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Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book

two sellers adjusting their prices in response to each other by factors whose products were greater than 1. And while it might have been more difficult to deconstruct, one can easily see how even more bizarre things could happen when more than two sellers are in the game. And as soon as it was clear what was going on here, I and the people I talked to about this couldn’t help but start thinking about ways to exploit our ability to predict how others would price their books down to the 5th significant digit – especially when they were clearly not paying careful attention to what their algorithms were doing.

(Full Story: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 )

How Linux saved Amazon millions – CNET News

For 1,000 users tapping into a Linux server, the total cost is about a fifth to a half that of a Unix system, Kusnetzky said. The cost of administering a Linux system is about the same percentage of the overall cost for a Unix or Windows server, he added.

HP supplied Amazon’s Linux servers, large numbers of thin, rack-mountable models with Intel chips, said Mike Balma, marketing director for HP’s newly formed Linux Systems Operation. And Red Hat customized Linux for the servers.

Red Hat spearheaded Amazon’s switch over to Linux, said Billy Marshall, vice president of enterprise sales and marketing for the Durham, N.C., company.

“Amazon has been a customer of ours for over a year now,” he said. “Each of the transactions that goes through their systems touch our technology. Now they are locked down for the holiday season. They are very happy with the output that they are getting.”

(Full Story: How Linux saved Amazon millions – CNET News)

How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy on Amazon

Then another bot piled on, and then one based in the UK. They started competing with each other on price. Pretty soon they were offering my book below the retail price, and trying to make up the difference on “shipping and handling”. I was getting a bit worried.

The punchline is that Amazon itself is a bot that does price-matching. Soon after the marketplace bot’s race to the bottom, it decided to put my book on sale! 28% off. I can’t wait to find out what that does to my margin. (Update: nothing, it turns out. Amazon is eating the entire discount. This is a pleasant surprise.)

(Full Story: How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy on Amazon)

Creating Web Services by Working Backwards at Amazon.com

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the faq) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

(Full Story: Creating Web Services by Working Backwards at Amazon.com)

How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse

  1. Spread across as many AZs as you can.
  2. Beyond mission critical? Spread across many providers.
  3. Build for failure.
  4. Understand your components and how they fail.
  5. Try to componentize your system.
  6. Test your components.
  7. Relax. Your stuff is gonna break

(Full Story: How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse)

16,000 U.S. Mechanical Turk Workers on a Map

16,000 recent U.S. MTurk workers who volunteered their locations.

(Full Story: 16,000 U.S. Mechanical Turk Workers on a Map)


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