Amazon Bridges Troubled Waters

During the fourth quarter, Amazon stepped up its efforts to take advantage of its massive investments in technology infrastructure.

Power Points

Though necessary for peak times and future growth, most of Amazon's storage and computing power largely goes untapped. But Amazon is pioneering a way to take advantage of its excess technology capacity -- the case at most large Internet companies -- through a pair of initiatives aimed at small businesses.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service sells empty space on the company's sea of servers to start-ps such as ElephantDrive, and its Elastic Compute Cloud 2 platform sells the latent computing power in the company's technology grid to another start-up, Powerset, a high-profile search company that aims to outdo Google.

In November, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos graced the cover of BusinessWeek and took the stage at prominent technology conferences to plug the services, likely a considerable focus for the company.

Although the new services may not constitute a major strategic effort for Amazon just yet, they could go a long way in alleviating one of the company's big headaches down the road.

"Our biggest cost is not power or servers or people. It's lack of [computing infrastructure] utilization. It dominates all other costs," Bezos said in November.

Progress on Amazon's Unbox service, which lets users download videos, will likely also be featured. The service was criticized for its glitches and slow speeds when it debuted in November, and evidence of real progress in the demanding endeavor will reflect well on the company's technical prowess.

Along with a bullish report for its highly profitable retail business, a healthy progress report on some of Amazon's more daring ventures should render investors more confident that the company knows what it's doing -- even if they don't initially agree.