PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
Amazon has taken four websites to court to stop them posting paid-for positive product reviews, plus it has revealed its new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace for Desktop Apps.
The etail behemoth filed a complaint in King County Superior Court in Washington this week, saying that bogus online product reviews are misleading to its customers, and are generating improper profit for the review authors and dishonest sellers, reports Reuters.
The defendants include Jay Gentile who allegedly runs buyazonreviews.com, as well as unnamed operators of buyamazonreviews.com, bayreviews.net and buyreviewsnow.com.
"While small in number, these reviews threaten to undermine the trust that customers, and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers, place in Amazon, thereby tarnishing Amazon’s brand," the complaint said.
These fake reviews can apparently cost between $19 to $22 to create.
In other news, Amazon’s cloud arm Amazon Web Services has announced new offerings during its AWS Summit in San Francisco.
AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps is a new category on the AWS Marketplace that makes it easy to search for and buy desktop applications for Amazon WorkSpaces. Virtual desktop customers can choose from more than 100 applications in 11 categories, and pay monthly for the applications they use.
AWS also announced Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager (Amazon WAM), a new service that packages and delivers applications to Amazon WorkSpaces so that they that run as if they are natively installed, but are centrally controlled by IT administrators.
Launched in 2014, Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed desktop computing service in the cloud that gives end-users access to the documents from the device of their choice.
AWS also announced that enterprise tech partners MicroStrategy, Software AG, TIBCO and Onshape have joined other ISVs like Acquia, Emdeon and IMS Health who have chosen AWS as the core infrastructure platform that powers their SaaS solutions.
"As cloud computing becomes the new normal for IT, companies expect applications and software products to be consumable in the cloud – in a manner that is secure, always available, and accessible instantly from anywhere around the world. To serve these customer needs, ISVs require a cloud platform that has all of the infrastructure and platform services to support their current solutions as well as their future innovations," said Terry Wise, VP of worldwide partner ecosystem at AWS.
Finally, AWS announced Amazon Machine Learning, a managed service that aims to makes it easy for any developer to use historical data to build and deploy predictive models, for example detecting problematic transactions, preventing customer churn online and improving customer support.
It’s based on the same machine learning technology used by Amazon’s main retail website to generate customer predictions and display relevant products to them.
"Until now, very few developers have been able to build applications with machine learning capabilities because doing so required expertise in statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. Amazon Machine Learning makes machine learning broadly accessible to all software developers by abstracting away this complexity and automating these steps," said AWS in a statement.
