Quick links

Some of the best of what I've been thinking about lately:

• Amazon now has 109 warehouses and 165k employees. Wow. ([1])
  
  
• Amazon cloud computing has 17% operating margins, surprisingly high given all the competition ([1] [2])
  
  
• Microsoft appears to be claiming they're going to be bigger than Amazon AWS in three years ([1])
  
  
• But Amazon's Andy Jassy says, "One of the biggest surprises around this business has been how long it took the old guard companies to try and pursue an offering. None of us thought we would get a seven-year head start.” ([1])
  
  
• Apple is the iPhone ([1])
  
  
• Great article on the history of YouTube: "It's easy to forget YouTube almost didn't make it" ([1])
  
  
• Mobile ads still aren't targeted (unlike Web ads) ([1] [2])
  
  
• Browsers are disabling Java and Silverlight by default, and Flash's days might be numbered ([1])
  
  
• Surprising how few people use their mobile to get directions, look up public transit, or request a taxi ([1])
  
  
• A major predictor of how much people like a picture of a face is how sharp and clear the eyes are in the photo ([1])
  
  
• Successful tests of a bullet-sized guided missile, cool but very scary ([1] [2])
  
  
• "If an election was hacked any time in the past, we will never know" ([1])
  
  
• "Maybe this head-up display for your life starts as a head-up display for your car" ([1])
  
  
• Beginning of the end for radio: "Norway the first country in the world to 'decide upon an analogue switch-off for all major radio channels'" ([1])
  
  
• A new trend in biology, collecting large amounts of data and doing A/B testing ([1] [2])