More on Amazon from VentureBeat:

Amazon Web Services has become a huge business, with revenues of $500 million in 2010, according to UBS Investment Research. And that success is due in no small part to the rapid rise of social games such as FarmVille on Facebook.

...Amazon hosts six to eight of the top 10 games on Facebook at any given time. That includes top Zynga and EA Playfish games, meaning that hundreds of millions of players are playing games on Amazon’s servers, without even knowing it. Overall, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of customers in 190 countries for its web services. It also powers big operations such as Netflix, NASA, Autodesk, NASDAQ and the New York Times.

Cloud services is only about 2% of Amazon's revenue. But still it's a good, and growing, chunk of change. I wish I bought their stock around July 1, this year.

tags: cloud, information, service, source, games, virtualization, commerce

Recently, I wrote about voice communications and books becoming virtual, i.e. an application on a mobile computer. Here's how remote control follows the same path (NYT):

And so now we have a bounty of applications and accessories that let us use the technology we already have to control the technology we already have. This is not only frugal, but upgradeable and flexible. Whether you want to control your music, your television or your PowerPoint presentation, there’s probably a solution using your phone.

The association is urging locals to come up with their own ideas for the area's gardens and post them in the online world of Second Life, where people create virtual doubles of themselves called avatars.

Accomplir will shortlist five of the best projects, which will then be displayed on an island in Second Life.

The winner will be announced at the end of June and receive a reward of 275,000 linden dollars (785 euros, £530), the currency used in Second Life.

Accomplir will then go to the town hall with the winning idea, aiming to put pressure on officials to speed up the redevelopment process.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6544377.stm

The alternative universe provides more opportunities for influencing the so-called real life. Blogging was just the beginning of the evolution. With regard to ideas, virutal world is a lot more productive than the material one. The selection process is also very scalable.

Microsoft has followed a rival in advocating virtualization as a way to try out software painlessly.

Microsoft's Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format can be used to collect an operating system, higher-level software and specific configuration details into a single package. A particular VHD image can be loaded into a virtual machine software such as Microsoft's Virtual Server product.

A good example of the "virutalization" trend.