Microsoft is set to form an assault on video-sharing websites, including the hugely successful YouTube.com by launching a new service that will allow users to post their own web content. The new service will target users ranging from amateur documentary makers to aspiring pop stars and will earn revenues through advertising. Microsoft, which recently offered clips of World Cup coverage, is also planning to offer more conventional video content in areas such as comedy and extreme sports. Watch for a rollout simultaneously in several markets “imminently.” [24×7]
Goooalll! Amazon S3 Winning Storage Fans
Early World Cup victories by Argentina triggered a flood of website traffic for the country’s second-largest newspaper, LA NACION. Uncertain whether its banner ads would survive the traffic spike, LANACION.COM discovered Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Within hours, the site started storing ads in Amazon S3 to ease the load on its servers. Altexa, Amazon.com, Elephant Drive, Jungle Disk, LA NACION, MediaSilo, Microsoft, and SmugMug are other companies storing more than 800 million total data objects using Amazon S3 from Amazon Web Services.Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3) provides a web services interface that lets businesses simply and quickly store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon S3 uses the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. There is no minimum fee to use S3 and developers pay only for what they use at a rate of just $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. Amazon S3 is available from Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com), a subsidiary of Amazon.com. [24×7]
Rhapsody Web Services Competition Gets Jammin’
In synch with an enhanced set of Rhapsody Web services APIs and RSS feeds, RealNetworks has announced a new competition promoting the use of these tools to incorporate free playback of full-length songs and Internet radio stations directly into Websites, blogs and “mash up” applications.
The Rhapsody Web Services Competition will award the creator of the most innovative “Rhapsody Web Jam” with a grand prize of a trip to see their favorite band anywhere in the world. Complete details about the competition, which starts today and runs through October 16, 2006, are available via the Rhapsody Web services site at http://webservices.rhapsody.com/ , as are a full set of Web services development APIs, tools, reference applications, support and a software developer kit (SDK). [24×7]
