Last week Skype rolled out an application for the iPhone. If you are on a WiFi network you can make calls to other skype users or phones. I have used it to make phone calls to land lines a couple of times the quality of the call was really good. The main problem is that currently you can not make calls through Skype when you are on the 3G network. Here is an article on the Wall Street Journal about Skype on mobile phones.
In celebration of S3’s 3rd anniversary Amazon has announced the reduction of the transfer-in costs for data from $0.10/GB to $0.03GB for April – May 2009. Now is the time to transfer all the home videos and music that isn’t backed up else where.
Amazon anounces Elastic MapReduce.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
If you wanted to do a large amount of data processing the past with EC2 you would have to setup the whole environment which can be time consuming for the first time user or over whelming just thinking about it. This will make it much easier for other companies to tackle tasks like the NY Times did when they converted a large amount of scanned articles in TIFF format into PDFs.