In a world of online fraud and flaky customer service, the prospect of having Amazon handle payment collection for apps sounds great to us.

A number of companies have been beta testing Amazon DevPay, from cloud monitoring service Hyperic to photo sales app SmugMug.

DevPay charges 30 cents per transaction plus %3 of costs to customers beyond the cost of the Amazon Web Services charged to developers.

On Windowshop.com, you can either use your mouse or the arrow keys (the keyboard works better) to scroll through a wall of Amazon.com content which includes both best-sellers and new releases in Books, Music, Video, and Games categories. After you zoom in on an item, a preview will play. For an album, that preview is just a snippet of a song; for an audiobook, it's a snippet of the narrator reading the content; for video content like movies, TV shows, and games, you'll see a video clip displayed instead.

The content is sorted into different scrollable columns with column labels at the top describing the items below. There are columns with both the best-sellers and new items for each category, but there are also Editor's Picks and "Best-Selling of All Time" categories, too. As new content is added to the site every Tuesday, the older content is moved to the right, which keeps the Windowshop.com product list in chronological order.

Cooliris Should Be Flattered

The Windowshop site is so much like a Cooliris-enabled web page, that it had us scanning for a "powered by Cooliris" logo somewhere on the site. The scrolling, zoomable wall of content is very similar to what the Cooliris plugin provides. It seems the entire site has been inspired by the technology if it doesn't, in fact, actually use it to power the virtual "windowshopping" itself.

It's interesting that this site was created only a few months after Amazon.com became Cooliris-enabled themselves, with their own Amazon category underneath the Discover/Shopping feature within the Cooliris browser. There, you can scroll through several other categories of content like Home & Garden, Baby, Electronics, the Kindle Store, and more. You can also sort the content displayed by price, popularity, or relevance. The Cooliris wall also has a nifty 3D effect when scrolled, where the Windowshop.com wall stays very much 2D.

Still, the Winodwshop site is another good alternative to visually browsing the best from Amazon.com, even if it is just a tribute to Cooliris's technology. You know what they say about imitation...

We've seen more of these types of visual browsing technologies pop-up this year, from ManagedQ's semantic Google-based search to Photo Stream's visual newsroom and, more recently, to new search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. We wonder: will 2008 be remembered as the year visual search took off?

Windows in the Cloud

Given how many companies rely on Windows servers to run their business, adding support for this operating system makes good sense for Amazon. The pricing for these Windows services, however, is considerably higher than that for running Linux instances on EC2.

As Mary Jo Foley notes, Amazon will also attend Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference next week, which is interesting, given that Microsoft is also expected to unveil its own cloud computing platform at this conference.

Amazon will continue to offer the pricing under the "pay what you use" model where there is no minimum fee or long term equipment required.

According to Alyssa Henry, general manager of the Amazon Simple Storage Service, ""The growth of Amazon Web Services has allowed us to become even more efficient and further lower our operating expenses. AWS remains committed to passing savings along to our customers. Just six months ago, we announced a reduction in data transfer costs, and today we're pleased to pass new storage savings along to our customers."

But it's clear that this pricing change is more than a simple "pass the savings on to you" move by the company. Since the company formerly had a flat pricing plan, the new tiered pricing and volume discounts makes it clear that Amazon is looking to edge out their competition. The service now also looks more appealing to the enterprise who may have felt that, before, there was not enough of a savings to use cloud storage as opposed to host-your-own storage behind the firewall.

The new pricing goes into effect November 1st, 2008.

Just like Amazon's S3 and E2 shook up the market for online storage and cloud computing, this new CDN solution will surely drive down the prices for content delivery. At first, however, Amazon's new service will not support streaming video or live broadcasts. Because of this, Akamai and Limelight don't have to fear the competition with Amazon just yet, but we would be surprised if Amazon did not add more video specific features to its CDN in the future.

Preemptive Move

Interestingly, as Om Malik points out, New-York based Voxel just announced a CDN solution based on S3. Amazon rarely pre-announces new services, so we definitely agree that this announcement today should be seen as a preemptive move by Amazon.

Project Management in DreamFactory

With the availability of DreamFactory on QuickBase, the suite is now available on four different cloudware platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Salesforce App Exchange, WebEx, and now QuickBase. The company is now working on making DreamFactory available on Google App Engine, too.

The Amazon S3 dashboard by Sisense is a pre-configured custom analytic dashboard. It connects with your Amazon hosted web service to provide better visuals of your service's statistics. Sisense utilizes the Amazon S3 log files to provide developers with a more visual view of their stats. You can view your data in tabular format, receive charts, review data from specified periods of time, and receive information with "Key Performance Indicators".

Future Plans and Concerns

Thus far, the company offers services for Excel, MS SQL, MySQL, CSV, OLAP, and Oracle. Versions for Google spreadsheets, and Adwords are on Sisense's roadmap for the near future. While the product is great and more than useful for developers, the biggest concern for Sisense and similar cloud based services is whether these services are sustainable if the cloud computing platforms they cater too ever shut down.

Update: We have 50 invites available for Sisense. If you'd like to try Sisense simply use "S3!W435zar@50" as the invite code.

Each of the DreamTeam Suite's components offer features that put them on par with other similar web apps and desktop software products. The Project Management module, for example, does Gantt charts and resource management, and the Document Collaboration piece allows for sharing, messaging, and version control. A new homepage for the suite lets you see an overview of all the activity of your current projects and allows for one-click workspace creation as well.

DreamTeam's Project Management Module

As for the pricing, DreamTeam is much more affordable than some of its competition - for comparison purposes, Basecamp starts at $24/month and goes up to $149/month, but to get unlimited projects in Basecamp, you must pay the $149/month rate. With DreamTeam however, the money the company saves on infrastructure is passed on to their customers.

For anyone in need of a business suite that's a bit easier on the wallet, DreamTeam should be added to your list. There's a free trial available from the company's homepage, if you want to try out the suite for yourself.

"Increasingly, we see that organizations of all sizes are putting AWS to use in new, innovative, and mission-critical ways," wrote Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. "These organizations have told us that they need a more direct and more discreet way to request assistance and to report problems."

The new services don't come particularly cheap, costing $100 per month or $0.10 per dollar of total monthly usage for silver level (whichever is greater), or the greater of $400 per month or $0.10-$0.20 per dollar of total monthly usage for gold level.

Amazon is also beefing up support options for free customers with the release of the new AWS Service Hearth Dashboard that monitors the status of all AWS services. Amazon says that during outages, users can expect to see updates from the team every 15-30 minutes until things are fixed. Status updates can be accessed via the page or by RSS.

If Amazon really wants to upgrade their free support center, we suggest they build something off the excellent Get Satisfaction service, which just released an API yesterday. Some of Amazon's web services already have a page on Get Satisfaction, but the company has yet to send over any official support reps.

In that respect Google App Engine is more like the so-called "Platform-as-a-Service" (PaaS) apps like Bungee Labs, which we profiled firstly in April 2007 and then more recently in February when it launched a new version. Other PaaS contenders include Salesforce.com's Force.com platform (nicely summarised by Dan Farber) and Morfik's Ajax platform.

Google App Engine launches as a closed Beta, with 10,000 developers granted access on a first come, first serve basis. It's free, but during the preview period applications are "limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day." It has a good set of initial features, which Google's Matt Cutts summarizes well:

"You can store your data in a Google Bigtable using the Google File System (GFS). There’s a bunch of App Engine APIs to simplify things like sending email and fetching urls. Your application can authenticate users that are using Google Accounts, so you can avoid the whole “ask your users to create a new account” issue if you want."

So it's a good start and you can imagine that this is just the beginning, as anyone who has read Nicholas Carr's excellent book The Big Switch will realise. Computing infrastructure is rapidly turning into a utility and Google App Engine is yet another example of this.

Why Would a Startup Want to Use Google App Engine?

There are many compelling reasons for startups to use Google App Engine; and Alex Iskold summed them up in his post Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds. Alex explained why the likes of Amazon, and now Google, are providing a valuable service to startups:

"We are witnessing a fundamental shift in our ability to compute and this is just the beginning. Amazon is at the forefront of making massively parallel, web scale compute services available to the world. Free from the need to solve the scalability problems, startups are able to focus on the specific problems that their product or service is trying to solve. All of this is happening while the cost of hardware, bandwidth and services overall keep dropping."
(emphasis mine)

However, there are a few downsides to the Google approach. For one thing, it means developers must use Python as their programming language - PHP and Ruby are two other popular languages today. But looking at the bigger picture, startups which use Google App Engine are essentially tying themselves into Google's technology. They'll need to host with Google, do their processing with Google, store their data with Google, etc. And as some people have already speculated, having a web app built and deployed with Google App Engine makes it much easier for Google to eventually acquire that web app.

It does make you wonder: would you want Google to control your entire end-to-end development environment? Isn't that what developers used to be afraid of Microsoft for?