Money and Finance
- Ibm And Others Facing The Cloudy Business Of Accounting For The Cloud
Found via @HowardSchilit. FORTUNE -- Last week's disclosure that the Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting an investigation into how IBM reports its cloud computing revenue poses more questions than answers. The New York-based tech giant...
- Jeff Bezos Pays $250 Million For The Washington Post
In an ironic twist for a tycoon whose company has always kept its distance from the press, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has agreed to pay $250 million cash for The Washington Post. The purchase takes the newspaper out of the hands of the Graham family,...
- How Amazon Trained Its Investors To Behave
In March 2000, Barron's reported that 51 Internet companies were burning cash so fast that they'd be broke by the end of the end of the year. The article (it's behind a seemingly unbreachable paywall) has acquired the reputation of having...
- How Apple And Amazon Security Flaws Led To My Epic Hacking
In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID...
- I Want It Today
Amazon has long enjoyed an unbeatable price advantage over its physical rivals. When I buy a $1,000 laptop from Wal-Mart, the company is required to collect local sales tax from me, so I pay almost $1,100 at checkout. In most states, Amazon is exempt...
Money and Finance
Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing
Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.
Every day, a start-up called the Climate Corporation performs over 10,000 simulations of the next two years’ weather for more than one million locations in the United States. It then combines that with data on root structure and soil porosity to write crop insurance for thousands of farmers.
Another start-up, called Cue, scans up to 500 million e-mails, Facebook updates and corporate documents to create a service that can outline the biography of a given person you meet, warn you to be home to receive a package or text a lunch guest that you are running late.
Each of these start-ups carries out computing tasks that a decade ago would have been impossible without a major investment in computers. Both of these companies, however, own little besides a few desktop computers. They and thousands of other companies now rent data storage and computer server time from Amazon, through its Amazon Web Services division, for what they say is a fraction of the cost of owning and running their own computers.
“I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. I guarantee I’d need 60,” said Daniel Gross, Cue’s 20-year-old co-founder. “It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper.” He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend “probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility.”
He conceded that “I don’t even know what the ballpark number for a server is — for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.”
Cloud computing has been around for years, but it is now powering all kinds of new businesses around the globe, quickly and with less capital.
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Related video (CNBC): Amazon's Battle in the 'Cloud'
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Related video (CNBC): Amazon's Battle in the 'Cloud'
- Ibm And Others Facing The Cloudy Business Of Accounting For The Cloud
Found via @HowardSchilit. FORTUNE -- Last week's disclosure that the Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting an investigation into how IBM reports its cloud computing revenue poses more questions than answers. The New York-based tech giant...
- Jeff Bezos Pays $250 Million For The Washington Post
In an ironic twist for a tycoon whose company has always kept its distance from the press, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has agreed to pay $250 million cash for The Washington Post. The purchase takes the newspaper out of the hands of the Graham family,...
- How Amazon Trained Its Investors To Behave
In March 2000, Barron's reported that 51 Internet companies were burning cash so fast that they'd be broke by the end of the end of the year. The article (it's behind a seemingly unbreachable paywall) has acquired the reputation of having...
- How Apple And Amazon Security Flaws Led To My Epic Hacking
In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID...
- I Want It Today
Amazon has long enjoyed an unbeatable price advantage over its physical rivals. When I buy a $1,000 laptop from Wal-Mart, the company is required to collect local sales tax from me, so I pay almost $1,100 at checkout. In most states, Amazon is exempt...