Amazon CTO Vogels Plays with Internet Building Blocks in the Cloud

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO and Information Week’s 2009 Chief of the Year, gave a keynote here at The Next Web Conference about the “The Future Building Blocks of the Internet”.

According to Vogels, in Q1 2010, Amazon Web Services served over 100 billion objects. “If you go to a VC and say you aren’t using the scale of these services they will think your head is not on right”.

Vogels insists that in the future, all apps will need to include a core set of functionalities: rich media experience; multi-device access; location context aware; real-time presence driven; social graph based; user generated content; virtual goods economy; recommendations; integrated with social networks; and advertisement and premium support.

“Think of it as an international startup competition where I choose the winners.” Vogels went through a number of infrastructure cloud-based services including Drop.io (file sharing), Panda (security), SimpleGeo (location), Animoto (video), Twilio (VoIP), Echo (real-time conversation), Amazon Mechanical Turk (crowdsourced human labor), Social Gold (virtual currency), Charify (payments), OpenX (advertising), 80Legs and github (development).

Vogels concluded by saying that all apps need to “have a lot of stuff” – basically, all apps need to include many if not all of the above functionalities offered in the above or similar services.