I find it very interesting how the constant battle between
"paid" and "free" plays out on the Internet. On the one
hand, businesses know they must make money to stay in
business, while on the other hand, consumers expect and
demand more and more free "stuff" online.
Two business models practiced by two of the Web's largest
players seem to have found the right balance, either
supporting themselves through direct advertising sales or
through a "pay as you use" model.
Amazon and Google must know what they're doing, because
they both generate billions of dollars in online sales. So
if you want to grow your own small business, why not ride
on the backs of giants!
Amazon S3
Log on to http://aws.amazon.com/s3 to find out more about
Amazon's increasingly popular Simple Storage Service (S3)
which provides access to extremely high-end, beefy media
and file servers for pennies on the dollar. The S3 service
allows you to easily upload and store huge files right
through your web browser and then access them through a
variety of applications. What this means for small business
is that you don't need to operate with a dedicated web
server to compete with larger companies.
Amazon's S3 gives you ultimate scalability to meet demand
as it comes at a rate on par with mid-level hosting
companies. But instead of charging you hundreds each month
(whether you use the storage and bandwidth or not), Amazon
only charges 15-cents per GB of storage and 10-cents per GB
of data transfer. This means you don't pay unless you use
it (as opposed to a fixed server cost each month). We're
just now seeing the tip of the iceberg of what open access
to Amazon's powerful and scalable storage capacity will
bring to the marketplace.
Amazon Fulfillment Web Service
http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=402340011 Amazon
allows you to use their infrastructure to ship your
products for you. Instead of maintaining a fulfillment
staff, you pay Amazon only when you sell product and they
ship it to your customer. This service costs much less than
a full-time employee for most small to medium sized
businesses. Scalable cost tied to sales, not an employee
punching a clock, holds the key benefit for anyone who
sells online. Plus, Amazon stores your products for you
(for a small fee) so you don't even need to maintain
inventory at your location.
The service works with virtually any other type of product
and you can also integrate directly with your shopping cart
to automatically put orders into the Amazon system.
Google Friend Connect http://www.google.com/friendconnect/
Here's how Google explains this new service (currently in
pre-release "Beta" at press time). "Websites that are not
social networks may still want to be social. But the
barriers to offering social applications on the site have
been considerable. Google Friend Connect changes this by
enabling any site to offer dozens of social gadgets created
by Google and OpenSocial developers to their visitors. This
means more visitors spending more time on a more engaging
website -- with absolutely no programming required to make
it happen."
So if you want to create a social aspect to your site or
blog, Google will make it very easy and free for you to add
this functionality. Literally you will just copy and paste
some code and your site gets socially enabled. You can then
modify the various widgets and options of the social
aspects of your site right through your web browser.
----------------------------------------------------
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