Tag Archives: Amazon

New Amazon S3 Data Transfer Pricing

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This is incredible. The price for transferring data into your S3 account is now FREE! Starting July 1, 2011. And now they have pricing for data storage in the Petabyte range. That just blows my mind.

New inbound data transfer price for all regions (effective July 1, 2011)

  • $0.000 – all data transfer in

New data transfer price for US-Standard, US-West and Europe regions (effective July 1, 2011)

  • $0.000 – first 1 GB / month data transfer out
  • $0.120 per GB – up to 10 TB / month data transfer out (10 TB total)
  • $0.090 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out (50TB total)
  • $0.070 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out (150 TB total)
  • $0.050 per GB – next 350 TB / month data transfer out (500 TB total)
  • Contact us - next 524 TB / month data transfer out (1PB total)
  • Contact us - next 4 PB / month data transfer out (5PB total)
  • Contact us - data transfer out / month over 5 PB

5 Tech Stories Worth Reading

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1. Sources: PopCap In Late Stage Acquisition Discussions With EA For $1 Billion+
 PopCap Games is in late stage acquisition discussions for a sum of over $1 billion — we’ve now heard from two sources that the buyer is Electronic Arts.

2. Google Invests $102 Million More Into California’s Alta Wind Energy Center
 According to an official company blog post today, Google is increasing its investment into California’s Alta Wind Energy Center (AWEC) by $102 million, bringing its total investment in the renewable energy facility to $157 million.

3. Tips for taking good handheld photos at night
The problem with taking photographs in low-light situations is that the camera has little alternative but to leave the shutter open longer to soak up more light. These tricks and tools will help you take better nighttime photos, without having to pack a tripod.

4. Music Discovery Platform exfm Goes Mobile With A Killer App For iOS
The artist formerly known as Extension Entertainment, now known simply as exfm, has officially gone mobile today, releasing its first mobile app for iOS. I’ve been enjoying exfm for a few months now through the startup’s Chrome extension, so I’m very excited to be able to finally bring that experience with me on-the-go.

5. A New Mobile Social Games King In The U.S.? Former Facebookers Take Storm8 To 210 Million Downloads
On the heels of PopCap’s billion dollar acquisition comes some interesting news from the social games front: Game developer Storm8 is today announcing a few impressive stats. Among other things, the company is claiming that it has become the “largest mobile social games developer in the U.S.”, boasting over 210 million downloads across iOS and Android. While those numbers are certainly impressive, with Angry Birds raking in over 200 million downloads, I think Rovio, Zynga, PopCap, Outfit7 and quite a few others might have a thing or two to say about that, each of which has fairly sizable user bases in the U.S. Then again, Rovio is in fact Helsinki-based and Outfit7 is international as well so Storm8′s claim to American soil likely stands — at least in relation to the Angry Birds and Talking Tom Cat makers, respectively.

BONUS

6. Google Launches New DOM Snitch Chrome Extension To Keep You Safe From Malicious JavaScript
Google has this week announced via its security blog a new tool its created called the DOM Snitch which is an experimental Chrome extension that enables developers to identify insecure practices commonly found in client-side code.

7. Amazon’s “state of the cloud” — it isn’t stacking up
When it comes to the cloud, just forget about the stack. Cloud computing is evolving beyond the data structure of interchangeable layers, said Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President at Amazon, during his “state of the cloud” address at GigaOm’s Structure conference.

First Use Of Amazon CloudFormation

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Amazon recently release a new product called CloudFormation. It’s basically an automated build out of several Amazon AWS products, driven by a simple XML file.

One of the templates offered out of the box is for a complete WordPress install. After following the wizard like instructions, I had a basic WordPress installation up and running in a matter of minutes.

I played with several WordPress settings, saved changes, added posts and pages, and even modified the theme.

Overall it was a painless experience. I downloaded the template XML so I could modify for future needs, and tuned the server off after about 4 hours. Total charges were around $3. Of course that’s with little data transfer.

One feature I haven’t been able to get working yet is WordPress MultiSite. I kept getting an error pointing to a location on the server that was throwing a 404 error. This could be a problem with a plugin. Further investigation is needed.

What I really liked was I could turn on a dev box for a demo or to work on a new site without having to setup a new web hosting. Not sure yet how feasible it would be to run the site 24/7, but for dev and test it would be great.

Cutting Out The Bloat Of Cable

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I’ve been forced by circumstance to evaluate my usage of, and payment for, Cable/Satellite TV. What follows is an overview of my attempt to find free or low cost alternatives to the bloated cost of Cable/Satellite.

The first thing I wanted to do was evaluate how much TV we actually watched. Most of our live viewing happened in the morning, catching up on local news. Almost everything else was watched from the DVR (digital video recorder). My biggest hurdle was finding a way to watch free local TV.

Finding the local channels turned out to be easier than I originally thought. I had been so programmed to watch TV via Cable/Stallite, I completely forgot TV is broadcast through the air. I spent days trying to figure out how to get to streaming news from local channels. TO no avail (which is a fail in my view, TV stations need to get their content on line or stream it live).

Thanks to Noah Sparks, who reminded me you can get HD channels over the air, with an antenna. I made my way to the local tech store, got an antenna, hooked it up, and voila, free local channels, so now we can get the news when we want it.

The next difficult hurdle was figuring out how to watch shows that I couldn’t record to a DVR. There are several open source and commercial products that let you record TV and store it on a local hard drive, but I would have to invest in more hardware, and setup is time consuming. I wanted something easy. Several services came to mind, Netflix, Hulu+, Amazon Video on Demand, and Apple TV.

Netflix

Netflix is a no brainer. The setup was easy (built in to my Blu-ray player), and gives me the ability to stream movies and TV shows, or order a DVD. My only wish for Netflix was they make current seasons available the next day. But I can live without that for now.

The other big draw to Netflix for me is the absence of ads. I’m paying for the individual content, I don’t want to see ads. Ever.

Web Shows

Next I went through our current DVR to see what was being recorded, and then tried to find the corresponding show on the channels web site. Typically these sites make shows available soon after they have aired live. In most cases I was able to find the show, both current episodes, and past episodes. All include advertising, before during and after. But for free, can’t complain.

Hulu+

This is a complete failure. Not only does Hulu+ charge a monthly fee, they also run ads during a show. Seriously? They also struggled to deliver streaming content without buffering. I watched shows from several services all on the same night, and Hulu+ was the only one that had to buffer. In fact, it took me nearly 1 hour to watch the last 15 minutes of a show because of buffering every 30 seconds. I just wasn’t impressed, but was glad I had a 7 day trial.

Apple TV

The last piece of the puzzle for me is Apple TV. Using this device gives me the ability to rent movies and TV shows, for a reasonable price, on demand. I can also connect my own content to one my Mac’s, and stream content through the TV. Big win in my mind. This product will only get better, including giving me the ability to stream content to my iPad or iPhone. Very cool.

One service I tried was Amazon Video on Demand, but the cost was too high, and I didn’t want to buy content, just rent it. Average price for an HD show as $3 or more. I think between Netflix, the Web, over the air Digital TV, and Apple TV, I should just about be able to cut the bloat of Cable/Satellite, and put my money into content I want to watch instead of paying for content I will never watch.

One final thought, and that is sports. I’m not a huge sports fan, except for NASCAR and College football. I can watch most of the college sports on local channels, and possibly ESPN3 (which I’ll write about later as I take time to explore it more). NASCAR doesn’t have a streaming system, yet. I really want them too get on board with that. I need to check and see what is available for mobile consumption, but I’m looking for whats on TV.