Amazon's SimpleDB - Nice concept that took time for me to grasp!!

I was reading this news about SimpleDB all over the technology news and blogosphere, yesterday.

So I opened couple of links given below including Amazon's SimpleDB announcement.
- Amazon.com: Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Web Services
- inside looking out » What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB
- Amazon SimpleDB 101 & Why It Matters - GigaOM

It was really tough for me to understand what SimpleDB was all about. All I knew about Amazon was that it was a great online book store which has spread into other areas of online shopping. And more recently, I know Amazon for Kindle - their e-reader. By the way, here is one more latest review about Kindle. Probably, this mindset about Amazon was the reason why I could not understand (digest) the fact about SimpleDb.

You might consider me to be stupid and dumbfor having read the above links at least 4-5 times (except for the Amazon's web page where they explained about SimpleDB. I should have read that first) and then I slowly came to realize that SimpleDB was a web service which is available for you (or your company) to create, store, update and handle a database online.

Basically, you would setup an RDBMS such as Oracle and then have a web interface to update the database (backend).

What Amazon promises is that they seem to have all the storage and database related logic distributed over a network of servers (concept known as cloud-computing). If you are an organization, then you are readily use this web service for your database/backend requirements. The cost as Amazon claims is very nominal. Refer to their SimpleDB page for details of the cost.

You should probably read this article in CNet News about SimpleDB, which is more down to earth and is for non-geeky folks.

From the above article is when I came to know that wordpress.com actually uses SimpleDB as their backend. This is like a eye opener.

Look at the possibilities that it opens up for a startup which wants a reliable and fast backend.

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I have been allergic to the DBMB/RDBMS and I have been particularly allergic to the word "Oracle". The main reason for this is that during my student days, the way concepts of DB and RDBMS were taught was horrifying and I started hating the subject.

But during my work years, I realized that I do like database concepts and I have designed a few decent DB schemas using MS-Access and given it a web interface. I had come up with simple tools such as bug tracker. Not bad for a guy who hated concepts of DB so much.. i tell myself.

Redefining books - E-Reader from Amazon

I read this news in Newsweek about this e-reader from Amazon called as "Kindle".

Kindle is a physical electronic device which of size of a book. It can store and display pages of books for you to read. That's why it is called a e-reader.



The beauty of this e-reader is that it can store thousands of books for you to read at your leisure. Not just that, you can subscribe to news papers and magazines and read them on this e-reader.

Kindle also has internet capabilities and lets you search the net and go through wikipedia and things like that.

Now, you must be thinking as to how good/pleasurable will it be to read a book on a device. But it seems that the device uses a technology called E-Ink which renders the text on the screen very similar and close to a printed paper. So it looks like printed paper and feels like printed paper. Below is a short description of E-Ink which I took from the Newsweek article.

This decade's major breakthrough has been the introduction of E Ink, whose creators came out of the MIT Media Lab. Working sort of like an Etch A Sketch, it forms letters by rearranging chemicals under the surface of the screen, making a page that looks a lot like a printed one. The first major implementation of E Ink was the $299 Sony Reader, launched in 2006 and heavily promoted. Sony won't divulge sales figures, but business director Bob Nell says the Reader has exceeded the company's expectations, and earlier this fall Sony introduced a sleeker second-generation model, the 505. (The Reader has no wireless—you must download on your computer and then move it to the device— and doesn't enable searching within a book.)

Oh yes.. Kindle is not the first device of its kind. Sony has done it before.

In my opinion, what matters is that the publishing industry should form an open standard format which can be then published on to e-reader's like Kindle (it may already be the case even now.. i don't know).

E-reader is something I have already thought of since many years. It will be the next great breakthrough. Think about it. School children don't have to carry so many books. And why would you want to give a cheap laptop to a child. Give them a e-reader like kindle which will contain all the book the kind ever needs. This will expand the kids knowledge.

I am definitely looking forward to buying this the next time I end up in US.

And hey.. there are two things I could realize from what Amazon is trying to do.

First, the world is moving towards convergence. Kindle with its internet capabilities is already a sort of handheld PDA. Now even other PDAs like iPhone could support such e-reader capabilities.

Second, now isn't it interesting to note that Amazon is also becoming a product company. Now this is what in my opinion I would term as "Business Convergence". The line between services and product companies is disappearing.

Btw, read the Newsweek article. Its a painfully long article but with lot of insight.

And also you can read the device's review at Engadget.