What's New | 2005

Utilize the growing network of Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers in your business and for a limited time, get $2,000 worth of work done for only $1,000. Simply submit your HITs, pay Workers for $2,000 worth of approved HITs and get $1,000 back from Amazon! We’ve extended this limited promotion only until March 31, 2006, so act quickly to take advantage of this limited promotion.

The AWSZone.com web site provides an easy way to prototype software built using Amazon Web Services. AWSZone.com now offers scratch pads for our latest web services, including the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service. Be sure to check out the new HIT Question Builder, which simplifies the process for adding work to Amazon Mechanical Turk.

IBM’s Developer Works site features its second tutorial on the Amazon Simple Queue Service. This tutorial is the third in a series on creating applications with Amazon Web Services.

Today, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs – something children can do even before they learn to speak. However, 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?

Amazon Mechanical Turk does this, providing a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing.

IBM’s Developer Works site features a new tutorial on the Amazon Simple Queue Service. This tutorial is the second in a series on creating applications with Amazon Web Services.

The final Alexa Web Information Service 1.0 release is now available. The Alexa Web Information Service offers developers a platform for creating innovative applications based on Alexa’s vast repository of information about the Web.

Hundreds of software and information industry executives honored their peers at the 20th annual SIIA Codie Awards banquet at Universal Studios’ Globe Theatre. In its first appearance at the event, Amazon Web Services took home the award for “Best Web Services Solution”, which AWS evangelist Jeff Barr proudly accepted on behalf of the team. This year more than 800 companies submitted a record 1,000 nominations for the awards.