Articles about Amazon

Amazon began shipping its seven-inch Kindle Fire HDX back on October 18, going directly after the Google Nexus for supremacy of the low-price tablet market. Now the company follows up by announcing that the larger version is heading out the door today.

The 8.9-inch Fire HDX weighs in at 13.2 ounces, which Amazon claims makes it "the lightest large-screen tablet". It also features a 339 ppi display, and boasts three times the processing power, two times the memory and four times the graphics performance of the previous generation. Fire OS 3.0, the new mobile operating system, also features a "mayday" button -- for those in need of a bit of hand-holding.

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Amazon Web Services quietly released on Tuesday a pair of new instances on its EC2 cloud computing service. Not just new instances but a whole new type of instance aimed at 2D and 3D graphical computing. For the first time from AWS in a generally available instance, developers and users will have access to virtual machines with GPUs.

It’s like putting a PC in the cloud. More properly it is like putting your PC in the cloud. I think this has great disruptive potential. And that means we’ll see similar services coming soon from other cloud providers.

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Amazon Prime, at least the video arm of it, has been rolling along and seemingly gaining momentum recently. New original content has debuted, with some shows picked up for a season run, and more are currently in the pipeline. However, finding this menu of new videos has not always been easy, save when the company displays links on its homepage.

Rather than relying on a fortunate link or a search of the content, Amazon is giving viewers an option to fast-forward straight to what's new, and do so ahead of your friends.

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The Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the FAA, has lifted the last of its device restrictions, allowing people to finally use electronic devices during takeoff and landing. The ruling went into effect last week, with Delta being the first airline to allow passengers the privilege.

"We've been fighting for our customers on this issue for years, and we are thrilled by the FAA's recent decision -- this is a big win for customers. Delta and JetBlue have already started flights with the new rules -- we're excited to see which airlines are next", said Drew Herdener, vice president of Amazon.

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When it comes to reading, I use a Kindle PaperWhite. I hate paper books with a passion -- they take up space and are obsolete. The Kindle is wonderful because it allows me to easily bookmark pages, look up definitions, and scan the book for certain words with the x-ray feature. An Amazon Prime membership enhances the Kindle experience by letting the user "borrow" a book from among 350,000 choices.

Today, Amazon announces Kindle First , a new program that gets unreleased books into the hands of readers before the official release date. This is not just a few days either, it can be up to a month early. This will give Kindle owners extreme bragging-rights in the book-club community. I can already picture pretentious people sitting in Starbucks saying  "oh, that book is so last month".

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Amazon has continued to roll out its Cloud Player application with the release of Amazon Cloud Player for Mac 2.0 (despite the version number, this is the first release on the Mac platform). The new player is practically identical to the Windows build, which debuted in May.

Amazon Cloud Player, also available for iOS and Android, allows Amazon users to access all music stored in its Cloud Player service.

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It has been nearly two months since online retail giant Amazon announced its MatchBook feature for Kindle, complimenting the previously unveiled Autorip service for music. Now, the company finally shows the feature the light of day, unveiling MatchBook availability effective today.

If you aren't familiar, MatchBook for Kindle provides customers with the opportunity to purchase a Kindle version of any book already bought through Amazon in physical form. You could, of course, do this previously, but only by paying full price for each copy. With MatchBook, prices range from free up to $2.99 for the digital version.

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Amazon Prime today continues its battle with Netflix and Redbox Instant, in a fight to get control of that monthly fee you lay out in the name of entertainment. This time the retail giant strikes with a new agreement between it and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio to expand availability of content.

The company brought the hit series Vikings to its British and German viewers through LOVEFiLM back in May, but those who failed to watch season one in the US can now also catch up with Ragnor and his crew.

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It has been almost a month since Amazon unveiled its Kindle Fire HDX tablets and began thrusting them in consumer's faces via its homepage. While its been long enough for this tablet model to seem the new norm, Amazon was not actually shipping the devices, but that changes now.

The seven-inch Amazon Kidle Fire HDX begins shipping today, coming along with the latest version of Fire OS 3.0, known as "Mojito". Amazon promises "a beautiful 323 ppi perfect-color HDX display, 3x the processing power, 2x the memory, 4x the graphics performance, and Fire OS 3.0, we think customers are going to love the new Kindle Fire HDX", according to Peter Larsen, Vice President of Amazon Kindle.

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We've grown rather accustomed to logging into web sites through the use of other services, most notably Facebook and Twitter. Now retail giant Amazon is stepping into the ring, and adding a financial twist to the concept.

Today the online behemoth announces its new "Login and Pay with Amazon" service, aimed at allowing "participating companies to empower customers to go from browsing to buying in just a few clicks using their Amazon account information".

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Amazon has been busy producing original content to bolster its Prime streaming video service, releasing 14 shows for testing back in April and letting the viewers decide which would stick. Now the Studio arm of the retail giant is announcing three more shows going into pilot production.

Mozart in the Jungle from Roman Coppola, The Outlaws written by Jeremy Garelick and Jon Weinbach, and Transparent from director Solloway are all heading for filming.

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Microsoft held an event in NYC to launch the Surface 2 and Brian was live-blogging. The full video of the launch is available to view online as are advertisements that show off the tablets' versatility. Microsoft is pinning a lot on the updated product after the first generation suffered from poor sales. There were no great new features, but there is a redesigned kickstand, a healthy speed boost, new dock and updated covers -- Brian was particularly impressed by the Blades.

Anyone buying a Surface 2 or Surface Pro 2 earns themselves a SkyDrive upgrade. Purchase a new device and your online storage gets upgraded to 200GB, but the same amount of space is available for $100 per year. Moving away from Surface-related news, Microsoft turned its guns on Google Docs, highlighting user complaints to demonstrate the superiority of Office 365.

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Earlier today we reported on Amazon's launch of three all-new Kindle Fires. Thanks to the introduction of improved enterprise and productivity features in Fire OS 3.0, Amazon hopes to make the latest Fire HD and HDX more attractive to BYOD and business users.

"Kindle Fire is already the second most popular tablet at work in the US," says Raghu Murthi, Vice President of Enterprise and Education at Amazon. "As employees increasingly bring their own devices to work, the new Kindle Fire tablets can be easily integrated into the workplace with the new enterprise features, including encryption, secure Wi-Fi, a native VPN client, integration with leading MDM solutions, and Kerberos support for Intranet access".

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It’s all about tablets this week as following on from Microsoft’s Surface reveal, Amazon today announces three new Kindle Fires -- the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, and the Kindle Fire HDX, in 7 and 8.9-inch sizes. The new devices offer a slimmer design, better screens, faster hardware and an updated OS.

The $139 Kindle Fire HD has a high-definition display with 1280 by 800 resolution and 216ppi -- 66 percent more pixels than the previous generation Kindle Fire. It’s powered by a dual-core 1.5 GHz processor, and has dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus audio.

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Many of novelist Stephen King's books and short stories have found their way to the screen either through a movie or mini-series. Some, like The Shining, have become classics in the eyes of fans, while others...well... This season a King novel has returned the author to prominence on the small screen -- Under the Dome has been the most watched show of the summer season.

Now Amazon and CBS announce that the streaming deal that was in place for season one has been renewed. "Prime Instant Video will remain the exclusive online subscription home for Under the Dome. Amazon Prime members will have unlimited streaming of all the series' episodes four days after their initial broadcast on CBS and will be able to enjoy them on hundreds of compatible Amazon Instant Video devices including Kindle Fire HD, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Roku, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and the Wii U gaming console" reads a joint statement issued by the two parties.

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