Ozana Popovic Nataliia Levchenko
UNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB FACULTY OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS-ZAGREB
Course : Enterprise Information System
Zagreb,May,2015.
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Content:
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Essay scope and purpose
2.
Introduction
3.
History
4.
Amazon Web Service
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Link to Service or Web Service homepage
6.
Technical requirement
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Software/Web Site Service History
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Detailed description
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Profile Creation
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Business Usage
11.
Competition
Essay scope and purpose The purpose of our essay is to present Amazon and its usage nowadays. Also we are going to show you how to create an account and use Amazon which is one of the most popular eretailer in a whole world nowadays. Besides E-bay Amazon is very popular and has a very 2
wide range of offering various goods and services. It is essential for all different kinds of businesses and its very useful from customer’s point of view. Amazon is working with various different suppliers because they offer almost everything that can be sold on a market.
Introduction Let’s introduce Amazon. It is an American e-commerce company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is crucial to say that it is the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States. Also Amazon.com firstly started as an online bookstore, however soon diversified, selling DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, video downloads/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewelry. What is important to mention about it is that the company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Amazon Kindle e-book readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV and Fire Phone — and is important to emphasize that it is a major provider of cloud computing services. Amazon also sells certain low-end products like USB cables under its inhouse brand AmazonBasics. Also regarding purchasing on Amazon is interesting to mention that it has separate retail websites for United States, United Kingdom & Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India and Mexico. Amazon also offers international shipping to certain other countries for some of its products.
History The company was founded in 1994, and the founder of Amazon is Jeff Bezos. Actuallly what happened is that in 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved to Seattle. He began to work on a business plan for what would eventually become Amazon.com. He incorporated the company as "Cadabra" on July 5, 1994[11] and the site went online as Amazon.com in 1995.Bezos changed the name cadabra.com to amazon.com because it sounded too much like cadaver. Additionally, a name beginning with "A" was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of any list that was alphabetized. Regarding how he selected the name Amazon, it was by looking through the dictionary, and settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that which was "exotic and different" just as he 3
planned for his store to be; the Amazon river, he noted was by far the "biggest" river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest in the world. Firstly, the company began as an online bookstore. In the first two months of business, Amazon sold to all 50 states and over 45 countries. Within two months, Amazon's sales were up to $20,000/week. While the largest brick and mortar bookstores and mail order catalogs might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could "carry" several times more, since it would have an almost unlimited virtual (not actual) warehouse: those of the actual product makers/suppliers. What is interesting is that, Amazon's initial business plan was unusual; it did not expect to make a profit for four to five years. This "slow" growth caused stockholders to complain about the company not reaching profitability fast enough to justify investing in, or to even survive in the long-term. But what actually happened is that when the dot-com bubble burst at the start of the 21st century, destroying many e-companies in the process, Amazon survived, and grew on past the bubble burst to become a huge player in online sales. It finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million (i.e., 1¢ per share), on revenues of more than $1 billion. This profit margin, though extremely modest, proved to skeptics that Bezos' unconventional business model could succeed.] In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos the Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing online shopping. However they faced some problems in the past. Barnes & Noble sued Amazon on May 12, 1997, arguing that Amazon's claim to be "the world's largest bookstore" was false. Barnes and Noble asserted, "[It] isn't a bookstore at all. It's a book broker." The suit was later settled out of court, and Amazon continued to make the same claim.]Additionally Walmart sued Amazon on October 16, 1998, alleging that Amazon had stolen Walmart's trade secrets by hiring former Walmart executives. Although this suit was also settled out of court, it caused Amazon to implement internal restrictions and the reassignment of the former Walmart executives.
Amazon Web Services When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) it is important to emphasize that it is a collection of remote computing services, also called web services, that make up a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon.com. These services are based out of 11 geographical regions across the world. The most central and well-known of these services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon S3. These products are marketed as a 4
service to provide large computing capacity more quickly and cheaper than a client company building an actual physical server farm. As we have already mentioned AWS is located in 11 geographical "regions": US East (Northern Virginia), where the majority of AWS servers are based,[3] US West (northern California), US West (Oregon), Brazil (São Paulo), Europe (Ireland and Germany), Southeast Asia (Singapore), East Asia (Tokyo and Beijing) and Australia (Sydney). There is also a "GovCloud", based in the Northwestern United States, provided for U.S. government customers, complementing existing government agencies already using the US East Region. [4] Each Region is wholly contained within a single country and all of its data and services stay within the designated Region. What is also important to mention is that Each Region has multiple "Availability Zones", which are distinct data centers providing AWS services. Availability Zones are isolated from each other to prevent outages from spreading between Zones. Several services operate across Availability Zones (e.g., S3, DynamoDB) while others can be configured to replicate across Zones to spread demand and avoid downtime from failures. As of December 2014, Amazon Web Services operated an estimated 1.4 Million servers across 28 availability zones. When it comes to history of AWS it was officially launched in 2006, and it provide online services for other web sites or client-side applications. Most of these services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality that other developers can use in their applications. Amazon Web Services’ offerings are accessed over HTTP, using the REST architectural style and SOAP protocol. All services are billed based on usage, but how usage is measured for billing varies from service to service. Interesting facts regarding AWS: In June 2007, Amazon claimed that more than 180,000 developers had signed up to use Amazon Web Services. In November 2010, it was reported that all of Amazon.com retail web services had been moved to AWS.
Link to Service or Web Service homepage
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Firstly you should go to amazon.com. In the upper right-hand corner, you’ll see a menu marked “Your Account.” When you hover over it, a drop-down menu appears. Click on the “Start Here” link directly beneath the yellow “Sign In” button.
Enter your personal information. The registration form will ask for your name and email address, and it will prompt you to choose a password. Note that you can also enter a phone number. This is not mandatory, but it provides better account protection. Amazon will not call you, so don’t worry about that – it’s only used for security purposes.
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Technical requirements Talking about technical requirements let first define what it means. Technical requirements analysis encompasses those tasks that go into analyzing and figuring out the needs or conditions in order to meet a new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, analyzing, documenting, validating and managing software or system requirements. These analyses are critical to the success of a systems or software project. The requirements should have several characteristics in order to identify business needs and the level of detail sufficient for system design. Such characteristics are documentation, action, testability and measurability. Let’s look on the situation with American online book store Amazon and see what requirements should your computer, web browser and internet connection fulfill in order to satisfy their technical requirements. Firstly we should pay attention on the minimum internet bandwidth. It standard definition videos is 900 Kbits/sec while high definition videos is 3.5 Mbits/sec. Secondly computer hardware should be PC: Intel Pentium 4 2.33 GHz processor or equivalent or Mac: Intel Core Duo 1.33 GHz or faster. Thirdly talking about computer operating system for PC: Windows 7 or newer and for Mac: OS X or newer (10.7+). Using web browsers make sure that you use the latest version. Internet explorer need to be 8.0 or above. It has to be the latest version of Firefox. Safari need to be 5.0 or above and Google chrome need to be the latest version. 7
There are also technical requirements for product images such as TIFF (.tif/.tiff), JPEG (.jpeg/.jpg), GIF (.gif) and PNG (.png) format; image pixel dimensions of at least 1000 or larger in either height or width preferred and sRGB or CMYK color mode. File names must consist of the product identifier (Amazon ASIN, 13-digit ISBN, EAN, JAN, or UPC) followed by a period and the appropriate file extension (Example: B000123456.jpg or 0237425673485.tif).
Software, web service history. The word software basically means any set of machine-readable instructions that directs a computer’s processor to perform specific operations. It includes computer programs, libraries and associated documentation. Talking about computer software of Amazon Shop for PC and Mac software it includes Free Software, Small Business Software, Software for Students, Academic Courseware, Computer Security, Education & Reference, Illustration & Design and Operating Systems. Let’s briefly explain the meaning of each of the following software’s. Free software is computer software that gives users the freedom to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, modify, and distribute the original software and the adapted versions. What is interesting here is that the rights to study and modify free software imply unfettered access to its source code. For computer programs which are covered by copyright law this is achieved with a software license where the author grants users the aforementioned freedoms. Small business software has been many years any software that a small business owner could appropriate to get jobs done. Another good example will be software for students. It is software which primary purpose is teaching and self-learning. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of remote computing services, also called web services, that make up a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon.com. Eleven geographical regions across the world have these services. The most central and famous of these services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon S3. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. These services are used in order to provide computer capacity more quickly and cheaper than a client company building an actual physical server farm. Describing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in more details we can see that it is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. 8
Another famous service is Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface that allows you to receive and configure capacity with minimal friction.This program helps to control your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.In order to quickly scale capacity Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes as your computing requirements change. It also changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), provides developers and IT teams with secure, durable, highly-scalable object storage. It is very simple to use Amazon S3 with a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. With Amazon S3, you pay only for the storage you actually use. There is no minimum fee and no setup cost. It can be also used alone or together with other AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Glacier, as well as third party storage repositories and gateways. It provides cost-effective object storage for a wide variety of use cases including cloud applications, content distribution, backup and archiving, disaster recovery, and big data analytics.
Detailed description 5.1 software, web service functions One of the Amazon web service functions is AWS Lambda which is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for you, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information. It starts running your code within milliseconds of an event such as an image upload, in-app activity, website click, or output from a connected device. You can also use AWS Lambda to create new back-end services where compute resources are automatically triggered based on custom requests. With AWS Lambda you pay only for the requests served and the compute time required to run your code. Billing is metered in increments of 100 milliseconds, making it cost-effective and easy to scale automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second. Tutorial 9
Using Amazon CloudFront, customers can deliver adaptive bitrate video in a scalable, high performing and cost effective manner to audiences around the world while taking advantage of full adherence to Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming format specification. To use this solution there is no need to go through the high touch and expensive process of setting up and managing third party media servers. Customers ranging from individual broadcasters to online video subscription services can simply delegate all of their Smooth Streaming delivery side to Amazon CloudFront with minimal initial configuration. In addiition, with Smooth Streaming format’s integration with Digital Rights Management systems and availability over HTTP, video publishers using Amazon CloudFront now have another easy to use, secure and globally scalable streaming solution. The link below will take you to the Amazon CloudFront developer guide which can be used to get started on using this feature. HLS Streaming: Amazon Elastic Transcoder can be used to convert your mezzanine (or master) media files stored in Amazon S3 to various formats depending on the devices your viewers will be using to play it and can further be transmuxed to create a collection of HLS segments and manifest files. This can be stored back in Amazon S3 and delivered using Amazon CloudFront in a high performing and scalable manner. Using these AWS services, you benefit from easy setup, scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing. The following links published by JWPlayer can be used to get you started on using this solution. RTMP Streaming: For customers desiring to use the RTMP protocol to deliver media to Flash player Amazon CloudFront has developed specialized RTMP distributions which lets you stream content stored in Amazon S3. RTMP Streaming: For customers desiring to use the RTMP protocol to deliver media to Flash player Amazon CloudFront has developed specialized RTMP distributions which lets you stream content stored in S3. Wowza Streaming Engine: Wowza Streaming Engine:  Combine the benefits of Wowza® Media Systems streaming software, Wowza Streaming Engine™, and its broad array of Wowza AddOns with the reliability, scalability, low latency and cost-efficiency of Amazon CloudFront. Customers have two options to choose from — a bring-your-ownlicense (BYOL) arrangement or fee-based AMIs on Amazon Marketplace, The setup and management system will make it faster and easier for publishers to deliver multiple streaming formats, including Apple® HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Adobe® HTTP Dynamic Streaming
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(HDS), Microsoft® Smooth Streaming and MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). Adobe Media Server: Customers who desire to run their live streaming event using Adobe Media Server can take advantage of its integration with Amazon CloudFront to deliver streams using Adobe® HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) or Apple® HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) to a global audience. This solution also supports using features unique to Adobe Media Server such as protected HDS and Adobe Access 4 DRM readiness IIS Live Smooth Streaming: Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server can be used to deliver media using the Smooth Streaming and Apple® HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocols. Seamlessly integrating this with Amazon CloudFront provides customers with a Microsoft Windows centric choice to stream their live event at a global scale. JWPlayer: JWPlayer by Longtail Video, , supports playing progressive download, HLS and RTMP streams. This player operates in both HTML5 and Flash modes and contains advanced features such as single-click sharing to Facebook and Twitter, integration with Google Analytics and complete customizability. Adobe Flash: Adobe Flash is an option for customers wanting to play the streams delivered by Amazon CloudFront RTMP distributions. The tutorial below will take you step-by-step through the process of using Adobe Flash Builder to create your Adobe Flash player.
Profile creation In order to create your profile on Amazon you have to sign in to Amazon Studios, download scripts, participate in discussions, and write reviews. If you don't have an account, you'll be prompted to create one. After signing in, you'll be able to create a personal Amazon Studios profile. In order to customize Amazon studios profile page you have to click on your name, then on "Profile" at the top of any page. If you want to add or change the information on your profile page, just click "Edit" and make your changes. Be sure to click the "Save" button for the changes to take effect. Your profile information — including name, location, areas of expertise, favorite movies and other details — is publicly available to others at Amazon Studios, and via search engines on the internet. However, scripts that you submit privately will not be publicly available on 11
Amazon Studios unless you choose to make them public, we buy them, or we extend our option by paying you $10,000. See the Development Agreement for details. Any additions or changes to your Amazon Studios profile will not automatically update any profile information displayed elsewhere on Amazon.com.If you want to add or change your profile image, just click on the image space. Then click "Browse" to select a picture to upload.
Competition Let’s talk about Amazon’s competitors. The interesting fact is that it wasn’t under attack from just startups. There are big companies with deep pockets ready to challenge Amazon, too. Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba is about to IPO. It's hoping to raise $21 billion in the biggest IPO in history, giving Alibaba billions in cash to try to crack into the U.S. market Because Amazon is performing is several different segments so what is important to say that they competitors come from: media, electronics and other merchandise. From the media segment, Amazon competes with auction site eBay (EBAY); media gamechanger Netflix (NFLX); Time Warner Cable (TWX); Apple (AAPL), with iTunes; Google (GOOG) with its Play Store; and media producer Liberty Interactive (QVCB) Additionally Amazon has several competitors in the electronics and general merchandise segment, many of which are brick and mortar rivals including Best Buy, Family Dollar, RadioShack, Staples, Target, Walmart, Sears, Big Lots, Delia and Systemacs. Regarding competitors In the electronics and general merchandise segment online competition includes Alibaba Group, LightInTheBox Holding Co., Overstock.com, PCM, Vipshop Holdings, JD.com, Wayfair Inc. and Zulily. In the other operating segment, Amazon competes with several of the world's largest companies including CDW, PC Connection, Insight Enterprises, Google, Oracle; salesforce.com, Accenture and Citrix Systems, among others.
References: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Amazon-Account 12
www.wikipedia.com www.amazon.com www.investopedia.com http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/amazon_inc/index.html http://www.amazon.co.uk/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services http://www.slideshare.net/davinken/amazon-web-services-history-overview-presentation http://aws.amazon.com/ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2920592/amazon-helps-automate-software-upgrades-ineurope-and-australia.html https://www.google.hr/?gws_rd=cr,ssl&ei=xO9hVcXEFYObsgGSg4GYCA http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticMapReduce/latest/DeveloperGuide/emr-getstarted.html http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=16465241 https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/intro?hashed=124496045 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304441404577482902055882264 https://www.kabbage.com/blog/selling-strategies-how-to-outsell-your-amazoncompetition-during-the-holidays http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-marketplace-merchants-complain-of-competitionwith-amazon/
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