Amazon Web Services (AWS) now allows ASP.NET developers to take advantage of Elastic Beanstalk, which has been developed to make it easier to roll out cloud-based applications, the company said on Tuesday.

Tech giants Apple and Amazon have proved their mettle to doubting investors once again, leading US stocks higher in the week as the markets showed they had not yet run out of steam.

With Apple leading the revenue charge midweek and Amazon providing a kick to trading in tech shares Friday morning, bright spots appeared in what has otherwise been a mixed earnings season.

The dotcom sector is blitzing it. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Zinga have all reported this week, and while commentary has been a little mixed around some of the results, the reality is that the view from the cockpit of the helicopter is spectacular.

Amazon Web Services has made it possible to create private clouds using CloudFormation, which automatically creates stacks of resources described using templates, the company said on Wednesday.

There's been a lot of discussion the past couple of days about an analysis by Guy Rosen, in which he estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provisioning 50K EC2 server instances per day. He created this estimate by examining EC2 resource IDs and doing a time-series analysis on how much the IDs are incremented per hour.

The Amazon Kindle and other e-readers have potential as a business device. But they need more capabilities to catch on in the enterprise.

Social networks, e-readers and other technologies are transforming the publishing industry and heralding a new era of reading and learning.

What It Is: Big business has learned its lesson about paper consumption: We read Word docs on laptops, use the copier sparingly and print only what we need. Yet, the paperless office is still a distant dream. E-Readers at least give the trees--and therefore the human race--a chance. The 170 dot-per-inch screen resolution--well over twice that of the typical computer monitor--lessens eye fatigue. Right now, the Amazon Kindle DX, with its 9.7-inch screen, is as close to reading printed material as possible on an electronic device.

Amazon.com has been down this road before: Like one-time Amazon e-commerce "partners" Toys R Us and Borders before them, Target executives announced last week that the world's second-largest retailer plans to say adios to Amazon.com and "build and manage its own platform for Target.com," with an expected launch date before the 2011 holiday season.