Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
amazon.com
amazon.com
My guess is that Amazon will own content delivery for these devices (books, movies, TV, music) and that Microsoft will round out the rest, with a Bing Maps app and an email app that supports Gmail etc but syncs nicely with Hotmail (which has been totally overhauled since you last tried it). This is entirely a guess on my part, mind you.
The original release of the operating system included Visual Voicemail, multi-touch gestures, HTML email, Safari web browser, threaded text messaging, and YouTube. However, many features like MMS, third-party apps, and copy and paste were not supported at release. These missing features led to hackers "jailbreaking" their phones which added these missing features. Official software updates slowly added these features.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(original)#Software_Hist...
Looking back now they clearly did the right thing. In articles at the time when journalists did a feature comparisons it lost. But when people and journalists actually used it - it was awesome. I argue a product can be both a MVC and have simple, powerful, useful, polished features. Just look at the ipod and iphone (yeah similar reviews happened for ipod. See the infamous Slashdot quote).
Edit: Another example is iTunes (why couldn't you buy things directly on your device) or their office productivity suite.
Amazon's cloud product is aimed at Android
Apple's cloud product will almost certainly ignore Android users because they'll use it to bolster the iPhone/iOS stack (+ enticement to switch to).
They're aimed at two different markets.
While many of the pieces will be available to any android device, I don't think carriers/OEMs are likely to partner too tightly with a company that aims to release its own first-party hardware.
Since we don't store the music in the cloud, we don't have any size limits (the current winner has about 530,000 files). Obviously this only works if you leave your home computer on, but we've found that isn't a problem for most folks.
Audiogalaxy 1.0 was the first to really execute on an amazing new UX since the days of IRC Fserves and Napster, and after your legal problems it wasn't till OiNK (and now what.cd) showed up years later that anything nearly as good was available.
As far as I can see, your service is subsonic + the hassle of registering, yet another company with your personal details, less features and the possibility that it may become a freemium service in the future.
So, what, exactly, does your service offer?
Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle.
There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon wasn't interested in implementing that stuff themselves. There's no debating that this will make Amazon a ton of money. It remains to be seen, however, how much it will cost them in developer loyalty and businesses that never get built because "If they did it to JungleDisk, they'll do it to us".
( http://swombat.com/2011/2/22/predictability-of-closed-platfo... )
> I would argue that only one thing is entirely predictable about closed platforms: they will do whatever is in the business's interest. When building your business on someone else's platform, you should always assume that if it is in the platform owner's interest, they will shut you down tomorrow with no warning.
> So, you need to do two things at the very least:
> 1. Ensure your goals and the platform owner's goals are always in harmonious agreement.
> 2. Have a backup plan for what happens if your access to the platform is revoked tomorrow.
> People seem to keep learning this lesson over and over again... with Facebook, with Twitter, and these days with Apple...
And these days, with Amazon?
The surprising thing about Amazon, however, is that they've gone out of their way to be the exception to that rule over the last 4 years. JungleDisk was the posterchild for "business that will only last until Amazon incorporates their product as a feature", and yet it continued to survive as Amazon released infrastructure product after infrastructure product. And in the few cases where they did move into a space where somebody had built something, they did it delicately and cooperatively. They really were the Good Guy.
I'm hoping that this was just the one space that so obviously needed filling from a Company Strategy perspective that they're making an exception in this case. They've built up a lot of goodwill. It'd be a shame to see it squandered.
Also, JungleDisk already competing against a whole slew of worthy competitors, some of which run on S3, some of which don't.
Amongst all the argument about "open"-ness and what it means, whether it's source code or something else - for me this is the important part. If a competitor can build on a platform and safely do so in competition with the interests of the platform owner then that platform is "open" in the real sense that matters.
From what I calculated, it's cheaper than storing files straight in S3 (atleast at the 500G level). So their "retail" is cheaper than their "wholesale". I think it's probably not much of a profit source for them.
EDIT: "wholesale" not "hardware"
In short, your complaint doesn't make sense.
They've deliberately stayed away from those areas that have products in them. You're right though that this is one area where "AWS" wasn't a necessary component for the service in question. That could help explain why they're comfortable doing it.
[citation needed]
At the scale AWS is operating I guess Amazon isn't even fully aware of all the stuff going on there. No surprise an elephant can stomp onto ants.
This doesn't strike me as true.
Amazon CloudWatch versus CloudKick Amazon SimpleEmailService versus SendGrid Amazon RDS versus FantomDB
Frankly, looking at AWS's evolution, it seems that one of their favorite methods of innovation is to watch for startups that are servicing a lot of AWS companies, then creating their own version of that product.
• This is the first time Amazon has pulled together the two major branches of their business, retail and cloud infrastructure, into something (dare I say it?) synergetic.
• Amazon is taking the first steps into the non-retail consumer web, where, if successful, they'll probably give a good scare to a handful of startups as they sweep across segments (and without the Google / Facebook-like startup shopping).
I'm pretty sure I heard that in a talk on AWS given by an Amazon product manager, but I could be wrong (or he could be wrong).
Just put aside that, is it actually any legal reason for using things like dropbox to upload music purchased and streamed for private uses?
BTW that one album/20GB offers only last until the end of the year, and it only last for a year. After that, you would have the habit of using the service but be reverted to the free plan.
However since all the new purchases on amazon are automatically saved without counting towards the quota, I guess that solves the problem for many android users. Just that I don't listen to many of bands/artists that put their songs on Amazon MP3 may make this offer less appealing.
I'm in Australia and that's what it looked like to me initially too, but after manually uploading an MP3 and then attempting to play it, the Cloud Player then worked.
But when I tried to install the Android player it said it wasn't available on my carrier (Optus)
Uploaded an mp3 manually and tried to play, but got the warning of being outside the US :(
I don't know much about this but cdbaby[1] will do that for what seems like an affordable price. It just takes a bit of effort and sacrificing some profits in lieu of better distribution. I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but it's possible to get music out there if you are an artist. And cdbaby will let artists choose where/how they digitally distribute so artists could just choose Amazon MP3 if they wished.
I don't understand these types of comments. I have the same problem with Spotify in the US, but I don't feel the need to share that I can't use Spotify whenever a Spotify discussion comes up -- everyone is well aware of country restrictions already.
Besides that, I also try to attract people with the backgrounds of the legal side in US, to explain the ground for making this service legal and the issues on fair-use particularly in US.
In this case, the only step of the process that checks your foreign-ness is the first one, where you accept the license agreement. So if you have a US VPN, you can quickly bypass the wall and get signed up. Then it's open to use directly from there.
Or better still, since it's Amazon, you can fire up one of their handy EC2 Windows boxes in New Jersey, remote desktop in and IE your way to http://amazon.com/clouddrive. It's a few minutes of pain, followed by a nickel charged to your Amazon account, but it gets you in to try this thing.
Enjoy!
Very strange, why is that?
Maybe this is a European directive and enforced in all of those countries, and they need to figure out how they're going to approach this law.
Think of it more like Dropbox-style-sync for your whole phone (likely configurable to only happen when in wifi), plus the option to stream if you really want.
The average user will be using the wifi-sync by default without even realizing it and probably never even consider streaming all their music.
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5 GB (FREE)
20 GB ($20 / year)
50 GB ($50 / year)
100 GB ($100 / year)
200 GB ($200 / year)
500 GB ($500 / year)
1000 GB ($1000 / year)
20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)
400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)
1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)
Allowing previously purchased tracks to be streamed without first uploading them looks more like what Lala was doing, and they had to negotiate streaming licenses. Though I'd wonder if there is any real implementation difference in Amazon's case.
Except:
> You have 5.0 GB of Cloud Drive storage. Upload your entire music collection.
I don't think this is going to work...
Having said that, since there are smart people working on this platform on amazon, I am sure they don't make a physical clone, which raises the question already mentioned above, why limit to 5GB?
They don't compete with dropbox's sync functionality, but they sure do on price and the mp3 cloud player!
...you will be automatically eligible for the 20 GB plan for one year from
the date of your MP3 album purchase. Unless you set your account to auto-renew
to a paid plan, the 20 GB plan will revert to a free plan one year from the
date of your MP3 album purchase.
I would love Amazon Cloud Drive to have desktop integration like Dropbox.
Doesn't google have a cloud service now? It just doesn't have a pretty GUI or desktop integration?
But for me the real story here is the ability to store any file or document, and aggressive prices of bigger storage tiers.
Dropbox's prices have always seemed unreasonably high to me - and I'm tempted to move all my personal docs over to Amazon and use DropBox just for social sharing.
The cloud is generic and multi-vendor. It's a utility. This angle makes sense when talking to developers.
OTOH, I could see a lot of users being confused because they put stuff "in the cloud", but they can't get it back (from another vendor i.e. different cloud).
I just set my dad up with SFTP on a dreamhost account, and he keeps calling it his "cloud storage" account. I think beyond the developer world it's starting to just mean "I don't have to back it up, and I can reach it from anywhere."
1) Vendor-centric: It's a missed opportunity for Dreamhost, because your Dad won't think of their brand.
2) User-centric: What happens when he has two "cloud" accounts from different vendors? Will he expect them to work together?
[edited for clarity]
PS: Sorry for hogging your upstream Alan.
yet the normal clouddrive uploader works. weird.
edit: It also imports playlists, etc.
Despite the Flash requirement for uploading, they're already doing non-Flash playback. I don't have Flash installed on my desktop and playback works great.
Seeing as Safari has had background audio support since before it was granted to third-party apps, the web UI would be a decent stopgap in lieu if a native iOS app.
Here's hoping it's just a bug!
First time in a while I got a warm fuzzy for having an Android device.
I imagine the music companies would have a hissy fit and demand streaming payments if that was the case though.
I'm not sure if having to upload your music before it's de-duplicated makes a legal difference, but I bet it came into play. I have long thought of the possibility of hacking up the dropbox binary to fake hashes of known music I didn't have and get access instantly
Judge Jed S. Rakoff, in the case UMG v. MP3.com, ruled in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner." Before damage was awarded, MP3.com settled with plaintiff, UMG Recordings, for $53.4 million, in exchange for the latter's permission to use its entire music collection.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/MP3.com#My.MP...
I notice that they used Flash for the uploader. Surely they wouldn't have used it as the only option for the player.
Strange.
Is this meant to supplement your old ways of syncing music to the phone or replace it?
Does anybody knows how to access Amazon Cloud Drive using Webdab?
Is it the added meta info about music and other things that Amazon can use since it has a huge collection of music?
To elaborate: Yes, Amazon Cloud Drive can act like iTunes, insofar as you buy tracks from Amazon and can play them thru a browser via the MP3 player. No question Amazon will, like Apple & iTunes, expand this ability by using this "cloud drive" as the focal point for an assortment of applications, now that Amazon is in the e-book, e-movie, e-music, etc. business. I expect the Kindle will start using this in both overt and covert fashion. As Amazon observes what people use their "cloud drive" for, they will provide matching services to enhance and lock-in use thereof. The intent is to make this a disruptive product: its full potential may be unclear, but it's the groundwork for new ways of doing things - and new ways for Amazon to make money.
You're coming from a 'what it could be' which is at best guess in your own words, unclear. Right now they are using music as a beach head into the market. In future it could be something video or word processing related.
Is that what you're trying to say?