant like Amazon Echo. MarkLogic revs up security and encryption. We have all this and more in our Big Data Roundup for the week ending May 15, 2016.
InformationWeek: Cloud
Amazon discovery service marks on-premises apps for assimilation
Sometimes the hardest part of performing a cloud migration is figuring out what has to be migrated in the first place. That’s one idea behind Amazon’s now generally available AWS ADS (Application Discovery Service), which polls existing on-premises systems and determines what apps they’re running as a prelude to migration.
Originally announced in April, ADS is yet another sign that Amazon is more interested in building a one-way bridge into its cloud than in creating a two-way street involving a hybrid cloud strategy.
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