Founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, talks about cloud computing at "Startup School 2008". Cloud computing refers to companies outsourcing their computational "heavy lifting" to Amazon's servers. Bezos summarizes the various paid web services that Amazon provides that enable companies to utilizes Amazon's server for computational and data storage purposes.

Amazon.com started as an online book retailer. As the chart the Bezos showed, although the bandwidth usage for Amazon's retails side is rising, the bandwidth usage for Amazon's web services is rising even faster. This is an indication of how the industry is trending. He also gave several examples of how companies are using Amazon's web services.

Bezos makes that analogy that in history's past large companies such as beer maker have their own generator to generate their own electricity to run their beer brewing machines. Of course, companies no longer do this since we get electricity from the grid. Similarly, now companies maintain their own servers and handle their own computational resources. But in the future there will be an industry where companies use servers and computational resources via internet web services calls to servers that are "in the cloud".

Bezos allocated a lot of time after the talk to answer questions and the audience readily asked some great questions. In response to the question as to how Amazon came up with the idea of providing computation resources to developers and companies, Bezos responded by saying that Amazon at first had enough internal issues that they built this infrastructure for its own internal use. Then naturally, it occur to them that this services would be useful to others as well.