Amazon Announces Amazon Simple Email Services

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company, today announced Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required - businesses can utilize a free usage tier, and after that, enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer. To get started using Amazon SES, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

Building large-scale email solutions to send marketing and transactional messages is often a complex and costly challenge for businesses. To increase the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered, businesses must deal with hassles such as email server management, network configuration, and meeting rigorous Internet Service Provider (ISP) standards for email content. Additionally, many third-party email solutions require contract and price negotiations, as well as significant up-front costs.

Amazon SES eliminates these challenges and enables businesses to benefit from the years of experience and sophisticated email infrastructure Amazon.com has built to serve its own large-scale customer base. Through a simple API call, businesses can now access a high-quality, scalable email infrastructure to efficiently and inexpensively communicate to their customers. For high email deliverability, Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business's outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action. To help businesses further improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES provides a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.

"Customers have consistently asked us for the ability to send large quantities of high-quality email from Amazon EC2. Amazon SES makes it very easy for businesses to send email from applications running on Amazon EC2 and other AWS services," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. "With Amazon SES, businesses no longer have to worry about the details of building and maintaining their own email-sending solution or negotiating and paying for expensive outside email services. Instead, they can focus on improving customer communication and reducing costs."

Amazon is able to pass on the efficiencies of its scale to customers, and pricing for Amazon SES is only $0.10 per thousand email messages sent. Additionally, a customer can send 2,000 email messages for free each day when these emails originate from Amazon EC2 or AWS Elastic Beanstalk (data transfer fees may still apply if a customer exceeds their AWS free monthly bandwidth allowance).

Neustar, Inc is a managed services provider that enables seamless connectivity across networks, technologies and applications for carriers and enterprises. "Amazon SES has been invaluable to our business by letting us no longer worry about email deliverability - just as Amazon SQS lets us do so for our own queuing, Amazon S3 lets us do so with file storage, and Amazon RDS for databases," said Patrick Lightbody, Director of Product Management at Neustar, Inc. "For our self-service SaaS business, the email signup process must be flawless. Any delay in delivery can have significant impact on our signup rates, which require email verification, and Amazon SES has already improved those signup rates by about 10%."

"Reliable email deliverability has become more of a challenge as spam volumes have increased and ISP's have rightly become more aggressive in their efforts to shield end users from unsolicited messages," said George Cook, Vice President of Technical Architecture, 42 Entertainment, a digital entertainment and content development agency that develops alternate reality games. "Amazon SES gives us a simple way to send high-quality email directly from Amazon EC2 for in-game messaging. By providing feedback and insight into the quality of the email we're sending, we can further improve our communication with customers."

EyeJot is an easy-to-use video mail platform that can be used by both consumers and businesses to send video messages. "EyeJot is excited to be working with Amazon SES and we plan to use the new service for all our transactional email sending. Since email is an integral part of just about every business, including our own, it's nice to know there's a resource that product developers can employ that simplifies the task of sending email," said David Geller, CEO and Founder, EyeJot. "Amazon's well-documented API allows developers to send email without having to configure and manage SMTP servers. Amazon SES is easy to set up and use, and will enable us to more effectively deliver our video mail notification messages to our customers."



Amazon Allows Kindle Owners to Share Books

In the last couple weeks, Amazon made good on two announcements made some months ago. One is you can now share Kindle titles with other Kindle owners.

The lending feature has been on the want list of Kindle owners for some time. If you are a Kindle customer you can now be able to share titles you have purchased with any other Kindle user - including those using the free Kindle apps.

While a title is on loan the lender has no access to it and this seems fair, but you can only loan a title once and only for 14 days - which seems far too short. There are also other restrictions,  lending can only be initiated by customers in the U.S and recipients in some countries won't be allowed access to some titles.  Currently, sharing can only be administered via the Amazon website.

In addition, the facility is controlled by the publisher who can opt to enable or disable sharing. As you can guess most publishers see no advantage in letting users share a book with another user and so lose a potential sale. As a result you have to look quite hard to find a Kindle book that you can use to even just test the facility!

Here's hoping more and more books become sharing enabled. I can understand if newly released titles won't be able to be shared, but after a period of one year, most books should be able to be shared.

iPad Holiday Gift Ideas: Jed and Roy McCoy, A Christmas Story

Looking for something to keep the kids occupied before the big day?  Well, kids love the iPad, and kids love Christmas, so this is the perfect purchase.

A neat story and eye catching illustrations. 

'Peace on Earth!---now there's a good idea.' 'Peace in our family!'---you must be joking. Shepherds Jed and Roy McCoy have been fighting for years; so what will happen when an angel arrives announcing the birth of a baby who brings peace on earth? Read this Christmas story for the whole family, based on Luke 2:8-20, and find out!

Buy it here and it will be delivered to your iPad via the Kindle app.  Merry Christmas!

Kindle Free Pick of the Week: Unwrapping Christmas

By Lori Copeland.  It's that time of year again, and with excitement and high expectations, Rose has planned the perfect Christmas for her family and friends. But when she feels them drifting away during a time that should celebrate togetherness, Rose is forced to slow down in the most unexpected way. In this whimsical, uplifting story, she discovers the true meaning of giving.

A nice, quick read to get you in the spirit of Christmas.

Google to Launch an "Open" E-book Store

Many were wondering when this was going to happen, and now it looks like it is coming in a matter of days.

Google will debut it's version on an online bookstore in December to rival the digital reading leaders Amazon, Apple and others.

Google Product Manager Scott Dougall told the Wall Street Journal the e-book service will launch in the United States by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year.

The Journal said Google has signed deals with many major book publishers and will offer hundreds of thousands of titles for purchase and millions of books for free.

It appears Google will offer most of the titles that currently are available in other e-bookstores at launch or shortly after with costs similar to those at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, Google told the publication.

Google will allow consumers to access books from retail partners on devices with full Web browsers, including computers, tablets and smartphones.

Google users will buy books online using Google's Checkout system and add them to an online library matched to a Google account.  It has not been revealed what percentage Google will pay its partners.

I'm looking forward to see what new features Google will offer and how they will manage their store compared to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple.  Let's just say this competition is good for readers everywhere.