Amazon web services are cool because they let individuals do things that previously were impossible. They are working their hardest to break down the barrier of entry to many different software projects. For instance, they let you leverage their web crawlers and web searchers. Mechanical Turk is also quite cool. You can enlist the human web to complete tasks for you. here and here are good examples. Putting humans behind robotic tasks is interesting. Putting robots behind human tasks is also cool.