Just checking, did Ray Ozzie join Amazon?
I'm sure they would love to have him, but they've always been 5 years ahead of whatever Ray Ozzie did.
Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
91–100 of 183 posts
Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't Audiogalaxy used to be a P2P service in the early 00s?
It did. We are some of the same folks, but a totally different service now.
Wow! I'd been thinking about researching iTunes -> iPhone streaming apps, but now I don't even have to — I know wholeheartedly that anything y'all put out is going to be awesome. It's weird to realize that 'brands' really do have worth.
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.
Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
#93It's surprising that their player doesn't work in Mobile Safari. On my iPod touch, I can load the page and see my music (though it helpfully tells me I should upgrade to IE), but nothing will play.
I notice that they used Flash for the uploader. Surely they wouldn't have used it as the only option for the player.
Strange.
Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's a bug; the site is pretty carefully worded. For whatever reason, sideloading from the MP3 store is not retroactive.
If that's the case, I'd bet it's for license reasons. An AmazonMP3 purchase made after Cloud Drive is launched could be described as having been copied for personal use, at the time of purchase, to your Cloud Drive. 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 i…
Bingo. They encourage you to upload your Amazon MP3's directly throughout the launch site. This is a licensing issue.
Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
No linux?
Not yet -- I am bummed we haven't been able to make it happen yet but it is definitely on the list.
My music sits on a ReadyNAS Duo (fantastic value, low power, always on), which runs Debian. It would be very nice if the helper application worked there too.
Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
#96It doesn't seem like they currently do this, but it would be great if Amazon applied file de-duplication (like Dropbox) to at least music files. If I'm trying to upload a song that Amazon already has on its own servers, it should just use that copy instead of uploading a new copy from my computer.
Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
#97This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. 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…
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
( 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?
Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
#98This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. 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…
I've said it before, I'll say it again: ( 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 warni…
Agreed. It's generally a bad idea to build your entire product around a missing feature in the Big Guy's thing.
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.
Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player
#99This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services. 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…
I would say that that the music side of things was the driver here--not to be a cloud-drive competitor. They are going to make a ton of money selling music and letting people play it from the cloud. I think the CloudDrive as a standalone storage product is more of a by-product (they needed the drive product to create the player product).
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"