I hope this isn’t getting too deep in the telephony weeds, but it strikes me as an under-reported development in the Recombinant Communications marketscape. Amazon, arguably the defining giant in Web-based retailing, has made impressive inroads into cloud-based e-commerce, where resources like “checkout”, “simple pay,” and “fulfillment” are extended to a broad spectrum of businesses through the cloud, where they reside with enhanced storage, security, database management and other Web services that can rival the likes of IBM, Microsoft, SalesForce.com and Oracle.

Optimization of EC2 to boost the performance of Asterisk seems to have begun in earnest roughly a year ago. Adding speech-enabled IVR using i6net’s beta program for testing VXI based VoiceXML scripts in EC2 began the following August. Apparently several applications have already moved into production. Thus we see RC on EC2 accelerating with the likes of i6net and Twilio leading the way.

The ideal proof points, as listed in the post, include “image and video processing, conversion and rendering; scientific research data processing; or financial modeling and analysis. However, my voice and mobile-oriented mind spins sees a mechanism for rate arbitrage when running a videoconference or Webcast; a source of call processing and media processing resources for “busy hour” in a customer care/collaboration session or other instances that are left to the imagination of the new generation of real-time, rich phone application developers.

The good news is that spot prices are often less than published rates. They are, in essence, loss leaders and ways for Amazon.com to make incremental revenue on unused capacity. The caveat is that, by design, “If you’re running Spot Instances and your maximum price no longer meets or exceeds the current Spot Price, your instances will be terminated.” So it isn’t the rock-solid, persistent connection that a company would want to make part of its critical path telephony.

This is a very promising development in the world of Recombinant Communications. Solutions providers and application developers have one more place to shop for affordable storage, computing, database management and queuing resources at the lowest price possible. It is an evolutionary step toward that will put pressure on alternative hosted service providers to become more fluid in how they price and offer resources on demand.

The other development is the exit of the url-shortener tr.im from a crowded niche that already includes tinyurl, snurl and a few others. Tr.im’s owners made no secret about the reason for its precipitous departure, explaining that “there is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.”

URL shortening services have occupied an interesting, but not vital, backwater of the Web navigation world. They emerged when e-mail clients – the first and foremost means of engaging in social media – had a bad habit of inserting line breaks when lengthy, embedded Web addresses “wrapped” across lines of text. They became much more important as SMS and then microblogs, like Twitter, constrained posts to 140 characters (including embedded links). That transformed the millions of microbloggers into link-shortening addicts as they embedded pointers to longer posts or articles of interest.

The addition of this type of meta-directory “on top of” or “in front of” the Web’s DNS (Domain Name System) has long had the seeds of disaster. As Bob Frankston pointed out in a recent e-mail “tiny URLs just compound the failure of the DNS – they should be used as a last resort and not a normal way to make the Internet unravel even faster.” Well the flurry of microblogging has had just the opposite effect and there will be more serious repercussions down the road as IP v6 brings the promise of an address on the Internet for just about everything that moves.

The Amazon.com/Target rift was inevitable, as the two firms discovered that they compete on several levels of their core retailing business. It is within Target’s right to shop around for other providers of pieces in the recombinant telephony and e-commerce puzzle. The shrunken URL issue is just beginning to surface and we look forward to our readers helping to figure out how to solve both the technological and business challenges posed by the need to provide abbreviated ways to provide pointers from short posts (including instant messages, SMS-text and microblog posts) to Web resources who’s addresses are bound to get longer, not shorter.

More to the point, eBay issued a letter to its customers saying that it was removing the Skype-based click-to-chat or click-to-talk buttons from their listings, effective June 10. EBay’s management cites “limited buyer and seller usage”. But it is more likely that the company, which derives significant revenue by taking a percentage of the value of transactions carried out through its resources, had no incentive to encourage interactions, and the subsequent transactions, to be carried out over a synchronous voice or text-chat conversations.

This should not be taken as a dismissal of voice communications (or chat for that matter) as a vital way for buyers and sellers to communicate in conjunction with Internet based commerce. The opposite is true. With the introduction of more robust IP-based telephony services and companies taking advantage of telephony APIs for e-commerce hosts (like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) we expect to see rapid-fire introduction of services that can quickly toggle from clicks to conversations.