One of the web’s master entrepreneurs has devised a novel way to expand his domain. Jeff Bezos explains how Amazon, already home to 59 million active customers worldwide, hopes to beguile increasing numbers of developers to use web services that the company evolved for its own operations.

Bezos’ plan involves renting out the “guts of Amazon” -- the servers and software code and networking behind the online shopping giant. He describes a trio of services. The first, Mechanical Turk, named for a 19th century chess automaton (actually run by a human) “makes it possible to encode human intelligence inside a software application,” Bezos informs us. At Amazon, Mechanical Turk employs simple software to allow individuals to “vote” on product detail pages to help eliminate duplicate images and products. Work traditionally done by an in-house unit can be performed by a distributed group of Internet users, at their own convenience and for little cost. Bezos is making this software routine available to outsiders now, for such applications as podcasting transcription.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) gives users access to Amazon’s massive data storage capacity for an annual subscription fee. For small businesses worried about buying up to the next level of server capacity, S3 provides a welcome alternative, with its multiple data centers and relatively low cost, says Bezos. Businesses can also take advantage of this same digital network, through Elastic Compute Cloud, to run applications. This “allows for elastic scaling up” of computing tasks, says Bezos. Many organizations need to test for bugs as they take applications to larger scales, and would prefer not to commit new resources if they don’t have to. They also may require only intermittent machine time. Amazon’s computers stand ready to serve, at 10 cents per CPU hour, and 20 cents per gigabyte of data transferred, says Bezos.

People are excited, says Bezos, “because they see a hint of what the future may be.” The reality of taking an idea to a successful product involves lots of obstacles -- what Bezos describes as “undifferentiated, heavy-lifting infrastructure.” This “muck” has to be of the highest quality, and often costs an arm and a leg. Amazon’s web-scale computing enables users “to get rid of as much of the muck as possible,” says Bezos.