Animoto, a new Web application that let users to create their own MTV-style videos from images or music they choose, is announcing a venture capital fund from Amazon. Although the sum of funding is not disclosed in their blog, but this funding mean that they’re just begun to fulfill their promise to collaborate, as Animoto was able to scale its service to meet the exponential growth with the help of Amazon Web Services.

As Brad Jefferson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Animoto said, “Before AWS (Amazon Web Services), we simply could not have launched Animoto.com and our professional video rendering platform at our current scale without massive CapEx and a lot of VC funding. The viral spike in Animoto video creations we experienced this week would have been disastrous without AWS.”

In fact, Animoto was founded in August 2007, headquartered in New York, and currently has 160,000 registered users. Upon sign-up, users are given the ability to create a 30-second videos, i.e. Animoto Shorts for free, but the videos are not downlaodable. However, to extend a longer length videos, they simply required to pay a premium rate that costs $3 each video and it includes the ability to download the video to their desktop computers. Videos created can be embedded onto any blogs, social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, or Websites such as YouTube, or shareable through emails. To create a video, it appears to have become an easy job for novice users, as they only need to follow three steps, that are 1) Get your images, 2) Get music, and 3) Finalize with details. Normally, to complete a video, users are require to wait for 8 minutes to half an hour, depending on the length of the video to be created. But bear in mind, the best browser to do the job is Safari browser.

Animoto is changing the way it competes, simple steps to create videos or slideshows, and the images browsing and uploading process is also simple. In the meantime, Animoto also support direct image retrieval from Flickr, Facebook, Smugmug, Picasa, and Photobucket. And for the music soundtrack selection, users can mix any of their MP3s to their videos. MP4 format will be expected on its way soon.

Nevertheless, users are recommended to pay an annual fee of $30 in order to get an All-Access Pass. This All-Access Pass will allow users to produce an unlimited number of full-length videos for one year. Additionally, they also can download any of their videos, whether they’re Video Shorts or Full-Length videos to their computers.

Amazon has recently tapped into the powerful Facebook social network by launching two of its unique applications, Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine. I believed that Amazon has reached a tipping point where these two applications will help them to reach a far more broader user base, a higher chance of success and attaining a higher quality of customer experience.

Amazon Giver, allows Facebook users to see what’s on the Wish Lists of their friends, and thus provide a platform to purchase those items for their friends. Not only Amazon Giver list the Wish List of a Facebook user, it also provides recommendations based on a profile’s interests and likes. On the other hand, Amazon Grapevine updates Facebook users’ friends their recent public activities on Amazon.com, such as write a review of Amazon product or tag an Amazon book, and etc. via Facebook’s News Feed.

“Amazon.com is pleased to bring the convenience of shopping on Amazon to our customers, many of whom are also Facebook users, with the Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine applications on Facebook Platform,” said Eva Manolis, Vice President, Amazon.com. “By combining Amazon’s vast selection of products with Facebook’s millions of users, we are able to make activities like gift-giving more efficient and rewarding for Facebook users.” According to Amazon’s press release.

Amazon has recently launched its newest site, i.e. Askville. It is a site for sharing knowledge, in term of functionality, a site that works similarly to Yahoo! Answers, Yedda, and Baidu Zhidao. Askville is a platform that allowed users to post a question to the community and let the members of the community to provide the best answers to that particular question. On top of this main purpose, Askville can provide all the creative, and yet delivery resources necessary to cultivate a huge group of “Askers” and “Answerers” that are meaningful to the whole society.

What set them apart from the other similar platforms is their added features. They have implemented a new voting system that is now being combined to the Askville Store, in which users can use the “Quest Gold” to redeem for $100 or $50 Amazon.com gift cards for a limited period, i.e. start from November 29, 2007 to December 31, 2007. However, the ultimate site for an user to redeem their Quest Gold which is Questville will only be launched in next year.

If you really want to get participated in Askville, you’ll have to understand how this Quest Gold be rewarded, what is the Raw Score, Final Rating, Experience Points, Best Answer Badge as well as Gold Payout. Their system is somewhat complicated, it seems that Askville is building a platform that extensively around the concept of “more is more.” Apparently, Amazon want Askville to serve as an ultimate place for users to ask…answer…meet…play! Some of their ideas pertaining to how question to be answered are very good, such as a new question to be open for 7 days, and a maximum of 5 answers per question to be received for a duration of 7 days showed that Askville only want the best and high-quality answers to a question. The other feature is an user can ask a question anonymously, which in turns protect an user that did not want her identity to be disclosed in the public. On behalf of the Answerer, Askville provide Answerers the option to appeal for any final rating for the answers they gave within 90 days after they posted their answers.

Indeed, in many ways, Askville is a Web 2.0 site that resisting the pressure to be a general Q&A or voting site. They have their own distinctive voting system. Also, in order to maintain the answer integrity, they also hide the answer of a particular question so that the potential Answerer will not get any clue on how to tackle the question. With all the above features rendered, and the branding power of Amazon, Askville is showing its promise to the existing users, and thus increasing its traction on the Web.

Amazon has released its new wireless reading device called Kindle. Enthusiasm over this device promises that all the technology blogs will write a review on it. It is costs $399 per device and guarantees that more than 90,000 books are available, including 100 of 112 current New York Times best sellers, all will be offered at $9.99. Other than this, magazines, newspapers, and more than 250 top blogs will also be accessed through this device. The only common thing that Kindle with the iPhone is that they will initially launch in the US, not Europe, Asia-Pacific, or even Latin America. For a guy like me that based in Asia, I’m trying to figure out what this device really look like in a conceptual way. However, my sense is that if Amazon managed to sell it like a hot cake, I mean more than 1 million of this Kindle in a year, its success had nothing to do with the quality or product specifics, it was all about concept and how it fitted to the reading habits of people in the US. Basically, it was all based on the concept that book readers do not want to compromise on their reading habits. They want to read the books anytime, anywhere, preferably in a wireless environment, and this device appeared to cater to this needs and wants.

Apparently, first-generation device typically have pricing issues waiting to be discovered, and hopefully people that are book lovers willing to pay $399 for a device like this. For those who want to watch the demo of this device, you can check out from this Amazon site.

Amazon S3, which stands for Amazon Simple Storage Service has reached a new milestone, by doubling its size of objects stored to 10 billion objects, compared to 5 billion objects in April 24, in addition to expanding the hosting service to the European. The increase in objects stored also reflects the growing number of developers that used Amazon S3, the user group of developers have grown from 240,000 in April to more than 290,000 as at today.

Amazon S3 was introduced in March last year, has been a hosting provider of choice for developers for its scalability, reliability and cost-saving features. Presently, objects is allowed to write, read or delete up to 5 gigabytes (GB) and the number of objects that can be stored is unlimited. On the other hand, developers can made the object they stored private, public, or assign rights to a specific user and the objects can also stored and retrieved via a unique developer-assigned key. Currently, Amazon S3 is offering the standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces.

Amazon S3 employed pay-as-you-go scheme hosting solutions for developers to store their data without any up-front investment. Developers pay only for the space they consume and there is no minimum fee. $0.15 per GB of storage per month and $0.20 per GB of data transfer in the US. However, in the Europe, the pricing scheme is much different, as storage is $0.18 per GB and data transfer in is priced at $0.10 per GB, and so on.

The other day I came across a new visual search engine that called oSkope. I believed it has been released on the web for a month or two. As stated on their landing page, oSkope is a visual browser that fetch and organize the items from Web services such as Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube. Users are allowed to select one of these four services and play around with it, the search results display can be viewed in a variety of ways such as in the mode of grid, stack, pile, list or graph. Click on one of the thumbnail images that can be enlarged when mousing over, and in the right-hand side of the image will display a dialog box that list the item’s product and price information. For an instance, a book image fetched from Amazon will list the book’s particular details. For every book, you will find that there is a link that provided in order for an user to go to the Amazon’s original book page and buy the book.

Visually, oSkope meet the users’ needs when they want to get a better browsing experience. The establishment of these visual search engines tend to complement the existing search engines such as Google or Yahoo! However, if I’m looking for a specific book or photo, I prefer go to the Amazon or Flickr Website and enter the specific search query. Nevertheless, there is still room left for a visual search engine to further grow on the Web and oSkope might well situated to make money through the referral programs of Amazon or eBay.

Today the Amazon.com platform has launched 16 widgets that could helped its users to further exploring the e-commerce opportunities and distribution capability. These Amazon widgets is a series of small and easily configurable widgets that allowed a blogger or Website holder to place onto her blog or site. As shown on the landing page, several types of widgets have been designed for different layout, taste or purpose of a blog or Website, as color theme, width, height and title can also further be customized. However, the core content of an Amazon widget is the Amazon product, i.e. users’ favorite Amazon products and the purpose is no other than selling or promoting this product.

Apparently, the released of Amazon widgets showed to the people that Amazon had continually pushed forward the boundary of what could be accomplished online in addition to widen their users’ revenue stream.