Presentations from Startup School 08.

Quoted: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has finally unveiled what's behind Blue Origin, his secretive effort to bring space flight to the masses. The Web site has photos and video of Goddard, the company's first vertical take-off and landing vehicle during a test flight in November.

Businessweek has done a very detailed story on Amazon's big new business as a web services provider.

Quoted: Yes, Amazon founder and Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, the onetime Internet poster boy who quickly became a post-dot-com pinata, is back with yet another new idea. Many people continue to wonder if the world's largest online store will ever fulfill its original promise to revolutionize retailing. But now Bezos is plotting another new direction for his 12-year-old company, which he will lay out on Nov. 8 at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Conference, the annual gathering of the digerati creme. Judging from an advance look he gave BusinessWeek on one recent gray day at Amazon's Seattle headquarters, it's so far from Amazon's retail core that you may well wonder if he has finally slipped off the deep end.

I really like the direction Amazon.com has been taking in the last couple of years with their major initiatives in the Web Services space. This article has Jeff Bezos discussing these new services at the Emerging Technology Conference.

Quoted: By making a handful of Web services applications open to outsiders, Amazon.com is building additional sources of revenue while creating computing models for the future, the CEO said at MIT's ongoing Emerging Technologies Conference.

Quoted: Blue Origin, a company headed by Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, has applied to build a launch site for its planned New Shepard space rocket about 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Van Horn.

WHOA. Jeff Bezos just invested in 37signals.

Quoted: 37signals, the makers of popular collaborative software like Basecamp, Backpack, Ta-Da List, Writeboard and Campfire, have just announced that they've ...