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Amazon Web Services announced today the launch of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), a bulk e-mail delivery service. The e-mail marketing service gives customers the ability to send mass e-mail campaigns without having to worry about messages being caught in spam filters. According to the company's announcement "Amazon SES provides a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints." The service will compete with services like SendGrid, and is charging much less than most of its competitors.

This was a busy week for the cloud. The biggest news was Amazon.com's entry into the platform-as-a-service business with its Elastic Beanstalk. But there were several other big announcements as well: a Dell employee confirmed that Dell will get into the infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service businesses, GoGrid announced a new service, Rackspace opened its first European data center and more.

Amazon announced today that it has acquired Lovefilm, one of the leading European movie rental services. Amazon already owned a minority share of the company, and will now acquire the remaining shares in the company. The terms of the sale were not disclosed, but varying reports estimate its value to be between $200 million and approximately $270 million.

Akin to Netflix state-side, Lovefilm offers subscription services with both rental-by-mail and streaming access to films and TV shows on to PCs, Internet TVs and Playstation 3. The company operates in the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and has 1.6 million members.

Today looks to be a record-breaking day for the daily deal site LivingSocial. It's offering a nationwide deal: a $20 Amazon gift card for $10. In just the first few hours of the sale, users have already purchased over 243,000 coupons.

Some are predicting the deal is on a course to outperform the previous blockbuster daily deal, when Groupon offered $25 off a $50 purchase at the Gap. That resulted in some $13 million worth of coupons being sold.

The LivingSocial deal still has 22 hours to go and has already sold over $2 million worth of coupons.

"Buy once. Read everywhere," the Amazon Kindle advertises. And "everywhere" now includes your Mac, with the addition of a Kindle app for the new Mac App Store.

The free app has quickly shot up the Mac App Store bestseller list. It's number 3 for free apps at the time of publishing - not surprising since there are no other e-reader app competitors currently available. Even Apple has not put its e-reader app, iBooks, in the Mac store yet.

Amazon Web Services announced today that it's reducing the cost of existing premium support plans by 50% and adding two new support options to its selection of plans. The existing Gold and Silver options will be complimented by a new low-cost Bronze option and a high-end Platinum option. The basic support plan is not changing.

This is obviously good news for existing AWS customers. However, competitors like GoGrid, Joyent and RackSpace include 24/7 support with all plans. The additional cost for support can make AWS significantly more costly than other solutions.

This morning, Amazon launched its Amazon Appstore Developer Portal, the first step towards the creation of its own Android App Store, which will exist outside the official Google Android Market. The Amazon Store has been the most highly anticipated of all third-party efforts to date, mostly because of Amazon's brand name recognition, business model and potential for marketplace disruption.

Do any of the new, non-iPad tablets being introduced at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas have a shot at achieving significant market share? Well, Amazon must think they do. The online retailer has just announced it will develop a Kindle application specifically for Android and Windows tablet computers, which, like its other mobile apps, will provide access to the Kindle e-bookstore.

Jesse Wolgamott presented at Lone Star Ruby Conference on four major NoSQL databases: CouchDB, MongoDB, RavenDB and SimpleDB. We've covered various comparisons before, such as one by Adrian Cockcroft. And of course there's our own article on the subject: "Is the Relational Database Doomed?" But if you'd rather kick back and watch a conference presentation, then this is for you. It has the benefit of including RavenDB in the comparison, which we haven't covered before.

The book-seller Borders may become the first casualty of a changing publishing industry. According to reports, the company has been delaying payments to book publishers in order to help refinance its debt.

Borders is the second largest book retailers in the U.S., after Barnes & Noble, but even so, Borders says "there can be no assurance" that these refinancing efforts will be successful in keeping the company afloat.