At Amazon’s first re: Invent developer conference in Las Vegas today, the company’s vice president for Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy announced that its S3 storage service now stores a total of 1.3 trillion objects and handles over 830,000 requests per second. Jassy also announced that the company’s users spun up 3.7 million Elastic Map Reduce clusters since the service launched in May 2010.

While Jassy didn’t announce any numbers for how many startups and enterprises are currently using Amazon’s Web Services, he did say that over 1,500 academic institutions and 300 government agencies now run applications on the service, including NASA, which gave a very dramatic presentation about how it used AWS to get the Curiosity to Mars and share the event with the world.

Jassy also noted that the company now adds enough server capacity every day to run Amazon when it was still a $5 billion business in 2003.

In addition to this momentum data, Jassy also announced a 25 percent price reduction for Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Path CEO Dave Morin offered some updates on the company’s growth while on-stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt. Version 2.0 of the journaling/personal networking app launched back in November, and Morin said the momentum from that launch has continued in recent months.

A lot of the early growth with Path 2.0 was in Japan and Korea, and Path’s second largest user base is in China, he said. Things have been picking up in the United States, too, especially in “these nice metro pockets.”

When asked to put a number on that growth Morin repeated a stat that he’d previously shared, that Path has more than 3 million downloads. However, he said the metric he cares about most is engagement — and in Path’s case, more than half of the total user base is active, something he called “really exciting for us.”

As for what those users are actually doing, Morin says photosharing remains the most popular activity. Music-sharing recently surged ahead to number two spot, overtaking the ability to announce when you fall asleep and wake up. That may seem like bad news for the sleep feature, but Morin says he’s actually been surprised by how popular it has been — in fact, before the launch of 2.0, he was even thinking of cutting the sleep feature out.

“I never would have expected it to be our third most popular type of content,” he said.

Morin also discussed Path’s competition, which we covered in a separate post.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dating/meeting-people site Badoo has been putting together a 147 million registered user base over the last six years, with a huge run on Facebook helping it to reach around the world last year. And today, it follows up on the momentum with a key hire. It has appointed long-time Google executive Benjamin Ling as chief operating office to help push it out across mobile and Web platforms.

He’ll oversee product, engineering, business operations, partnerships and corporate development. Badoo has been best known for expanding into emerging markets like Russia and Brazil but it’s now growing in the US where it already has eight million users.

Ling joins Badoo from Google, where he was product management director of Search Products and Local Business Products. His tenure at that company spanned roles including Google’s search, commerce and Local Business products, to Google’s Commerce products, to senior roles at YouTube. He also had a brief stint helping to lead Facebook’s developer platform in the early days.

Ling will begin his new role at Badoo in May, based at its London headquarters.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Adobe’s earnings for the first quarter of 2011 were a mixed bag. The company met earnings expectations and revenue increased, but net income continued to fall.

Adobe reported revenue of $1.05 billion, up from $1.03 billion during the same period last year, as well as earnings per share (on a non-GAAP basis) of 57 cents, meeting analyst estimates. Operating income declined to $387 million (from $400 million), and net income fell to $285 million (from $298 million).

The earnings included $9.6 million in revenue from the acquisition of digital marketing company Efficient Frontier, which closed in January.

“Our strategy is to be the leader in Digital Media and Digital Marketing,” President and CEO Shantanu Narayen said in the earnings press release. “With the upcoming release of our Creative Suite and Creative Cloud offerings, and with the momentum we have in Digital Marketing, we remain confident about our ability to drive strong revenue and earnings growth.”

As of 4:59pm Eastern Time, Adobe’s stock has fallen 5.13 percent in after hours trading.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tired of waiting for AT&T to launch their first LTE devices? Yeah — so is AT&T, it would seem. So much so, in fact, that they’re prepping to launch their first LTE devices early next week… before their LTE network is even officially fired up.

So, why launch these devices before the LTE network is up and ready? Because it lets them say they’ve got LTE devices, of course. Plus, they’ll still work, to some degree — they’ll just be limited to AT&T’s not-quite-4G-but-they-call-it-4G-anyway HSPA+ network until the LTE starts to light up later this summer.

Now, before my fellow phone-geeks get too worked up: in what seems to be a trend for the carriers as of late, AT&T’s first devices to run on the new network won’t be phones — they’re laptop tethering devices.

For the lone road warriors, AT&T’s launching the USBConnect Momentum (pictured right), which’ll juice your laptop into the LTE network over USB. For the folks that roam in packs, they’re launching the Elevate (pictured up top), a MiFi-esque, 4G-powered WiFi hotspot (turn it on, let it connect to the 4G network, and connect up to 5 devices over WiFi). Both are launching on August 21st, though the price tags for these things still seem to be under wraps. (Update: Looks like the Momentum will go for $50 on a two-year contract, while the Elevate will go for $70.)

AT&T also took the opportunity to confirm the monthly pricing for LTE “data-only mobile broadband” devices (read: not phones): $50 a month gets you 5 gigabytes, with each gigabyte you use over costing you another $10. The future of data continues to look pretty damned expensive.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft is on a roll. Onkyo is the latest company to trade Android tablet royalties for access to Microsoft’s patent licensing program. The details of the agreement wasn’t released. This makes Onkyo the third company this week that has signed such an agreement. Velocity Micro and General Dynamic’s Itronix brand joined the club just days ago.

“We are pleased that Onkyo has taken advantage of our patent licensing program for Android devices and has signed this agreement,” said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft. “This agreement and similar agreements recently announced evidence the momentum and success of our licensing program.”

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Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Halloween is an exhibitionist’s paradise, and nowhere do more (safe for work) exhibitionists congregate than in online communities like DailyBooth, a site which asks users to upload photo booth style pictures of themselves.

The YCombinator-funded DailyBooth has decided to get into the Halloween spirit this year (or is just really good at spotting opportunities for marketing itself) and is running a program that allows users to strut their Halloween stuff using the hashtag #trickortreat.

There’s already a critical mass of users sharing and a commenting on each other’s pics this Halloween Eve, and the momentum has inevitably spread to Twitter. And while the #trickortreat photos do include the ubiquitous assortment of sexy witches and sexy vampires, some of the DailyBooth users have gotten really creative (I’m looking at you Mr.iPad) and I’m including some of my favorites below.

You can view more costumes in realtime here; Link to your favorite (or your own) costumes in the comments.

Pics via Yourallcats, ijerr, Californiasonhermind, B_RAINpwns, meganwitkus, moonless_night and dalehaines.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Seedcamp, the roving pan-European startup programme which seems to have the momentum of a juggernaut these days, kicked off its big week this week in London at University College London with a record number of teams, 23 this year picked from 900 applicants, and over 100 mentors taking to teams from 16 regions throughout EMEA. And already there are general themes emerging from the teams presenting.

Saving businesses money is one major theme – important in a recession. Plus, fashion startups are a trend in their own right as they start to address the rather antiquated fashion world. “Data” startups are also a trend, and the problems of the media world are also being addressed.

But there is one elephant in the room which (almost) dare not speak its name: where were the really ‘big play’ consumer startups?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch