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:

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