Seattle, Washington - (Website Hosting Directory) - April 24, 2008 - Amazon Web Services’ Founder, Jeff Bezos, will speak at the Carnegie Mellon Business School and Computer Science Diploma Ceremonies.

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., is a distinctive, world-class research university that blends cutting-edge programs across many disciplines including business, computer science, the arts and sciences, engineering and public policy.

As guest speaker, Mr. Bezos will preside over Carnegie Mellon’s diploma ceremonies for its Tepper School of Business and School of Computer Science during the university’s commencement weekend, May 17-18.

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Seattle, Washington - (Website Hosting Directory) - January 8, 2008 - Amazon Web Services LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. has awarded Ooyala video company, as the winner of its Start-Up Challenge.

Ooyala delivers interactive video experience with monetization and analytics tools for video publishers and advertisers. As the grand prize winner, Ooyala will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Service credits and an investment offer from Amazon.com. The announcement was made at a celebration in Seattle after the final round of the contest in which seven finalists presented their businesses to judges from Amazon.com and venture capital firms.

Sean Knapp, Founder and President of Technology for Ooyala noted, ”When we started Ooyala, we were warned that we would spend most of our time in datacenters at 2 a.m. making sure everything worked. Very few companies in the world can provide the infrastructure services Amazon can provide. Why would you do it yourself? AWS has enabled Ooyala to build, deploy and scale our product in record time, raising the bar for rapid innovation.” Read more of this news »

San Francisco, California - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - June 8, 2007 - Wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., Alexa Web Search Service, has been upgraded with developer tools, in an effort to perform complex queries of the web’s data in a more cost-effective, efficient manner.

”Search Engine for Computers,” is designed to return up to 1 million search results from a single query, allowing complex queries involving thousands of search terms, and gives programmatic access to the actual page content of the documents matching a query. The new release is hoped to enable any developer to innovate in search at web scale using the power of Alexa’s search engine, web crawl and Amazon’s infrastructure web services.

Niall O’Driscoll, Vice President of Engineering at Alexa remarked, ”Developers, businesses, universities and research institutions have been asking us for years to use the Alexa web crawl for their own very specific purposes. They don’t want a search engine that returns 10 or even 100 results for a given word or phrase. They want a search engine they can program to return millions of results based on thousands of terms, and then analyze those results for even more specific data. The Alexa Web Search service makes this possible, and in a simple, affordable, and scalable way. Now any developer with an idea can use the power of search to build their own business, answer complex research questions, or discover new slices of data never queried before.”

Developers can use the Alexa Web Search service to build web search into their applications or services, to create vertical search engines on specific topics, and to perform custom, complex queries of data on the web and receive up to 1 million results that match the single query. In addition, they can filter or extract data from documents using regular expressions that are run across the documents matching a query.

For example, with the Alexa Web Search service, a developer could build a directory of Paris hotels. By searching for pages containing both ”Paris” and ”hotel” and retrieving up to a million matches, a developer could create a custom slice of the web as a starting point for a new directory. Additional processing could be as simple as using regular expressions to extract hotel names, rates, and addresses, or as complex as analyzing the full document text using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), offered by Amazon Web Services, to identify amenities or nearby attractions. In either case, the developer is spared the difficulty and expense of spidering the web just to find the subset relevant to hotels.

Developers can process the page content of documents themselves using the Alexa Web Search service to locate documents of interest, retrieve and process those documents from Amazon EC2 compute nodes, and store their output in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). These services offered by Amazon Web Services help make the Alexa Web Search service highly scalable, reliable, and cost effective. The Alexa Web Search service replaces the Alexa Web Search Platform service.

Mr. Driscoll continued, ”The Alexa Web Search Platform that we released in beta two years ago was the beginning of what we are launching today. We learned that developers want even deeper access to the crawl. They want a toolbox, not a Swiss Army knife, and APIs, not GUIs. We listened to our developers and the new Alexa Web Search service is the result.”

Musipedia (www.musipedia.org) — a site that allows users to find songs by melody instead of title lyrics or artist — has used the Alexa Web Search Platform to find melodies to add to their database. Rainer Typke, founder of Musipedia remarked, ”With Alexa’s new Web Search service, I can do everything programmatically. I search for up to 1 million files at a time, analyze those files using my melody identification software running on EC2 nodes, and release those nodes when I’m finished. And now the service is incredibly cost effective and easy to use. The process allows me to focus on my algorithms and website, and leave the web-scale infrastructure parts to Amazon and Alexa. The end result is that Musipedia users can now find many more sites with the melodies they are searching for.”

Founded in April 1996 by Bruce Gilliat and acquired by Amazon.com in 1999, Alexa Internet provides dynamic data about the web. Alexa’s services include web search, web site traffic information, statistics, and other tools to make timely and intelligent business and consumer decisions. The Alexa Web Search service returns up to one million search results, allows complex queries involving thousands of search terms, and gives programmatic access to the actual page content of the documents matching a query. Additionally, the Alexa Web Search enables any developer to innovate in search at web scale using the power of Alexa’s search engine, web crawl and Amazon’s infrastructure web services. The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites. It offers access to Alexa’s large and growing collection of images, gathered from its comprehensive web crawl.

AWIS offers software and web developers access to more than 100 terabytes of web site information and popularity data collected by Alexa’s web crawl of 10 billion Web pages on 16 million sites. Developers can use AWIS to answer difficult and interesting questions about the web, and programmatically incorporate these answers directly into their applications. Types of web site information and popularity data that are accessible to developers through AWIS include website traffic data, related sites, and a categorized view of the web ordered by traffic rank.

Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services exposes technology and product data from Amazon and its affiliates that enable developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own. More than 180,000 developers have signed up to use Amazon Web Services since its inception. Amazon Web Services recently launched the Solutions Catalog where developers can list the businesses, applications, and solutions they have built using Amazon Web Services.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers ”Earth’s Biggest Selection.” Amazon.com seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as health and personal care, jewelry and watches, gourmet food, sports and outdoors, apparel and accessories, books, music, DVDs, electronics and office, toys and baby, and home and garden. Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.joyo.com.

To learn more about The Alexa Web Search service, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/alexawebsearch.

Seattle, Washington - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - April 26, 2007 - Amazon.com, Inc. has released its financial results for its first quarter ending March 31, 2007, indicating that net income increased 115% to $111 million in the first quarter, compared with prior net income of $51 million.

According to Amazon’s financial report, operating cash flow was $726 million for the trailing twelve months, compared with $724 million. Free cash flow was $521 million for the trailing twelve months, an increase of 4% compared with $501 million for the trailing twelve months ended March 31, 2006. Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards outstanding totaled 430 million on March 31, 2007, compared with 438 million a year ago. During the quarter, the Company repurchased 6 million shares for $248 million.

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San Francisco, California - (Website Hosting Directory) - April 24, 2007 - O’Reilly Media and CMP Technology, co-hosts of the Web 2.0 Expo scheduled through April 18 at Moscone West in San Francisco, California, have reportedly received over 10,000 attendee registrations, doubling the number originally expected. Read more of this news »

Chicago, Illinois - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - April 3, 2007 - A fundamental business method patent related to Internet shopping and electronic commerce, forward-cited more than 80 times by 38 companies’ patents, including Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!, will be offered for sale.

U.S. Patent Number 5,895,454 (”the ‘454 Patent”), entitled “Integrated Interface for Vendor/Product Oriented Websites,” will be offered at Ocean Tomo’s first private auction, on Thursday, May 10, 2007, at its global headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. The patent discloses a method of allowing users to interact with vendors and their product or service offerings by querying a database to view, order and pay for products or services using the Internet.

Andrew T. Ramer, President of Ocean Tomo Auctions remarked, “Given the high-level of integration of online shopping methods in many of today’s Internet sites and the broad applicability and early priority date of this patent, this is an excellent acquisition opportunity for companies in a number of industries including comparison shopping, service aggregators, Internet software and services, and Internet retail. We’re excited to offer this patent in our first live private auction, which combines the sense of urgency offered by our proven live public auction methodology with the seller’s preference for a private transaction.”

The ‘454 Patent has been the subject of previous litigation. The ‘454 Patent was asserted against Yahoo! Inc. (Case No. C00-20495-JW, N.D. Cal.); and Shop.com and Altura International (Case No. 05-CV-682-PSF-PAC, D. Col.). The Shop.com and Altura International lawsuit was settled after a Markman ruling was issued on March 2, 2006. The sale of the ‘454 Patent is subject to two existing licensing arrangements and a non-exclusive license which will be retained by the inventor.

For more information on the ‘454 Patent and to register to bid at the Private Auction being held on Thursday, May 10, 2007 at Ocean Tomo’s headquarters in Chicago, please contact David Steinkeler at 312.327.4415 or DSteinkeler@OceanTomo.com.

Ocean Tomo Auctions, the auctions arm of Ocean Tomo, LLC, is a leading Intellectual Capital Merchant Banc firm, has received global recognition as the leader in the live auctioning of intellectual property assets for some of the world’s largest and most established companies. Hundreds of key decision makers in the intellectual property and financial communities attend and participate in the auctions and related workshops, including C-level executives, Fortune 500 IP professionals, investors, small to mid-size companies, inventors and media professionals. Ocean Tomo Auctions has been featured on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Red Herring, BusinessWeek, Reuters and more. The live auctions are held in the spring and fall in the U.S. and in the summer in Europe.

To learn more, please visit: ww.oceantomo.com.