Amazon has introduced a tiered pricing scheme for S3, its cloud storage service, that will take advantage of increasing economies of scale and go into effect November 1st.

Currently, American customers pay $0.15 for each gigabyte of data they store each month. With the new scheme, this will remain the price only for users who require less than 50 terabytes of storage. Once demands exceed that level, pricing drops to $0.14 and then $0.13 per gigabyte-month, and then settles at $0.12 for customers who need to storage over 500 terabytes of data.

Last April Amazon reduced pricing on data transfer on their Amazon S3 online storage service. Yesterday Amazon announced plans to reduce the price for the storage portion of S3. Basic users won’t see a change as the base price remains 15 cents per TB.

For heavy users, the pricing moves to a tiered model. Over 50 TB of storage is 14 cents/TB and it gradually lowers to 12 cents/TB over 500 TB of storage. I wonder how many Amazon S3 clients are using over 500 TB of data storage. It’s like saying if you drive more than 30,000 miles in a month in your car, we will give you 20 cents off each gallon of gas.

We were using S3 for all static files on CN but I’ve found in my travels that the domain didn’t resolve correctly so images and CSS files would appear broken. I must have set something wrong in the DNS.

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Yes and no. It’s clear that AOL’s parent company, Time Warner, wants this deal more than ever. What isn’t clear is whether AOL’s assets will fix any of Yahoo’s problems.

The deal structure that is currently being discussed is Yahoo’s acquisition of AOL (content, services and advertising), minus their subscription dial up business. That plus a couple of billion dollars in cash from Time Warner gets them approximately a third of the combined entity. Time Warner’s AOL headache is gone, and they have a stake in the world’s most valuable chess piece in the Google/Microsoft search and advertising war.Source:TechCrunch

It’s a blood bath out there this morning. The S&P 500 is at a four-year low as the credit crisis keeps getting worse, despite the passage of the government’s $700 billion bailout plan. The market is taking tech stocks down with it. Google is down 4 percent to $368, its lowest point since 2006. Apple is down 6 percent to $91. Microsoft is down nearly 5 percent to $25. Amazon, Yahoo, eBay—all down.

Already as I write this, there seems to be somewhat of a rally going on in some of these stocks (particularly Google). But if the economy falters, tech stocks won’t be a safe haven for investors, even if they are cash-rich and not as exposed to the credit debacle as companies in other sectors.

Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve “Developers” Ballmer revealed that Windows is working on a cloud-based operating system while Amazon is now offering Windows as an available server environment through it’s EC2 service.

A lot of hay has been made recently over the term Cloud Computing. Frankly, it’s a sign a term is overused when Richard Stallman is unclear on the concept. That’s why Sean and I sat down today to attempt to lay out exactly what cloud computing means in the context of these two bits of news today.

The short answer is that we’re not talking about web apps primarily here. Steve Ballmer was particularly short on details when he dropped the term “Windows Cloud,” and it seems to be a slight misappropriation of the term as purists define it.  

The Amazon offering is very easy to define, and we do so, and proceed to talk a bit about what this means in terms of long term Microsoft enterprise strategy as well as what sorts of branding issues Microsoft might be running up against with these new offerings. 

Watch our talk on it or download the MP4.

At the time we recorded, the details of the Windows Cloud were a bit, well, cloudy (though we had a pretty firm grasp on what was going on with the Amazon EC2 Windows situation).  They’ve since been cleared up a bit, so for more analysis on that, see Stan’s post from earlier today.

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—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Ballmer Keeps Bloviating, But Actually Makes Sense!Ballmer Comments on FacebookSteve Ballmer Attacks Google’s Gmail AdsGreat, Now We’re Left with BallmerMicrosoft’s Windows Cloud Smells FunnyYouTube Launches New Set Of APIsMicrosoft Gives Yahoo 3 Weeks For ‘Definitive Agreement’ To Buyout

ZocDoc, the service for finding doctors and making appointments online, is announcing two new high profile investors this morning: Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO of Salesforce.com. The investments follow news last month that the company had raised a $3 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.

The company, which launched about a year ago, is touting some impressive growth numbers in its announcement, writing “ZocDoc offered patients nearly 20,000 available appointments in September, a 2,000% increase since the company launched a year ago. The company has grown its consumer and practitioner base by an average of 50% per month as it continues to add new specialties and extend its geographic reach.”

Currently, the company’s service is only offered in the New York City area, though earlier this year they announced plans to expand to Washington DC and San Francisco.

Meanwhile, for Bezos, the investment in ZocDoc marks yet another addition to his Web 2.0 portfolio. It was recently revealed that the billionaire backed Twitter, while prior investments include 37Signals, Kongregate, and ChaCha.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:ZocDoc Gets $3M to Help You Find a DoctorZocDoc Adds More Doctors, Launching in New CitiesJeff Bezos Invests $3m In KongregateTwitter Funding Partners Revealed; Prepare to be Amaz(on)ed37signals Takes Investment from Jeff Bezos - Sellout?Kongregate Adds Facebook WidgetAlexa Versus Statsaholic, The Sequel

iPhones and Blackberries with all-you-can-eat data plans may be commonplace in Silicon Valley, but for the vast majority of mobile phone users in the United States, data plans are still an unneeded luxury. That said, nearly every phone built in the last decade includes SMS - the immensely popular text messaging format that now counts over 2.4 billion users worldwide.

To capitalize on the ubiquity of SMS, a number of companies such as Pizza Hut and Amazon now allow users to place orders and query information using some basic commands in a text messages. Unfortunately, these commands are clunky and impractical for most users (for example, to order my favorite Pizza from Pizza Hut I would need to enter “O FAV”).

SmartTouch, a mobile software company that launched at last week’s TechCrunch50 DemoPit, is looking to fix this. The company has developed a suite of basic widgets for mobile phones that visualize these SMS services, allowing users to navigate through an intuitive menu instead of having to remember keywords and commands. As CEO John McDonough explains, it’s sort of “like moving from the days of command line MS-DOS to Windows 3.1″.Source:TechCrunch
Today, we are releasing 100 tickets for “The Web Starts at the Grassroots” Roundtable Discussion prior to the TechCrunch Austin Ventures Meet-Up at Pangaea. Tickets are $50, with all of the proceeds benefiting the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

The Roundtable will be held at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center located on the University of Texas at Austin campus, starting at 3:00 p.m. (Austin Time) on Thursday, September 25. This will be similar in format to the Mobile Web Wars Roundtable I hosted in July—two dozen founders, CEOs, VCs, and execs in a room talking about a single issue, live streamed over the Web. The Roundtable will focus on how to use the Web to build grassroots support for startups, brands, politicians, and social causes. Source:TechCrunch

Just asking. Tech stocks closed down almost 4 percent today (3.24 percent since Thursday), versus almost 7 percent for financial stocks. Google is only down 1.05 percent. Amazon is down 1.35 percent. But Apple is down 5.76 percent. And RIM is down 7 percent (Wall Street banks are a big customer).

Did anyone buy any tech stocks today?

Microsoft and RIM announced today that they have struck a deal that will see all BlackBerry smartphones running Microsoft Live Search.

The deal’s specifics weren’t released, but Microsoft’s ability to bring Live Search to the BlackBerry is a major development in the mobile space and could prove troublesome for Google, which is currently providing the iPhone with its search and will feature Google Search in upcoming Android-based devices.Source:TechCrunch

Amazon has again announced that it will start selling US-produced wine to its American customers by the beginning of October.

But before you start getting excited about buying wine online, there’s one catch: it will only be available to people in about 26 states due to interstate regulations, but the company is working with New Vine Logistics, a firm that specializes in interstate transactions, to avoid any legal issues that may arise in the process and attempt to increase the distribution of wine as time goes on.

Since Amazon released its video on demand service earlier today, I’ve pored over each and every section of the site to determine if it has what it takes to supplant Hulu as the best online video service providing professional network content. And after doing just that, I’ve quickly realized that it doesn’t.

Amazon has done all it can to solidify its stance in the online video market. First, it launched its Unbox service to compete with film streaming and now it has tried to compete in on-demand streaming of TV shows and movies. And by making TV shows and movies available online to be streamed directly to your computer, it’s quickly becoming apparent that Amazon is not necessarily focusing all its attention on iTunes, but on what it perceives to be the next frontier in video: online streaming.

In the world of paid digital music downloads, there’s iTunes, Amazon MP3, maybe the Zune Marketplace and eMusic a rung or two lower on the industry ladder. The rest seem to comprise the land of the unspoken. Even Microsoft’s efforts and the indie fave eMusic are susceptible to falling into insignificance. After all, the music industry as a whole, as with virtually any market of capitalist design, tends to support winners. The tracks go where the traffic is. Most of the time anyway. Enough for the strongest of players to claim ubiquity and permanent and unchallenged staying power, and for those underneath to struggle for breath.

You might wonder why it is that I raise a point raised so many times before. The health of the music industry has been opined over ad nauseam, and to do so once more is to toss tired copy on a pile of wasted wordplay, right? Well, it depends, really. The story of the digital sales model is far from complete, and with new developments happening in the land of Apple and Amazon, as well as a steady flow of stories occurring along the fringe of the market, there still is room to press points further along and observe the space from underrepresented perspectives.

The last 24 hours or so, for example, have brought items having to do with a Napster letter addressed to shareholders, in which it notes that it is “open to a sale,” according to Joseph Weisenthal of PaidContent, as well as something or other to do with recently launched LimeWire MP3 Store and a marked 100% growth in its music catalog, to a mere 2 million in total, as noted by Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica. These you might thing to be insignificant. And taken as they come, I would admit that they are not very impactful. But if you consider them to be the newest round of pockmarks in the middle- and lower-class digital music scenes, they add to the subtle signs emerging each season that tell us the market’s bottom feeders are not long for this world.

Is that a good thing? Well, only the best survive, yes? Sure, ideally. It’s hard to say who would be left standing. Rhapsody? Maybe. The Zune Marketplace? That’s quite a variable at this point. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be “in it to win it.” On the upside, the loss of such actors - if indeed they do expire in the next year or two or three - would perhaps uncomplicate things more. Too many choices can more detrimental than few in some cases.

But, just for kicks, imagine a world that doesn’t have the spread of choices that we have today. If we start to see Napster, LimeWire, et al., start to drop like flies, what’s to say the consumer will really benefit? Those interested in music subscriptions, say, may no longer have such options. And labels that currently opt for one outlet or another due to variations in revenue agreements, might have to succumb to less advantageous contracts elsewhere. Which could hurt their bottom line. And though more musicians are taking an entirely solo route to promotion, the role of the studio, big or small, remains important. The music industry is busy enough as it is with a small set of great sounds and a vast amount of non-sellers. Some editorial is a good thing.

Granted, there are quite a number of ifs to take into account as things in the digital industry progress, but its certainly worth contemplating its evolving dimensions. It’s not been a decade since music downloads became “popular,” and already we’ve seen it balloon, we’ve seen its squeezed, and we’ve even seen it begin to consolidate.

Some might argue that where one gets his or her downloads won’t matter much. But I disagree. Businesses in a complex market such as media move to higher ground at the expense of others. And the “others” don’t simply get to continue on when left behind. So just know this. It may now seem purposeless to quibble over the failed and the failing. But if all but a few disappear, the consumer experience that might have been - that you can get what you want, how you want - probably won’t be realized. And that’s a shame if proven true. If any paradigm shift of modern making in the media world could be taken closest to an ideal, it is the convenience of the digital music download.

(Image source: Flickr/peymon)

This morning Mike Arrington wrote a great advice piece to Amazon on the Kindle.

The gist of Mike’s argument is that Amazon should offer Kindle up as an operating system and reference design. This would allow third parties to create Kindle compatible devices in the same way that Dell, for example, makes PCs compatible with Windows. This would create an ecosystem around the product which would be incredibly powerful. And at the same time, Amazon would still be doing what it really wants to do, which is to sell books. By offering their own product which they should continue to sell, they get to work out all the kinks without any meddling third party companies telling it what to do. But by opening up the platform, they really get to have their control cake and to eat their large marketplace cake too.

Interestingly, this is really what Google should be doing with Android. Google is indeed licensing the Android OS to third party phone manufacturers, but by not creating and controling an initial reference design they are leaving important pieces of the design to third parties, in a field (mobile phones) where important design elements can be critical.

Anyway, getting back to Kindle, I have been a fan of the product concept but I do believe it will be very hard for Amazon to build up the kind of market that they really need and should have with such a device without getting some help. I hope they take Mike’s advice.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

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