Timothy Archibald
At Your Web Service
As Amazon began amassing reams of useful product and pricing data, it soon found companies outside “scraping” that data off its Web site to provide new kinds of services, such as Amazon Light, a stripped-down site for finding products faster. By offering up that data as “Web services,” starting in 2002, Amazon found that other sites often sent potential customers back to Amazon.com, where they’d buy something.
Since then, the program has expanded into a sort of Windows for e-commerce, allowing Web developers to sync up with Amazon’s e-commerce software much more intimately. Now, more than 200,000 developers are building new services atop Amazon’s e-commerce machine.
Eric Cranston (pictured), an 18-year-old kid in Visalia, Calif., is starting an image processing company that will use Amazon Mechanical Turk, a Web service that matches freelance workers with businesses that want quick piecework tasks done.
Reader comments