So social commerce is a unicorn, a beautiful but imaginary idea; or that’s the headline finding of a brilliant (free) report is just out by Monetate on social commerce – with Mitch Joel and Jay Baer as contributors.

If you look at the numbers, rather than the hype, you see that social media drives just 1.55% of e-commerce traffic and has a conversion rate of less than three-quarters of one percent (.71%).  Using social media for direct response marketing sucks – with the logical conclusion is that ”social media participation is over-hyped and disproportionately resourced for ecommerce websites”.

The incontrovertible conclusion – from 500 million visits analysed – is, as Mitch Joel points out, that social media does indeed suck as direct response marketing. Social spam – offers, deals and ‘Likes’ from others – does not convert well into sales.  Just don’t. Instead, do something that does work in the direct response world – like search and email marketing.

The problem, of course, is that the report headline sets up social commerce as a straw man dressed in spam.  Any business thinking of social commerce that social commerce is (direct response) social spam has entirely misunderstood social commerce; the use of social technology to help people buy and sell is not about social spam, it is about a social service that creates value for shoppers.  Think Sam’s Club, not Social Spam. In other words, social commerce is about using social technology to create a shopping experience worth recommending

By creating value for shoppers, you – as a business, capture customer value.  It’s a quid pro quo.

Look, for example, at the burgeoning Tuangou team buying market in Asia – shoppers regularly club together to get bulk-buy discounts on items.  The vendor wins because the aggregate margin on 100 sales is greater than the margin on a single sale.  The shopper wins because they get better value (more for less).  The social commerce opportunity is to deploy social technology as a service to shoppers to help them shop smarter.

Or think how Amazon does social commerce through social recommendations – “Frequently Bought Together” or ”Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…). It’s social deployed as a service to help shoppers shop smarter. That, on occasion, this can drive sales directly is a bonus – the goal is to create a great shopping experience.  Apple nailed this kind of social commerce in its retail store network – which was explicitly created to create a social shopping experience so insanely great, people would come back for more, and bring their friends.  Social is something you earn, not spam.

Whilst we’re firmly of the if-you-want-loyalty-get-a-dog school of thought, Mitch Joel makes the similar point that social technology should indeed by deployed by vendors as a service – for creating customer value through relationships (that payout in enhanced loyalty).  We’re sceptical about the whole engagement/loyalty thing,  but Mitch’s point stands – social is a brand-building tool for vendors, not a direct-reponse tool.  Deploying social technology is about creating choice-shaping associations in the mind of the customer (like easy social login, social recommenders, tuangou offers…)

If social commerce is a Unicorn, there are a lot of Unicorns in China.

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has hit 10 million channel sales one month after its release. The company announced its latest milestone today just eight days after confirming that it had shipped over 6 million units of the S4 since its international launch on April 26. According to Samsung, this is the fastest ever sell rate for any of its smartphones.

The latest entry in the Galaxy series–meant as Samsung’s iPhone challenger–has sold much more quickly than its predecessors. The Galaxy S4′s milestone beats the record set by the Galaxy S3, which reached 10 million channel sales 50 days after its launch in 2012. The Galaxy S2 took five months and the Galaxy S seven months to reach the same number.

(Channel sales are to wireless operators and not direct to consumers. In other words, the numbers are for units shipped.)

The Galaxy S4 had to overcome inventory issues that disrupted its U.S. rollout and were attributed by the company to unexpectedly high demand for the phone. Though the Galaxy S4 is indeed selling swiftly, reinforcing Samsung’s dominance of the worldwide smartphone market, Jordan Crook noted after it hit 6 million units shipped that the iPhone is still technically a faster selling phone than any of Samsung’s Galaxy models.

When the iPhone 5 launched, Apple took over 2 million pre-orders in the first 24 hours available. Furthermore, iPhone 5 pre-orders were two times the number of pre-orders seen for the iPhone 4S. Despite Apple’s recent earnings woes, consumers still love their iPhones, and Samsung VS Apple: Battle Smartphone is not over quite yet, especially as the Cupertino company prepares to launch new products this fall.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Truecaller, the Sweden-based creater of a crowdsourced phone directory app and online white pages service, has opened its API to a select group of “handpicked” developers. Truecaller said its directory now contains some 960 million phone numbers, either contributed by individuals or harvested through partnerships with  other directory services. The API covers only the numbers Truecaller has in its own datacase, i.e. not partner numbers, meaning it covers around 600 million digits.

Truecaller’s numbers are global in scope, and include landline, mobile and pre-pay digits — the latter category giving it an edge over other directory services, it argues. Being as phone numbers amount to highly sensitive data in the wrong hands, Truecaller is being careful about who is getting access to its API — hence no open API. Telemarketing companies are specifically barred from getting their wires in. Being the company that helped spammers is clearly not the kind of publicity Truecaller is hoping for here.

One scenario where it envisages its API being a benefit to others but also without causing irritation to phone number owners is for call centres to identify who is calling before starting a call. Truecaller’s API allows for reverse number lookup, meaning developers can attach a name to a known number. It also returns a ‘Spam score’ to indicate if a number is a likely spammer (e.g. telesales or robocalls) and — at the other end of the spectrum — a ‘True score’ to indicate how important the number is. This score is “the measurement of how popular a phone number is with our users over time”.

Name search is not included in the API but remains solely a feature of Truecaller’s mobile app. Truecaller is charging developers to use some of the features of its API, so this is clearly part of its monetisation strategy. Its free API includes only how popular a phone number is. Pricing for the more fully featured APIs starts at $299 per month, rising to $4,999.

Truecaller said cloud e-signing company Scrive has been trying its API — as a way to validate the identity behind a phone number.

Asked about the types of customers it is envisaging for the API, Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi told TechCrunch: “We’ve had more than a thousand applicants till now even as the API was unannounced. However, we evaluate all of them internally and in all cases test their application before given access. For the time being, the developers and companies that have been given access to our API are developing for B2B services.

“I believe the Truecaller API will benefit various companies such as major airlines like Delta Airlines to improve their customer support and experience (greeting by name, decrease waiting times by connecting incoming name to ticket information), but also identify well networked and loyalty members based on their True score.”

Last September Truecaller raised a $1.3 million Series A from Open Ocean, with the aim of expanding its footprint in its key markets of North America, Asia and the Middle East.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sometimes, more medical information is a bad thing. The influential United States Preventive Services Task Force recommends against most women getting genetic screenings for their susceptibility to breast cancer. Why? Because the tests are imperfect: for every woman who gets tested for genes associated with onset breast cancer, even more will falsely test positive, leading spooked patients into needless surgery or psychological trauma. Super cheap genetic testing from enterprising health startups, such as 23andMe, have complicated cancer detection for us all by increasing the accessibility of imperfect medical information.

After discovering a mutated BRCA1 gene, known to increase breast cancer 60 to 80%, actress Angelina Jolie’s underwent a radical preventive double mastectomy. Her brave confession in the New York Times brought much needed attention to breast cancer awareness, but it’s dangerous in the hands of a statistically illiterate population.

For instance, as New York Times statistical guru, Nate Silver, once reminded me, while breast cancer mammograms are 75% accurate, a woman who tests positive only has about a 10% chance of actually getting cancer. Since the vast majority of women don’t have cancer, there are far more women who will falsely test positive (here is a helpful blog post with the numbers worked out). Most importantly, surveys reveal that many people don’t understand the math behind false positives in cancer testing, and may make uninformed decisions as a result.

The same math holds true for the mutated BRCA1/2 gene of Jolie’s confession: researchers estimate that a tiny 0.11 to 0.12 of women have the faulty gene. “I believe in doing genetic testing for BRCA1/2 with appropriate counseling,” writes University of Southern California’s David Agus, one of Steve Jobs’ cancer doctors, The answers are not simple in this case and require experienced professionals to discuss with the patient.”

Traditionally hundreds, if thousands of dollars to test, a cottage industry of cheap genetic testing has sprung up. 23andMe, one of the most popular, offers the service for as little at $99, and has even dared to weigh in on the BRCA controversy on the company blog.

Citing a new study that found no negative emotional consequences from patients after learning about their BRCA1 mutation, the 23andMe blog concludes, “The findings are important given that a frequent criticism of direct-to-consumer testing is based on the assumption that it causes either serious emotional distress or triggers deleterious actions on the part of consumers,” wrote the blog.

“Given the absence of evidence for serious emotional distress or inappropriate actions in this subset of mutation-positive customers who agreed to be interviewed for this study, broader screening of Ashkenazi Jewish women for these three BRCA mutations should be considered.”

Sometimes, however, voluntary surveys don’t tell the whole story. Time, in their cover story on Jolie’s decision, recounts the tale of one woman who likely had unnecessary preventative surgery after learning about a genetic defect. ““She freaked out and had a bilateral mastectomy,” said Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who worried that this patient’s particular mutation was not as troubling as she worried it was.

Interestingly, TIME’s author, Kate Pickart, argues the financial costs of genetic testing has stall mass run on genetic tests. Even a new provision under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) only mandates 100% insurance coverage for patients with a family history of genetic flaws.

But, at just $99 (and probably far less in the future), financial barriers are crumbling. This isn’t to say that genetic screening is bad, it just complicates things for the rest of us, especially those who don’t understand statistics. The more women get tested, the more false positives exist, the less confident patients and physicians become in a course of action.

Maybe our only hope out of this cheaper testing spiral is technology that makes detection more accurate and more predictive. One promising solution is a new bra that constantly monitors deep tissue for cancerous signs (below)

So, perhaps, before long, we will innovate our way out of this dilemma.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How do you market a hot new TV show without the benefit of commercial space which you can fill with network promos? Just ask Netflix. The company has come up with a number of clever marketing stunts to get the word out about the upcoming premiere of Arrested Development ranging several Easter eggs on Netflix.com to this month’s real, live frozen banana stand in New York visited by hundreds. It even sent around jokey emails to the media, reportedly from “Dr. Tobias Funke.” The latest to get in on the action is Seamless.com, which has partnered with Netflix to offer an ordering page for “Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana.”

If you don’t know what that is, then go watch the show, I guess.

The menu, which went live on Monday, is filled with food and drink items referencing the Bluth family, including the option to buy a double-dipped frozen, or a nice martini to accompany your snack. Unfortunately, the delivery minimum is $250,000.00, so you probably can’t afford to eat there.

Oh ha, ha.

Though these publicity stunts are funny, they do in fact have a serious purpose – Netflix needs to make original content work, and part of that is making sure its users (and potential users) know that content is out there. With a cult classic like “Arrested Development” on its hands – a show with the potential to top Netflix’s most-watched program, the original series “House of Cards” – it’s important to get word out.

A study from February of this year suggested that Netflix’s quality, original programming has the potential to not only bring in new subscribers but keep current ones from canceling. Around 86 percent of those surveyed said they would be less likely to cancel after watching “House of Cards,” for example.

“Arrested Development” was a critical darling and beloved by many, but it didn’t have the numbers to keep it on the TV airwaves. However, Netflix doesn’t need a TV-sized audience to make this model work, only all the niche audiences surrounding this show and others, who, combined, can make up a significantly sized viewer base. That leaves the network (we’re calling Netflix a network now, right?) the wiggle room to have a little fun with its promotional stunts, instead of having to spend big on mass media campaigns.

(h/t PSFK)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Emotions play tricks on our memories, making our recollections of events much happier or heart-wrenching than they actually were. Smartphone app Expereal seeks to cut through those cognitive traps by allowing you to rate your day on a 10-point scale and organizing that data into easy-to-read charts.

The iOS app (Android and Web-based versions are planned) is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based digital strategist Jonathan Cohen, who was inspired by psychologist Daniel Kahneham’s 2010 TED talk “The riddle of experience vs. memory.” Kahneham argues that our memories are often distorted by cognitive biases. For example, one bad day can completely spoil someone’s memory of an otherwise pleasurable two-week vacation.

When designing Expereal, Cohen decided to stick to a 10-point scale to help users keep their ratings objective.

“I could have potentially asked people to pick a word to describe their mood, but what I like about numbers is that in order to get the full breadth and benefit you also have to enter tags and give meaning to it,” says Cohen.

Expereal’s first screen allows you to rate your day (or part of the day, depending on how often you use the app). Then you can note your location and the people you are with, add tags and snap a photo. A drop-down menu takes you to a set of charts that visualize your ratings by day, week or month, and compares your numbers to all of Expereal’s users or your Facebook friends who also use the app (data is aggregated anonymously). The “Expereotype” option is an album of your in-app photos with embedded ratings, tags and locations.

Cohen says Expereal fills the gap left by journaling apps and life-tracking wearable tech products like Jawbone UP and Nike Fuelband.

“None of these services in my mind really address the fundamental question–’how is my life going and how is it trending over time?’ I thought that by having a better understanding of this over time, it would be an interesting way to look back in order to move forward,” says Cohen.

Of course, Expereal is only as useful as the data you enter into it. The app’s notifications can be set to remind you to use it 1-5 times per day. While testing the app out, I found I was more likely to enter a rating if I was having a bad day because adding tags allowed me to vent. If my day was going okay, however, it was tempting to ignore Expereal’s prompt on my iPhone.

“It’s not immediately sticky,” Cohen admits. “But for many of us who are relatively happy in our lives, I think there is value in those moments of self-reflection.” He adds that Expereal is meant to “counterbalance to the immediate promises of contemporary best-selling self-help books and programs.”

I committed to using the app five times a day for two weeks and was surprised by my data charts. A couple days I had written off in my memory as a total waste of time (because of a headache or a task left undone) were actually rated quite high, and I realized I’m much more pessimistic than I thought I was. I already use Timehop as a scrapbook and Step Journal to keep track of my daily activities, but I like Expereal’s focus on mood tracking because it’s already motivated me to stop being so negative.

Cohen tells me he is continually working on the app’s data analysis so that the aggregate numbers aren’t skewed toward any particular part of the day or people who log onto the app more consistently than other users. He declined to give me specific numbers, but says Expereal currently has several thousand users.

Aside from being a handy life-tracking tool, Expereal is also beautiful, with minimalist graphics inspired by mid-century California design, graphic designer Reid Miles and Monocle magazine. The app was bootstrapped by Cohen, who is currently looking for investors and investigating several revenue models. Cohen envisions Expereal as part of a larger ecosystem that will eventually include books, seminars and other tools that tap into people’s desires to improve their lives.

“If you look at the world of self-help, that segment of the marketplace, there are all of these amazing books by behavioral psychologists out there,” says Cohen. “If Expereal can capture a piece of that marketplace, I think the potential is huge.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @baigi.

Mobile gaming is a huge worldwide opportunity at the moment, having clocked in at $9 billion in 2012, and it is poised to grow further in the coming years. With the world’s 1 billion smartphones scheduled to almost double in number by 2015 and games responsible for a whopping 66 percent of all app revenue, it’s easy for anyone to do the math and see where this is going.

Game development continues to have a bright future, but only for those who can develop profitable titles. Pursuing such profitability is an exact science now, with monitoring analytics and continuous A/B testing having become the staple of game development. In fact, Zynga – the gaming company to have popularized (if not introduced) the use of analytics – has been often categorized as a big data company.

One can imagine metrics to be ‘levers’ that a game developer can push or pull to create a desired outcome. Some levers have a generous range of motion, while others are more limited. In the end a game developer’s task is essentially to figure out the perfect combination of lever positions that will produce the best financial outcome at the least cost. Notions of creativity, novelty and fun are all confined within the prism of this analytics-centric approach: They have wiggle room as long as they improve analytics. That’s the fundamental philosophy behind modern-day game development.

For those looking for a more visceral understanding of game analytics, I’ve set up a simple mathematical simulation that compares game performances across hypothetical retention and viral profiles. It’s in simple spreadsheet format and can be downloaded here. I’ll quickly list out the assumptions governing this simulation, after which I’ll explain the noteworthy conclusions one can draw from the numbers.

Imagine that a gaming studio has six games under its purview:

As the mobile gaming market continues to spew riches for the foreseeable future, it is imperative that modern day game developers structure their entire operations around the fundamentals of data analytics instead of trying to fit a metrics-based veneer over introverted, blind game development. Their jobs are basically to create digital entertainment products that activate the maximum possible number of highly viral users on a daily basis for the longest sessions.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sprint’s Q1 2013 financial results came out this morning, and the news wasn’t great overall. Losses continue to accumulate, and total smartphone sales aren’t faring very well, either, with just 5 million units sold in total. The iPhone, after achieving a record high of 2.2 million handsets sold on Sprint’s network last quarter, dropped back down to 1.5 million, the same number Sprint saw in the three quarters preceding Q4 2012.

This is the first time Sprint has reported specific total smartphone sales in an earnings release, and it said it achieved 5 million handset sales in total. that means that the iPhone accounted for 30 percent of total device sales at the carrier. iPhone sales for all of 2012 totaled 6.6 million, on total smartphone sales for the year of 20 million, which means Apple’s devices accounted for just about one-third of the total. That puts this quarter pretty close to on pace, but compared to the rest of the field, iPhone growth was flat at Sprint.

Horace Dediu of Asymco notes that iPhone sales grew 25 percent at Verizon, and by around 12 percent at AT&T. Worldwide, the pace was a 7 percent increase, with 14 percent improvement at home. It might be tempting to put some of the blame for Sprint’s flagging fortunes on a big bet on iPhone, but the numbers indicate the carrier isn’t being hurt so much by flagging iPhone sales, but by a general inability to match its competitors, in terms of device sales aside.

iPhone sales grew 25% at Verizon, 12% at AT&T and 0% at Sprint. Overall US growth was 14% vs. 7% globally.—
Horace Dediu (@asymco) April 24, 2013

Sprint is still quick to note that the iPhone is driving new customers to its business, pointing out that the rate of new subscribers signing up via iPhone purchases is once again at over 40 percent, the same as over the past several quarters. The iPhone has been consistent for it, but the company was likely hoping it would be more of a breakout hit.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A/B testing has long been a fundamental part of developing applications and products for the Web, and, with the explosion of smartphones, developers are naturally eager to use the process to test new designs and updates for mobile apps. The problem is that, traditionally, this has been tricky to manage, especially on iOS given Apple’s approval process, requiring app developers to wait weeks to push new iterations.

Frustrated by the current process, Pathmapp decided to create a solution — one that would allow developers to test different designs and push them out in real time. After debuting at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last year, today, the startup is officially launching an A/B testing platform for native iOS apps that aims to enable mobile developers to optimize their apps and increase conversion without making significant changes to their workflow — or to their users’ experiences.

Born of the founders’ experience building mobile app agency, APPEK, simply put, Pathmapp lets iOS developers create and deploy A/B tests in real time across their native apps without having to resubmit the changes to the App Store. Of course, while Pathmapp co-founder Adam Ceresko admits this may not sound like an earth-shakingly novel concept thanks to the fact that companies like Google and Optimizely have made A/B testing for the web available for years, he believes that no one has yet adequately addressed this problem on mobile.

“As mobile developers, we saw this massive gap in the market,” says Pathmapp CTO Andrew Herman. “Similar technologies have existed on the web for years, but have been sorely lacking in the mobile space since the first iPhone debuted in 2007.”

Since debuting at Disrupt last year, Pathmapp has been running an extended private beta, which came to a close in March. Today marks the beginning of the official public rollout of Pathmapp’s A/B testing platform, but Ceresko tells us that it will be a rolling release, as the startup plans to continue adding new features and tweaking based on user feedback over the next few weeks. The big-picture goal, he says, is to make Pathmapp completely “independent of the web.”

At launch, Pathmapp includes a number of new features that weren’t present in the beta product that the company debuted at Disrupt, chief of which is support for live configuration. In other words, app developers can now use Pathmapp to dynamically change the designs served to users in real time. This means that developers can change the interface of their apps without running an A/B test, bringing support to those who just want to tweak their design.

Pathmapp has also improved its analytics and statistics. It now offers a “confidence measurement” through which it crunches the numbers on user behavior and interaction, telling developers which design performs best among its customers. The idea is to save developers some time from getting wrapped up in data and behavior measurement, allowing them to instead focus on more critical product decisions.

To that end, Pathmapp now also offers the ability to segment users. This enables developers to run a test on a particular subset of users so that they can figure out which design is most effective among a particular group before pushing the change out to one and all. Lastly, Pathmapp is officially introducing A/B/N testing so that developers can try different variations within a single test, rather than having to run hundreds of tests for each small tweak.

In terms of pricing, Pathmapp offers all users a free, 15-day trial, after which Pathmapp starts at $19/month in its “Scout tier,” which is built to accomodate apps of all sizes, ranging from small to enterprise. Those who are looking for greater support and flexibility can upgrade to the startup’s “Pathfinder tier” at $79/month or “Trailblazer” at $399/month.

Pathmapp is developing a fairly simple, easy-to-use solution for app developers hung up on A/B testing for iOS. All they have to do is drop Pathmapp’s SDK into their apps, and they can begin building interfaces right in Xcode, managing the whole process and doing live configurations through their web dashboard.

For more, find Pathmapp at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon’s business model, CTO Werner Vogels reminded us today, is based on “low margins, high volume”, and today the company announced a development on how it’s applying that principle to its enterprise services. From today, AWS is expanding to Europe its Redshift data warehousing service and its EC2 High Storage service. Amazon first announced the intention to take Redshift global in February; it’s actually turning on Europe today.

The news of the international expansion was made this morning during the Amazon Web Services Summit in London, part of a wider roadshow for AWS. Redshift, Amazon’s petabyte-scale solution to better manage huge backlogs of data, was first announced in November 2012. It is very competitive on price: traditional data warehousing solutions can cost between $19,000 and $25,000 per terabyte while Redshift charges $1,000 per terabyte per year.

Big data, Vogels said in a speech today, will be the crux of competitive advantage in the future, but also, it can be the biggest stumbling block. “The database will be the bottleneck,” he said.

Vogels also took the audience through what he sees as the cloud services to watch in the future — a primer, of sorts, for what we may expect to see from AWS in terms of its product roadmap.

Internet of things: “To me it’s much more important that you see these devices as part of a wider strategy.” He described how Shell, an AWS customer, has plans for hundreds of thousands of sensors; and larger consumer developments around wearable technology like the Nike Fuelband and connected everything. “All of these devices in the hands of customers will need to have their data stored somewhere.” Is that a sign of more security services coming from AWS?

Security and privacy: If I had to put some money on it, I think security and privacy are two areas where Amazon will be looking to do more, not just to protect its own cloud platform from attacks, but also because tech companies whose services are based on cloud infrastructure, and who may already be customers of Amazon’s (or a competitor) are also increasingly becoming targets for attacks. “Encryption will be the most important tool to protecting your customers,” he predicted. “It’s important to realize that encryption will be a really important tool.”

Other areas where we might expect to see more AWS developments are more competitive price reductions (unsurprising, especially considering Microsoft Azure’s recent overtures for competing on price).

And there will be more sophisticated ways of manipulating big data, in ways that are perhaps more self-service and less technical. “At this point, the cloud is the default environment for big data,” Vogels said. “But much of big data processing is still pretty raw. What we’ll see is that there will be targeted solutions for you to do customer targeting. You will no longer look at analytics but what you really use for things you want to do.”

The rest of this morning’s presentation was focused on showing off just how much AWS has exploded in growth since first being launched in 2006.

As Amazon noted last week during its AWS Summit event in NYC, it now stores over 2 trillion total objects in S3, and processes 1.1 million peak requests/second as of Q1 2013. (These and other numbers may well get updated when Amazon announces its quarterly earnings later this week.)

Vogels describes AWS Marketplace, launched almost exactly a year ago, the “Amazon.com for enterprise software.” It’s seen a 102% rise in active customers in the last year, he noted.

This is likely to be the lever for much of AWS’s growth as it matures as a platform. AWS Trusted Advisor has made 329,000 recommendations (and now over 330,000 he says) across $22 million in cost savings.

Vogels defended how the company has been slow to date in adding more features to AWS overall. “We bring out limited feature sets because we do not pretend to know what our customers want,” reminiscent of Jason Fried’s idea of big ideas needing to be cut in half in order to execute them well. “We had no idea how this space would develop but this way we can react immediately.”

But as the popularity of AWS and cloud services (and competition to Amazon) continues to grow, the pace of development has accelerated from its introduction of nine AWS products in its first year. “Last year we launched 159 new features. And this quarter alone we’ve launched 53 new features and services. We’re on track to roll out more this year than last,” he noted.

AWS, as Amazon likes to remind us, has had 31 price reductions since 2006. Vogels’ take on this is not unlike that of Amazon as a whole: “We believe that if we can help you drop your costs down you will be more successful in the long run. For us it’s a high volume, low margin business and we really know how to do that well.”

Amazon eats its dogfood. Vogels says that on a typical day 40% of your capacity is unused but some months worse: in early November nearly 80% of traffic is unused. In November 2010 Amazon.com swapped out the last of its physical services, and then a year later did the same for its international operations.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch