Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.

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One programming tactic is called messaging, which involves electronic documents from a Web service to a queue that then processes each message in periodic batches.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Because Apple has become the leading seller of Hollywood TV shows (followed by the recently launched Xbox Live video service), consumers can queue up TV shows or movie purchases and have them delivered to the big screen.

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Others complained to BBC News Online that they spent more than half an hour in a queue for the technical help line of the Genie Wap service - a premium rate call costing 50p a minute when accessed on a normal telephone landline.

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Blockbuster has moved to counter the threat from Netflix, which mails movies to customers who queue up their orders online, with a Web-based service of its own.

FORBES: Chief Executive Steve Jobs

After all, fast service was supposed to go with fast life and fast food, even if you had to queue up at the check-out counter.

ECONOMIST: Lord Sainsbury