Posts filed under 'Deals'
As part of the Amazon Customer Vote deal ( cool concept by the way ), customers picked the $100 Xbox360. What should have been a nice PR move for Amazon and a good deal for 1000 customers, turned into a classic slashdot / digg effect ( crunchgear blog for details ). By that I mean an overload of traffic all trying to access the same site at the same time. Not only was the Xbox360 product page not available, but the whole Amazon.com site appeared to be down for several minutes costing the site untold revenue.
While not a remarkable event in itself — walmart.com and other sites have been down this holiday season — it is extra troubling to see Amazon go down as they are now touting their S3 platform for all kinds of services with a focus on reliability and uptime:
Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.
Scalable: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support an unlimited number of web-scale applications. It uses scale as an advantage: Adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness.
Failure tolerant: The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation, and continues operation with no or minimal interruption.
We’ll check back next week to see if this happens again with the next specially discounted Amazon offer. Right now the “Axion Portable DVD Player” is leading the vote :)
Technorati Tags: Xbox360, amazon, deals
November 25th, 2006
We posted earlier about our game rental research, and how we selected GameFly. Now for an update.
Two games shipped on Jan 3rd, 2006. They both arrived on Tues Jan 10th. Given that it was shipped in CA, and I live in NYC, I was expecting it to take about a week, and was not surprised that it arrived on the 10th.
The games arrived in nice red envelopes with GameFly branding. I didn’t have a chance to open them up when they first arrived, and when I returned home later that day I could not find them ! Turns out my wife mistook the envelopes for AOL CD junk mail and tossed them ! I was quickly able to retrieve them from the top of the kitchen garbage, but a warning to all of you out there, they do look very much like promotional / junk mail :) I also was concerned that since they were marked as coming from GameFly that they would be targets for mail theft.
Inside the envelopes were pre paid envelopes for shipping it back. No instructions are included for the game, but they do post all the info on the GameFly site (ex: PGR3 ) — which is a nice touch. I now also have the option to purchase the game for $44.95, which if I choose to do, GameFly will send me the original case and manual.
I’ll post another update once I get a few rounds in of returning and requesting other games.
January 13th, 2006
With games near $60 a pop, and a solid number of launch titles now available, I explored the option of renting games.
Doing some research, I looked at the new services that have popped up which essentially mirror what NetFlix has accomplished — the removal of ‘late fees’ with the adoption of a subscription service.
I looked at the following: Gamerang, GameFly, and GameLender.
Gamerang Pros: 4 shipping centers; California, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Minnesota. $9.95 trial month is a nice touch. Site is useful with features such as reviews & ratings, and an easy to use search
Gamerang Cons: I was all set to signup until I checked the game availabilities. Without exception every game I wanted had a wait time — meaning it would not ship out immediately. I was surprised to see this, and hope they can get their inventory up to a better level.
GameFly Pros: Easy to use site. Trial offer for $14.95 is a good thing. All the games I was looking for were in stock and ready to ship. Prices to purchase/keep the games are competively priced ( FIFA 2006 for $44.95 and PGR3 for $38.99 — keep in mind these are pre-owned)
GameFly Cons: Only west coast location, so shipping to the east coast could take an extra day or two. Not the cheapest of the services I looked at.
GameLender Pros: Strong reviews online from fellow gamers, good selection, competitive pricing
GameLender Cons: Web site appears to be a bit out of date ( copyright still has 2004 ), shipping from the west coast, and no clear pricing that I could see if you wanted to keep the game.
In the end I chose GameFly. Two games are being shipped as we speak, so I’ll post a review of the overall experience once I’m a few cycles into this subscription.
Agree or diagree ? Got a service that’s even better ? Please let me know in the comments field below.
xbox360, gamerang, gamefly, gamelender, video game rental
January 3rd, 2006
If you absolutely had to have an Xbox 360 this holiday season, you probably either stood in line for hours outside your local Best Buy, or paid 4X on eBay ! With inventory levels still relatively low most major retailers aren’t promising much until the end of January. But for those who want a few games, and maybe an extra controller, there are ‘bundles’ that can be found right now.
A couple of sites are pinging all the major off-line and online retailers looking for these bundles — and I’ve monitored them and have seen these ‘bundles’ pop up as a few times a day. Definitely worth checking out:
Gamermill: http://www.gamermill.com/thelist.php
Xbox.Clambert.org: http://xbox.clambert.org/
Good luck, and feel free to leave any tips in the comment field.
Technorati Tags: xbox360, ebay, hdtv, bundles
December 29th, 2005