Today, they’ve announced that AutoRip is extending its reach to vinyl.

“Starting today, when customers purchase an AutoRip vinyl record, a digital copy of that music will be automatically added to their Cloud Player libraries where it will be available, free of charge, for immediate playback or download. Customers no longer need to go through the hassle of making a digital copy of a vinyl record,” says Amazon.

One of the cool things about AutoRip is that it’s retroactive. Meaning, any CD or vinyl record that you’ve purchased since 1998 (as long as its AutoRip compatible) is instantly added to your Cloud Player.

It’s currently available for over 50,000 albums.

“AutoRip has been wildly popular with customers since it launched earlier this year,” said Steve Boom, Vice President of Digital Music for Amazon. “It’s a fun experience to suddenly find CDs you purchased just today – or 15 years ago -added automatically and free of charge to your digital library. We’re thrilled to extend this experience to vinyl records. Many of our music customers are vinyl fans and it’s traditionally been very difficult to make digital versions of vinyl records – now customers can enjoy the albums they buy wherever they are, not just when they have access to a record player.”

Clearly, Amazon’s goal in providing this service is to incentivize physical music sales, while also promoting use of their Cloud Player. Having digital copies of the music may not be a must for all vinyl collectors, but I don’t think anyone is going to scoff at the idea of free, retroactive MP3 copies of everything they buy.

[Image via Nina, Flickr]

67-year-old William Albaugh was arrested and released on $75,000 bond after police found underage porn images and videos on his Verizon cloud backup as well as on numerous thumb drives in his home. Police confiscated two storage units, a laptop, and an iPad as well.

According to police, there is no evidence that any children at St. Joseph’s church were victims.

Albaugh reportedly told police that he has been viewing child pornography since the 1970s, but was in no way involved with any of the porn’s creation.

Albaugh had been a deacon at the church since 1996, but the archdiocese has confirmed that he has been suspended.

The police were first tipped to Albaugh’s child pornography collection when Verizon notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Verizon said that they had detected the images and videos stored on his Verizon Online Backup and Sharing account.

[Baltimore Sun via Ars Technica]

“While you can go to Stack Overflow or Google Groups, we realize some of you may need 24×7 coverage, phone support or direct access to a Technical Account Manager team,” says Brett McCully from Google’s Cloud Platform team.

There are four tiers:

• Bronze: All customers get access to online documentation, community forums, and billing support. (Free)
• Silver: In addition to Bronze, you can email our support team for questions related to product functionality, best practices, and service errors. ($150/month)
• Gold: In addition to Silver, you’ll receive 24×7 phone support and consultation on application development, best practices or architecture for your specific use case. (Starts at $400/month)
• Platinum: The most comprehensive and personalized support. In addition to Gold, you’ll get direct access to a Technical Account Manager team. (Contact Sales for more information)

Here’s another way to look at it:

More info here.

Amazon announced today that any AWS customer can now launch a Redshift cluster from within the AWS management console. Customers can start with a few hundred terabytes, and then scale up to a petabyte or more. Redshift costs under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

“When we set out to build Amazon Redshift, we wanted to leverage the massive scale of AWS to deliver ten times the performance at 1/10 the cost of on-premise data warehouses in use today,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, Amazon Web Services. “With order of magnitude improvements in price/performance, Amazon Redshift makes big data analytics accessible to more people, allowing large organizations to analyze more of their data and smaller ones to afford fast, scalable data warehousing technology. We are delighted by the excitement from our preview customers as they’ve experienced the performance improvement and lower costs that Amazon Redshift delivers.”

During its time in preview, Redshift proved to be popular among various small businesses and large organizations that leveraged the power of Amazon’s servers. Many of the reviews praise the speed and ease of use in using Redshift, while others say it has saved them countless dollars by moving massive datastores off of their own servers and onto Amazon’s.

Those interested in Amazon Redshift, or AWS in general, can hit up the Web site. Just know that Redshift is currently only available on Amazon’s U.S. East servers in Virginia. It will be rolling out to other AWS locations in the coming months.

We’re talking about Amazon “AutoRip,” a new service that gives customers MP3 versions of any CDs they purchase on Amazon. When a customer purchased a CD that’s AutoRip eligible, Amazon throws the corresponding MP3s onto their Cloud Player library. It all takes place automatically and for free.

And Amazon says that AutoRip is retroactive. If you’re purchased an AutoRip CD any time between now and 1998, you can expect MP3 version of those CDs to be waiting for you in your Cloud Player library.

“What would you say if you bought music CDs from a company 15 years ago, and then 15 years later that company licensed the rights from the record companies to give you the MP3 versions of those CDs… and then to top it off, did that for you automatically and for free?” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “Well, starting today, it’s available to all of our customers – past, present, and future – at no cost. We love these opportunities to do something unexpected for our customers.”

Every AutoRip MP3 is stored in your Cloud Player library but doesn’t count against the storage limits. The AutoRip MP3s will be rendered in 256 Kbps.

“AutoRip is available for industry-wide top-sellers like ’21′ by Adele; new and recent releases like ‘¡Uno!’, ‘¡Dos!’ and ‘¡Tre!’ by Green Day, ‘Overexposed’ by Maroon 5, and ‘The Truth About Love’ by P!nk; classics like ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by Pink Floyd and ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson; and Amazon customer favorites like ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ by Susan Boyle, which was the most pre-ordered album of all time on Amazon,” they say.

AutoRip is currently available on 50,000+ albums. If you want to know if a CD is AutoRip compatible before you buy, just look for the AutoRip logo on the page.

Sure, it’s not a huge breakthrough – and CD sales will continue to decline even if digital copies are part of the deal. But by putting users’ MP3s in Amazon’s Cloud Player automatically, the company is increasing the chances that users will stick to Amazon for their streaming desires (and forgo iTunes or Google Play).

Financial details of the purchase have yet to be made available.

“Since 1999, Shutterfly has made it easier for consumers to be more creative with their memories,” said Jeffrey Housenbold, president and CEO of Shutterfly. “The combination of ThisLife’s best in class cloud organization and storage solution with Shutterfly’s award-winning product creation paths, uniquely positions Shutterfly to be the leading full service solution for storing, organizing, and sharing life most important memories.”

According to Shutterfly, they will begin to incorporate ThisLife’s organizational technology into their service in the coming months.

“Consumers will be able to safely and easily preserve, organize and share their memories, regardless of where photos are stored — from Facebook to Picasa to mobile phones. ThisLife’s intelligent organization platform offers features like facial recognition and presents photos and albums in an elegant timeline for convenient sharing and product creation,” says the company in a release.

Shutterfly with absorb ThisLife’s team, including the site’s co-founders Andrea and Matt Johnson.

Shutterfly’s umbrella covers other popular services like Tiny Prints, Wedding Paper Divas, and Treat.

The coalition has started a campaign to “remove the need for ‘paper’ from paperwork,” and will be promoting this initiative throughout the year via email and other unspecified activities.

“According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the average US office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year,” the coalition says on its about page. “In 2010, the amount of paper recovered for recycling averaged 334 pounds for each person living in the US, according to the American Forest & Paper Association.”

Google has its own blog post about its participation in the coalition.

“Google Drive makes it easy to keep all your stuff in the cloud and access it anywhere — so you don’t have to carry around paper copies wherever you go,” says product marketing manager Meredith Blackwell. “There are also other great apps that can help you get things done in the cloud – no printer required. This year, Google Drive is part of the Paperless Coalition, a group of organizations and products that help you live completely in a paper-free world. So whether you’re an expense reporter, invoice tracker, file hoarder, or note jotter, you can do it all without using paper.”

The Paperless2013.org site has a pledge that you can sign (electronically) and commit to going paperless, should you choose to do so.

This is the order in which the talks took place.

You can see more videos from the conference, including those from other companies here.

Eloqua provides cloud-based marketing automation and revenue performance management solutions, and Oracle says its “modern marketing cloud” ensures that “every component of marketing” helps to drive revenue more efficiently.

Oracle says the combination of the two companies will create a comprehensive “Customer Experience Cloud”.

“Modern marketing practices are driving revenue growth and is a critical area of investment for companies today,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “Eloqua’s leading marketing automation cloud will become the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud and is an important addition to the Oracle Customer Experience offering, which includes the Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Commerce Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle Content Cloud and Oracle Social Cloud.”

Eloqua Chairman and CEO Joe Payne said, “Exceptional customer experience starts with knowing your customer’s preferences and delivering a highly personalized buying experience. Together with Oracle, we expect to accelerate the pace of the modern marketing revolution and help our customers transform the way they market, sell, support and serve their customers.”

Oracle expects the deal to close in the first half of next year. It’s already been approved by Eloqua’s board, though it’s still subject to stockholder approval.

Earlier this week, Oracle posted its earnings for its second fiscal quarter ended November 30, beating analysts expectations, and showing “a growing acceptance” of the Cloud, according to the Wall Street Journal.

According to Amazon, it enables customers to “dramatically” increase the speed of query performance when analyzing any size data set, with the same SQL-based BI tools they’re already using.

“With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes and scaling to a petabyte or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte per year – one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to customers today,” the company said in an announcement.

Amazon Web Services VP of Database Services, Raju Gulabani, said, “Over the past two years, one of the most frequent requests we’ve heard from customers is for AWS to build a data warehouse service. Enterprises are tired of paying such high prices for their data warehouses and smaller companies can’t afford to analyze the vast amount of data they collect (often throwing away 95% of their data). This frustrates customers as they know the cloud has made it easier and less expensive than ever to collect, store, and analyze data.”

“Amazon Redshift not only significantly lowers the cost of a data warehouse, but also makes it easy to analyze large amounts of data very quickly,” he added. “While actual performance will vary based on each customers’ specific query requirements, our internal tests have shown over 10 times performance improvement when compared to standard relational data warehouses. Having the ability to quickly analyze petabytes of data at a low cost changes the game for our customers.”

Participants in the private beta program include Netflix, Flipboard, NASA/JPL and Schumacher Group.

Kurt Brown, Director of Data Science & Engineering Platform at Netflix, said, “At Netflix, we deliver personalized recommendations for our millions of subscribers by analyzing large volumes of data, and are always looking for ways to improve our service. We’re very excited about the cost-disruptive and cloud-based model of Amazon Redshift. It’s sure to shake up the data warehousing industry.”

Erik Selberg, Manager of the Amazon.com Data Warehouse team, added, “The Amazon Enterprise Data Warehouse manages petabytes of data for every group at Amazon. We are seeing significant performance improvements leveraging Amazon Redshift over our current multi-million dollar data warehouse. Some multi-hour queries finish in under an hour, and some queries that took 5-10 minutes on our current data warehouse are now returning in seconds with Amazon Redshift. Early estimates show the cost of Amazon Redshift will be well under 1/10th the cost of our existing solution. Amazon Redshift is providing us with a cost-effective way to scale with our growing data analysis needs.”

Amazon reportedly also announced today that it has dropped the pricing for its S3 storage service by about 25%

Earlier this week, Google announced some new features, lower prices and extended data center accessibility for its cloud platform, including a price reduction for its Cloud Storage offering, and the introduction of a limited preview of Durable Reduced Availability storage, which provides a lower price storage option for users. More on all of that here.