FriendCaller Blog

Today we fall from a cloud or to put it in another way, the cloud is falling and failing. We were a very happy Amazon AWS customer but today the cloud failed us. Part of Amazon’s EC2 service went down and took FriendCaller with it. There are many other online services impacted by this.

More worrying, the information coming from Amazon shows lot of similarities to the updates provided by Japan authorities about the failing of the nuclear power plant’s failing cooling systems. I call for a implementation of a cloud disaster scale, are we having a 5 or is this a 6 already? Didn’t we always told about the robust nature of AWS cloud hosting, sound familiar as well.

However, language is the only similarity to the tragedy in Japan. No life is lost in our disaster experience. Since the service is down, maybe is good time to read a book. Our recommendation today is a book from Jeff Howe. And No! It is not available on the Kindle online store:

Sometime is still amazing how things (not) work. Using the new browsers you get used to it by just typing “CNN” and let the browser worry about taking you to www.cnn.com or looking for Giga OM’s article about us you just type Gigaom FriendCaller, done!
So yesterday I just typed Amazon Android Appstore and expected to get there, it did not happen: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome all take you to a developer page or press coverage. Even trying variations, app store, Appstore for Android. Nothing.

Today I tried again and Heureka! Amazon.com: Appstore for Android showed up, at last. Still not as first search result, but around second to fifth. Taking a closer look it becomes clear why: The link is using www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/ instead of www.amazon.com/appstore/. I assume this choice is related to Apple’s legal case against Amazon’s use of the word “Appstore”. So it took the mighty search engines a day or two longer to index the store despite the great press coverage.

How FriendCaller is doing on Amazon’s Appstore for Android? Searching in communication for “VoIP” we are No. 1.  So far we have seen no particular increase in downloads. Let’s see, right now it is still fairly complicated to download and install Android apps from Amazon and this limited to the US only.

Amazon is launching its own Android Appstore. Many Android stores have launched recently though Google made it clear that they do not see a space for another store but the original Android Market. The differentiator for Amazon’s Appstore is certainly the large existing customer base and the opportunity for developers selling their apps.

In combination with Amazon’s check out payment solution it could create a success story. We have been critical of the Google Android Market for the poor presentation of the apps and the lack of payment solutions. Both issues have somewhat improved but the store is still very limited and improvements are not available to all users.

Amazon could make a real difference with a solid track record of sales, digital download experience from Kindle ebooks, Amazon Webhosting and the payment solutions. So far, so good. Our app have been approved for some time and will be found online once the store becomes available here.

However, why we have to learn about the exact start date from techcrunch and not from Amazon is a question only Amazon can answer. Right now we can not be sure either if our FriendCaller app can be used through the test drive feature either. Most likely not since our VoIP app needs access to the system microphone and speaker.

Digital books are on the increase according to the business figures Amazon published. The world largest retailer sells meanwhile more E-Books than hardcovers. In the last month Amazon sold on 100 regular books 180 E-Books.  This led to triple business numbers of E-Books at the turn of the half-year 2010.

Amazon did not mention absolute numbers, but reinforced their own statistics with information of the Association of American Publishers, whereby the sale of E-Books increased by 207 percent in the annual comparison.

Chief executive Jeff Bezos cites the price cutting of the own brand E-Book Reader as ones reason.

Can you hear the whisper?

I have been eyeing the Amazon Kindle DX for some time. I like to read, but getting English books while I am abroad is quite troublesome at many places. I must say that I like the idea of Kindle downloading your books through WiFi or UMTS/3G mobile data by utilizing its Amazon Whispernet. Howsoever, when the wireless feature was announced I was thinking of apps that could run on it, as no matter what, the DX is a decent tablet PC, just short of the color display though. Rephrasing, its indeed an ideal device for VoIP. And Amazon did a pretty good negotiation on roaming Charges: 1 Mega Byte of transfer overseas costs only 99 cents versus the big 20 dollars that a US AT&T Apple iPhone user would have to pay when roaming like in Germany for an example.

When we learned today that Amazon will soon launch a developer kit I immediately looked it up, and what a disappointment it was. The first reference to the not allowed features was the Voice over IP functionality. Sorry guys, no web-phone, no browser phone, no free calls. I guess I will be heading to my usual book store as usual.

The Whispernet is rather a Silentnet. Hence, Kindle does not whisper!

Image: Yaron Jeroen van Oostrom