HOUSTON, WE ARE READY FOR LIFT-OFF

June 27, 2006 at 3:36 pm | In Amazon, Startups, Web 2.0, beta test, gizmoojo, web2.0 | 8 Comments

After 4 days of non-stop coding and cracking, and eating and jumping, the moment has arrived. We are going into beta launch for gizmoojo.com. HEAD ON OUT BETA.GIZMOOJO.COM and sign up now. I am hoping we will not get any DIGG effect, like what DIGG did to itself when it launch DIGG3.0. Basically, they have so much hype that it was causing some serious strain on their servers. From the Digg blog

Digg v3 Status

(5:00AM PST): Digg temporarily down while we switch over to Digg v3.0.
(6:10AM PST): Digg v3 is live.
(6:20AM PST): Demand is so high we’re adding more machines.
(7:50AM PST): We are making a run to bestbuy to pick up some more servers (kidding). Seriously though: We are seeing much higher activity than we normally do, so bear with us as we turn on additional machines and tweak the site throughout the day.
(3:30PM PST): All is running fine. Digg on!

Really funny…. Mr Rose.. Although, on the back of my mind, if we ever got Digg, that would be such an honor…… but then that would render our service unavailable to the beta testers and that is something I hope would not be a major issue. Well, we’ll just have to see. Couple of points that I want to highlight, as you know Gizmoojo.com is about reviews, tech reviews.. so why not make a site that would benefit the reviewer that really work hard to share their knowledge and experience. So that is why we have the Gizmoojo adgent.

adgent_screen

The advertising adgents that runs the ADs on each Gizmoojo Page. What is cool about this is, if you signed up for an Amazon Associates Account, you can enter your Amazon Associate ID into your profile, and at the same time, enjoy some AJAX profile update…. Cool. ahh… and right now for the beta launch, you will get 100%, YES, 100% of the outward clicks to Amazon, so ALL the best.. since we will be revising that so we can earn some money to move on to bigger things for Gizmoojo.com. What I have in mind is a 50/50 split for outward clicks to Amazon once we are well away from Beta. So go ahead and gizmoojo away!

launchpic

Sued because you are using AWS?

June 16, 2006 at 8:17 pm | In Amazon, amazonecs, gizmoojo | Leave a Comment

As mentioned in my previous post, Gizmoojo.com has an Amazon ECS module used for runnning advertisments and stuff like that, so once in a while, I find myself going through the Amazon Web Service forum. One particular thread caught my attention and it goes like that " I'm being sued by Sony for displaying products from the web service". Going through the thread, I am totally amazed by what Sony is doing. Basically, they have engaged this law firm Ellis & Venable calling themselves Net Enforcers to protect their licensed trademarks, logos, and other copyrighted materials.
To me, this is just major silliness. Here you have a web site that is trying to push their products through the use of Amazon.com web service, definitely their authorized dealers, and there you have Sony, trying to stop these web shops from SELLING THEIR PRODUCTS. I must be missing something here… go figure…. corporate mess…..

The thread discussion is goes here, and the good thing is Amazon is now aware of this, from the users posting in the forum and they are taking care of this as we speak. Here's what the representative from Amazon posted:

It has come to our attention that some participants in the Amazon.com Associates Program have received letters from an entity called "Net Enforcers" or from a law firm working on behalf of Net Enforcers. In these letters, Net Enforcers allege that certain product images or other web site content violates their client's intellectual property rights. Some of you have received these letters because of images or other content that you receive from Amazon.com as a result of your participation in our Associates Program. We believe these claims regarding Amazon Web Services are simply wrong, and we are committed to working with you and Net Enforcers to help resolve these issues. If you would like Amazon.com to respond to Net Enforcers on your behalf, please contact us at aws@amazon.com, and include a copy of any letters you have received from Net Enforcers regarding Amazon.com content.

Thank you.

digg story

Ruby on Rails with Gizmoojo’s Amazon ECS module

March 27, 2006 at 9:09 pm | In Amazon, Ruby on Rails, amazonecs, gizmoojo | 10 Comments

Gizmoojo has a back end module that uses amazon web services and my previous post talks about how easy it was to use REST with AWS. This weekend was a fun one because I had actually written some code to use the amazonecs module that is going to drive some features of Gizmoojo. The amazonecs module is a Ruby class/module that I wrote to do backend work with Amazon Ecommerce Services (part of the Amazon web services). And of course, there is already Ruby/Amazon available but it's just wasn't what I was looking for ( I think it only works with Amazon ECS ver 3.0 and the current Amazon ECS is veriosn 4.0) plus I was looking for more "fun" in writing one up for Gizmoojo.

So I thought it would be nice to share a little bit of this. Now, I call this module "amazonecs" so in my rails controller, to do something with amazon web service is easy.

First of all you need to include the module in your controller rb file

include amazonecs

so for example if I wanna do a search on item using keyword/s all I need to do in the controller is as easy as that.

class AmazonSearchController < ApplicationController
def searchitem
mysearch = Amazonecs.new
@items = Array.new
@item = Electronics.new
keywords = ['ipod','speakers']
# 0 – amazon.com (us locale)
# "Medium" – SearchGroup

@items = mysearch.searchitem(0,"Electronics",keywords,"Medium")
if @items.nil?
#do your error handling or no results found.
else
@item.populate(@items[0])
end
end
end

And of course over at our AmazonSearch view for the searchitem.rhtml, I can get the information about the first item thru the attr_reader of the Electronics class.

Item ASIN : <%= @item.ASIN %> <br/>

Item Price: <%= @item.ListPrice %> <br/>

Click <a href="<%= @item.DetailURLPage %>">here</a> to see this item.

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