Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. It is tightly coupled with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that enables storage in the cloud. Amazon EC2 is under limited beta right now with the limitation of 20 running instances.
At first look, the new service is easily confused with traditional web/application hosting services. However, the key difference is the elasticity of capacity. Traditional hosting service has various plans for different hosting capacity. As the demand grows, you will always face the problem of migrating to higher capacity hosting. Amazon EC2 claims to solve the problem by offering elastic capacity hosting.
Continue reading ‘Run a Google-scale Web Site with Amazon EC2′
PayPal and Google Checkout are few of the many online payment services that offer web service payment integration.
PayPal
PayPal is the most popular P2P (Person-to-Person) payment service online. PayPal web service payment is only available in Website Payment Pro. A site owner can leverage the Direct Payment API to accept credit card payments without any redirection to PayPal web site. PayPal remains invisible throughout the customer experience.
Microsoft Excel is a powerful business tool with many advanced charting, graphing, and algorithmic/statistical capabilities, making it a favorite among business users. It has been estimated that 50% of the world’s business logic is contained within Excel spreadsheets.
Traditional data integration into Excel usually takes the form of
- Hand entry of data from a paper source
- Data imported from another file (database, spreadsheet, delimited text file, etc.)
- Date pulled by an intermediate program from another source (Visual Basic, macro, etc.)
Web 1.0 was about building websites to publish contents in HTML and sell things. Search engines are the single point of access for most web users. The higher the hit rate a website has, the higher the value it has.
Web 2.0 is about using the Web collaboratively — sharing and mixing up information and resources. The whole content pool is being analyzed by millions of talented web users. Users can consume or create contents in a personalized way either through blogs or wiki.
Search engines provide ad-hoc searching for unorganized contents as well as channels to deliver targeted contents. The playing field is spending money inside the Web to promote websites by creating as much links as possible. The higher the number of links a website has, the higher the value it can generate.
O’Reilly gives as examples: eBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype and Adsense