Weekly roundup

These are the headlines that caught my attention this past week:

• IBM launches AMZN AMIs. Glad to see IBM move in this direction. Customers will still need to have their own licenses but the provisioning and setup should be much faster. This would have been very handy for a former customer of mine in the automotive industry. We had a 45 day project delay because the production server was not ready.
• Experian launches QAS Pro On Demand, address verification and standardization on demand. I am a big fan of on demand data quality/enhancement services. In house solutions could be very expensive and cumbersome to put together. 
• YHOO announces pricing structure for BOSS. I am all for this because nothing can be free forever. I hope other vendors follow suit and charge users for extended use of their services. I also wish everybody offered (AMZN AWS) offered a limited set of services at no charge.
• The New York Times "big" API is now available: 2.8 million articles from 1981 to date.