From rumor to delivery in a couple days! Amazon Web Services just launched their new payments service.

If you want proof that Amazon web services are providing real value to real customers, look no further than the comment thread of this post from Tim O'Reilly. Tim has requested that people write in with their actual numbers from using the services. So far, only glowing reviews. Now that's good PR!

A very favorable, and more detailed article about the importance of Amazon's new web services on Read/WriteWeb. It's really great stuff and it's really catching on.

Quoted: Written by John Milan and edited by Richard MacManus.

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.

A good writeup on Amazon's Web Services strategy.

Quoted: WebOS services are going to be utilized by thousands of companies - and will power the next generation of web applications. Amazon is at this point leading the charge of the big Internet companies to capture this potentially huge market.

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.

Good explanation of the Mechanical Turk program.

Quote: When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

Alexa is now exposing their data via web services.