Amazon launched S3 in mid March and yesterday claimed to manage over 800 millions data objects. It is indeed a successful and quick start. I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick that, besides being a good business model, services like S3 are also a key factor for innovation. They make true the dream of a solo developer able to deploy an AJAX application to the web without worrying about how to scale it out, if it becomes popular.

Today’s mail servers, file servers and other data storage servers typically must be fully trusted since they have complete access to your data and are supposed not to reveal them without your authorization.

During the last months several laptop thefts made the news. Kevin Costner’s case did some noise, but the loss of pictures from his wedding was hardly something to raise a general privacy concern. Then came Ernst &Young with four stolen laptops and thousands of personal data records exposed. Few weeks later Boeing revelead that a second laptop has been lifted containing the names, social security numbers and other sensitive information of thousands of current and former employees.

Aaron Levie invited Clipperz to an early preview of a revamped version of Box.net, an online storage service. I played with the new Box.net for a couple of days and the overall impression is quite positive. I’m happy they dropped all the references to “documents”, “music” and “photos” from the menus, it was just confusing and added nothing to the functionalities.