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We're still waiting on a South Pole region for AWS, but it might be a while before Amazon sets up shop in Antarctica. However, the company announced today that they've got South America covered. Amazon has opened its South America (Sao Paulo) region in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

This will be useful for organizations in South and Central America that want to use AWS services with low latency. Amazon is also working to reach customers in the new region with blogs in Spanish and Portuguese.

The file sharing, synchronization market led by Dropbox is a popular target these days. For many companies, it's a chance to horn in on a growing market and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. For open source projects, it's a chance to return control of personal data to the user. For the folks behind ownCloud, it's both.

ownCloud is a project started by Frank Karlitschek, who's been very active in the KDE project. This week, Karlitschek took ownCloud to the next level with former SUSE/Novell guy Markus Rex and funding from General Catalyst. Terms weren't disclosed, but sources say that the funding is "well into 7 figures" but below $10 million.

The folks at BestVendor.com interviewed 500 developers and compiled this profile of the tools that they actually use. A few stalwarts predominate, such as Git, Eclipse, AWS, Dropbox, MySQL, and Google Analytics. But there were a few surprises too, including 23% using Notepad++ as their text editor and 8% using Heroku to host their apps. Many of the categories are wide open. All of those surveyed are from companies of less than 100 people from around the world.

Amazon announced four new regions for Amazon ElastiCache and three more locations for its CloudFront and Route53 locations this week.

The new ElastiCache regions are in Northern California (US West), Dublin (EU West), Singapore and Tokyo (both in Asia Pacific). This means that customers in those regions can add distributed in-memory caching to their applications. The CloudFront/Route 53 additions are in South Bend, Indiana; San Jose, California and a second location in New York. What, still no Texas?

The latest entry into calculating cloud computing costs of the public providers is from Cloudsizer, with more than a dozen different cloud providers covered. It is simple and easy to use, and you can start out with a free trial of its "express" service immediately, and upgrade to a paid "pro" account for AU$300 for three months.

Amazon has added two new EC2 reserved instances, so that users now have the choice of four pricing models for EC2 instances. Seven, if you count choosing between one-year and three-year terms.

A quick refresher might be in order. Amazon started with a single price for its EC2 instances, then added reserved instances in 2009. The reserved instances give you a break on instance pricing in exchange for an up-front fee per-instance.

Eucalyptus was once "the" open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu's cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn't developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

If you like your Amazon EC2 instances biggie-sized, Amazon has some good news for you. The AWS folks have introduced a CC2 instance type that comes fully loaded with "incredible specifications" for anyone using AWS for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Amazon grabbed the 42nd spot on the Top 500 list using 1,064 CC2 instances, and delivered a speed of 240.09 teraFLOPs. Now you too can run your own supercomputer.

If customers won't come to Rackspace, then Rackspace will simply have to go to the customers. Rackspace announced today that it's going to be offering a "private edition" of OpenStack to companies looking to manage a private cloud.

Rackspace has long been known for its "fanatical support" of customers inside its datacenter, but is it ready to provide support outside its walls? Is OpenStack really ready for production use? I talked to Rackspace's Mark Collier today to try to find out.

WordPress has grown by leaps and bounds from its origins as a personal blogging platform. Despite the evidence, though, a lot of folks view WordPress as a CMS that's exclusively for blogs or small sites. So what if I told you eMusic is moving to WordPress for all its CMS needs? That's exactly what Scott Taylor talked about this year at WordCamp San Francisco.

Now, eMusic isn't the world's biggest site, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. It serves around 6 million visits per month and "billions of HTTP requests" and millions of page views. The site has 400,000 subscribers. If it can handle eMusic, odds are it can handle your site as well.