Amazon has been doing things smart for a long time now. It survived the first dot com bubble. It has a successful electronic book reader, the Kindle. Now it will let you use its payment services.

Check out by Amazon is the new service highlighted in the NYTimes today and it comes with 81 million users! Plus, you can use its one-click feature, tax and shipping calculator and shipment tracking. All contained within an interface that people know and like.

I like the sound of this and it really could work where the same attempt by Google failed. But there's more: Amazon Simple Pay. This service could rival PayPal, which I certainly welcome. PayPal can be a bother to use.

Here are all the details on Checkout by Amazon and the Amazon Simple Pay widgets. These are just two in what is becoming a very complete offering of services to web-based business and software developers.

How would a Revolution developer use these services? One of the simplest ways to do this would be to embed the RevBrowser control in your payment stack and just use web pages. You can also use web services via the URL library and do all the UI yourself with native Rev objects.

Since getting paid is a big deal, these new Amazon payment offerings are a big deal.

Today there's an article in the New York Times that re-hashes the old intelligent agent / personal assistant software dream. However, this time there's a new wrinkle: using web services and possibly even EXISTING web services mashed up into a single user experience (app).

Using APIs for existent web services (like Basecamp, Backpack or iContact) is an approach we're now exploring within the Built-in-Rev Rev Mentor project.

Here's the money quote from the NYT article:

“This is the connective tissue that sits on top of the Web and brings you more than the sum of the parts,” he said. “I set out to deliver on the longstanding ‘holy grail of user-centric computing,’ a ‘personal Internet assistant.’”

He promises to bring together all of the discrete online services needed for business travel that are now separate — for starters, travel, airport parking, car services, dining reservations, entertainment tickets, package delivery and video conferences.

Click here or the image above to read the whole story.

Today there's an article in the New York Times that re-hashes the old intelligent agent / personal assistant software dream. However, this time there's a new wrinkle: using web services and possibly even EXISTING web services mashed up into a single user experience (app).

Using APIs for existent web services (like Basecamp, Backpack or iContact) is an approach we're now exploring within the Built-in-Rev Rev Mentor project.

Here's the money quote from the NYT article:

“This is the connective tissue that sits on top of the Web and brings you more than the sum of the parts,” he said. “I set out to deliver on the longstanding ‘holy grail of user-centric computing,’ a ‘personal Internet assistant.’”

He promises to bring together all of the discrete online services needed for business travel that are now separate — for starters, travel, airport parking, car services, dining reservations, entertainment tickets, package delivery and video conferences.

Click here or the image above to read the whole story.