Had reason to sign up for an Amazon S3 account yesterday to use as a download area for the anticipated spike in traffic to our project in the very near term. Was amazed that:the following set of steps worked so amazingly well:
– the site had me give it some info, including a phone number
– site told me it was going to call, and that I need to punch in a pin # it put up on the screen there
– I got an automated phone call and entered that pin
– as soon as I got off the phone, the site updated itself to say that it was creating my S3 account structure.

Amazing! Web site synched with autodial phone system which (I think) had its message crafted based on my info which then synched back to the web site’s back-end server to do finish processing and do a server push out to the site itself saying that the transaction had completed. Excellent user experience: no time lapses seen and my account got created seamlessly. Very cool use of multiple technologies, done breezily on the part of Amazon.