Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Adam D Bradley

James Cleveland Willeford

Nicole A Deflaux

Vidya V Iyer

Peter D Cohen

Ranganath Atreya

John B Bravenec

Anand Chelian

Glenn A Dierkes

Jessica C Locke

Techniques are described for facilitating performance of tasks supplied by task requesters, such as by a task exchange server interacting with mobile task performer users available to perform tasks at various geographical locations. Some or all of the tasks may each be associated with geographical locations and/or other device-related criteria related to the performance of the task, and one or more mobile task performer users may be identified as being appropriate to perform the task based on the location of, qualifications of, and/or characteristics of mobile device(s) of the user. Such identified task performer users may then be notified of such appropriate tasks in various ways, such as by sending one or more electronic messages with information about the tasks to one or more mobile devices of the users, and may in some situations use one or more of their mobile devices as part of the task performance.

Controlling performance of location-based tasks by mobile task performers

Techniques are described for facilitating access of users to tasks that are available to be performed, such as via a task exchange system that serves as an intermediary to facilitate performance by some task performer users of tasks supplied by other task requester users. The techniques may include automatically providing a particular group of task performer users with access to a supply of available tasks that are appropriate for those task performer users, such as based on an aggregate probability or other likelihood measure that the task performer users as a group will collectively accept to perform those tasks in a specified manner. More generally, the affinity and/or appropriateness of a group of users to perform one or more tasks may be based on various information related to the users, including past task performance behavior of those users, and/or qualifications or more general reputational aspects of those users.

Providing access to tasks that are available to be performed

Techniques are described for facilitating interactions between task requesters who have tasks that are available to be performed and task performers who are available to perform tasks, such as by an intermediary electronic marketplace or other task fulfillment facilitator system. In some situations, task performer users and/or other users may create task subscriptions for use in automatically identifying tasks of interest to the users about which the users desire to receive notification. The users may be notified of the identified tasks in various ways, such as by sending electronic messages of various types to the users that include indications of the tasks identified for those users based on their subscriptions. Tasks of interest may be identified in various ways, such as based on task attributes of interest specified for a subscription that are later matched against tasks that are available at the time of the matching.

Identifying tasks for task performers based on task subscriptions

Techniques are described for managing the release of tasks so that the tasks are available for performance, such as for tasks submitted by task requesters to be performed by human task performer users, or the release of other types of items as being available for use. In some situations, the managed release of tasks is based at least in part on determining one or more desired task performance characteristic values, and predicting appropriate values for one or more performance-related factors that will produce the determined desired task performance characteristic values. As one example, a determined target quantity of tasks to make concurrently available may be determined that will result in a desired level of task performance contention, such as based on expected or actual values for a rate of task performance and a duration of possible contention.

Automatically controlling availability of tasks for performance by human users

Techniques are described for providing enhanced access to stored data and related functionality, such as data stored by a system across multiple alternative storage partitions. At least some of the stored data may be specific to particular users who interact with the system, such as for users to perform tasks supplied by other users. The enhanced data access techniques may include storing at least a subset of each user's associated data on a single storage partition, and then efficiently identifying the storage partition corresponding to a user so that requests from that user may be handled by a computing node associated with that corresponding storage partition. Furthermore, additional data access enhancement techniques may relate to initially identifying an appropriate storage partition for a user and/or for migrating existing user data to a new partition identified as being appropriate for a user.

Providing enhanced access to stored data

A scalable data store framework is provided to migrate data across partitions in a data store without compromising data availability for customers. The scalable data store framework includes one or more partitions configured to manage a set of 'entities' for a network-based service. When a new-partition event is detected, a target partition is identified for bifurcation and various additional partitions are added to the data store. After the target partition is replicated into the additional partitions, some entities associated with the target partition are migrated to the additional partitions in order to maintain good load balance in the data store.

Data store replication for entity based partition

Facilitating performance of submitted tasks by mobile task performers

Techniques are described for storing and accessing data on heterogeneous types of data repositories, such as by a distributed software system that uses multiple data repositories on multiple computing nodes, including to transfer groups of data between multiple heterogeneous types of data repositories. In some situations, the techniques may be used by a system that stores various types of data regarding users or other entities that are modeled by the system, such as to transfer a group of data that represents an entity. The transfer of data may be facilitated by use of an abstraction interface that provides a uniform interface for accessing the multiple data repository types, such as an abstraction interface provided by one or more storage management components that further provide functionality to translate data between various data formats used by the multiple data repository types, such as via use of a common data format.

Growing community of inventors

Seattle, WA, United States of America

Adam D Bradley