Google launched the Google App Engine at Campfire One last night, a service that allows developers to run web applications on Google's infrastructure. TechCrunch's Mike Arrington has a great overview of Google App Engine, which competes with Amazon's S3, EC2 and SimpleDB services. Unlike Amazon's services, the Google App Engine is an all in one solution that includes Python servers, database access through Google's BigTable, and Google File System data storage.

The first 10,000 developers to sign up for the service will be allowed to deploy applications, which will be served initially at no charge. Developers can store up to 500 MB of data and have enough processing power and bandwidth to serve an application that equates to about 5 M pageviews / month.

This is another step forward to reducing the time to market for Internet start ups. There's now another option available to developers who want to build out an online application. They no longer need to worry about hosting the application, or buying servers to host it.

Essentially what this does is continue to make application hosting and storage a commodity whose price is approaching zero, removing that as a competitive differentiator. In my mind, this increases the need for a great user experience - and this user experience will likely be the competitive difference for Internet applications. That's where the value will come from. The performance of an application will now be taken for granted - it can run on hosted infrastructure that (in theory) should always be available. The difference for these applications will have to come from something else - and that something else is likely to be the user experience.

How easy is it to use your application? How engaging is the experience for your users? If you haven't thought about that, you should. Because that's where the money is going to come from moving forward.

More information at the Google App Engine blog, ReadWriteWeb and O'Reilly Radar.

Amazon is using a Flex application on at least two pages related to its Amazon Unbox service. There's a Flex application on the main Unbox page that allows visitors to browse and view previews of available videos.

A similar Flex application is also being used on the free Unbox downloads page, where visitors can browse videos that are available for free.

It looks like the same application with different data is being used on both pages. Its great to be able to browse the videos and watch the previews from within the application, without having to launch another plugin or external video player.

Ooyala, a Flex based start up founded by ex-Google employees, won the Amazon Web Services Start Up Challenge last week. I wrote about the application about a month ago, you can read about Ooyala in this article. As winners, Ooyala will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Service credits and an investment offer from Amazon.com.

Takayuki Fukatsu has created a pretty cool Flash application that allows you to see related items from Amazon.com. Starting with a simple search box, you type in a subject or book that you're interested in. Takayuki's Flash application makes a series of API calls back to Amazon, finding books that people are related to the one(s) you've searched for, using Amazon's 'people who bought this item also bought this item' API. After a few seconds, you get a cool visualization of related books. Check out this search for ActionScript 3 books on Amazon to see an example.

The site is done using Flash and ActionScript 3. The application is all the more impressive when you consider that ActionScript 3 for Flash is only available as a right now.

(Via)

Kyle Hayes continues to improve his open source Amazon sidebar widget. The widget, which we've covered before, allows you to display a list of books according to their sales rank at Amazon. It looks great, and now includes new features: clicking on an item in the list will fade the item out and show you the details about the book, including the cover art and a link to Amazon.com to purchase the item. The widget is embeded in the page below, and is also on the right hand side of the front page here at RIA Pedia.

The project is an open source project hosted on RIAForge, so if you're interested in improving it, you can submit bugs and patches to Kyle through that system. I'd like to see a few things added in the next release: added support for affiliate links, so I get money if someone buys from my site, and user preferences for the widget, to specify which store they want to purchase from. It would be great if the preferences for the widget were stored in the local storage mechanism for the Flash Player, and if the preferences were behind the widget itself, like with Dashboard Widgets on Mac OS X.

Kyle Hayes has created a very cool Amazon widget that would look good in the sidebar of any blog. The widget itself was created with Flex, and is delivered to the user as a very small Flash file. The widget reads in a list of ISBN numbers from an XML file, then displays those books in order of their sales ranking on Amazon.com.