Amazon announces Elastic MapReduce »

Amazon Web Services have launched Elastic MapReduce, which is a cloud computing service for on-demand data processing. You’ve been able to do this at Amazon before by running Hadoop on EC2 instances, but this looks to wrap it all up in a convenient product, and make the dynamic scaling easier.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit.

Languages supported: Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, and C++.

In-depth review of the Amazon Kindle »

After six months of use, Robert Mohns reviews the Amazon Kindle e-book reader in detail: what it’s like to read full novels on, its battery life, wireless and PC based syncing options, and everything else about what it’s like to live with.

In short: the device successfully “disappears” from your conscious – like a regular book — and leaves you with just the story.

I found this bit interesting (and scary):

Beyond its current consumer-centric design, we think Kindle has huge potential in education and vertical applications. School children today carry back-damaging backpacks full of heavy textbooks that would be trivial to replace with one 10.3-oz. Kindle. A 2006 BBC News article reported that half of UK school children suffer a back injury at some point due to carrying schoolbooks, and 8% have back problems that affect school attendance; other studies show school children often carry book loads approaching 60% of their body weight. The health implications are obvious.

We think the first educational publisher to get on board is going to make a killing selling Kindles to schools. Content can be updated at any time, wirelessly, making paper textbooks obsolete the day they’re printed. Reliable subscription revenue for publishers, lower costs for schools, and better student health could come together in one, small package from Amazon.