Articles about Amazon

The holidays seem to get earlier every year, with retailers like Wal-Mart rolling out its Christmas decorations before the leaves have even begun to change. With Halloween now behind us and Thanksgiving approaching, Internet retail giant Amazon has gone a step further by bringing early Black Friday deals to customers.

The company today unveiled its Black Friday Deals web site, complete with a Daily Deal starting today. In addition to those daily deals, there is a long list of products being offered at deep discounts, from cameras to toys to computers, and even kitchenware. The store kicked off with a discount of up to 65% on Joss Whedon DVD's including such popular titles as Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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This morning Amazon quietly pushed out a brand new app designed to let Android devices interface with their popular Cloud Drive storage service. Amazon, of course, has a horse in this race with their Kindle Fire HD tablets that have seen increased sales in recent days, ironically at what appears to be Apple's expense. The app is specifically designed for photos, so let's take a walk though and see what it can do.

First, it's a free install and is available from both Google Play and the Amazon AppStore for Android. Once you have downloaded it to your device you are presented with a sign-in screen that requires you to have, or create, an Amazon account, which is something that the vast majority of people probably already have anyway. Users automatically have 5 GB of free storage, but more can be purchased for prices comparable to those offered by Google Drive or SkyDrive.

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If you haven't been to Amazon for a day or so, do visit and check out the guerrilla marketing before it's gone. The online retail giant has revamped its ever-changing home page to directly take on iPad mini. A graphic compares iPad mini with Kindle Fire HD -- highlighting differences such as display resolution, HD playback and stereo instead of mono. Of course, the glaring difference is the price -- $329 versus $199, Apple's device being the more expensive.

Last week, Amazon boasted that the day after Apple announced iPad mini, $199 Kindle Fire HD had its biggest sales day ever, implying that many people waited to see the competition and then went for the Amazon product instead.

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Like Microsoft in the late late 1990s and early 2000s, antitrust scrutiny confronts Google on two continents. Among the core issues emerging from the preliminary investigations: privacy. Your data, who has access to it, how clear are the search giant's privacy policies and how carefully does the company adhere to them. But Google is by no means the only concern. Facebook is renown for making user interface and feature changes that can suddenly and unexpectedly expose personal data, and there are problems past about third-party applications accessing what they shouldn't.

As more established tech companies offer more services in the cloud, increasingly there is lingering question: Whom do you trust with your personal data? Last month, Apple expanded cloud services with iOS 6 and iPad mini and the fourth-generation 9.7-inch model go on sale November 2, supporting them. On Friday, Microsoft launched Windows 8 and Surface and does same with Windows Phone on October 29. To get the most from these products, users must have a Microsoft account, like Apple and Google require for their cloud services. Meanwhile, Office 365 extends online sync, storage and collaboration features.

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Apple should learn something from Google and Samsung. In a poll which results I'll post today, the majority of respondents tell us that iPad mini costs too much; prices start at $329. Meanwhile, the 11.6-inch Chromebook is priced just right. The WiFi model is Amazon's laptop top-seller, while the $329.99 3G model is No. 4 (and declining). Both models are sold out, like Google Play. Get one, if you can!

Many of you want new Chromebook, which swaps x86 for ARM architecture. So far, 1,770 people have responded to buying poll "Why you buy $249 Chromebook?". More than 35 percent plan to get one within 3 months, while 15.37 already placed orders. How funny if Google's Chrome OS portable turned out to be autumn's ARM sleeper sales success, and not iPad mini or Microsoft Surface.

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Whether some might people like it or not, we live in the cloud era and there the key role is played by services. But what happens when there's an outage? Yesterday I tried to log into Flipboard, but unlike what would usually happen, the message "service is currently down" greeted me.

It wasn't a scheduled maintenance. Flipboard announced via Google+ that the service was down and it "only" took roughly five hours to get it back up. So what happened? According to Data Center Knowledge and Wired, when Amazon Cloud went down so did Heroku, Flipboard, Foursquare, Reddit "and others", with problems reported to its North Virginia-based servers. But the cloud is supposed to be the future, and it doesn't include pulling the plug and sending people off: "Go to sleep, I'm incapable of anything now!"

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I bought my first ebook in 1999 and in recent years stopped purchasing print altogether. My wife is a relative ebook newbie, so I am surprised that she and not me received an email today from Amazon about a forthcoming purchasing credit. Perhaps you got a similar message.

In April, the Justice Department accused Apple and five publishers -- Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster -- of fixing ebook prices. Three publishers settled; MacMillan and Penguin, along with Apple, refused. The three publishers also settled with states attorneys general, agreeing to put $69 million in a fund for consumers. The Amazon purchasing credit is product of the settlement.

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I'm not locked in to any one company's ecosystem right now. I have a Windows 7 Ultrabook, a desktop I built myself running Mint Linux, an iPad, and my trusty Galaxy Nexus. Each appliance serves the purpose I purchased it for very well, and I feel no need to switch away from any of them for the moment. When I perform basic daily tasks, things run smoothly. I use Dropbox and Google Drive for sharing much of my content back and forth, and it's a great experience.

When it comes to purchasing digital content like music, movies, or books, it feels like I am punished for not being locked in to any one content system.

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Almost two weeks after Amazon unveiled new tablets, the $199 7-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet gets "a new lease on life" through rooting.

Gaining elevated privileges (popularly known as "root") is facilitated by an exploit found in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich that Amazon didn't fix before shipping the tablet. The fairly uncomplicated process gives the Kindle Fire HD a new trick up its sleeve -- using the Google Play Store, which provides access to all apps available there.

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Following Amazon's Kindle Fire HD announcement, a reader reminded me of a prediction I made at the start of the year: "If Apple gives up its position of industry leadership in 2012 the only company capable of assuming that role is Amazon.com". I stand by those words -- Amazon is really bringing the fight to Apple -- but the most important part is "if Apple gives up its position", which it clearly hasn’t, at least not yet. The real loser here, in fact, is not Apple but Microsoft.

I could be wrong about this but I don’t recall any pundits (me included) predicting that Amazon would introduce a larger format tablet, yet that’s exactly what they did. The larger Kindle Fire HD with its built-in content and app ecosystem (and that killer 4G data package!) is a viable iPad competitor at a terrific price and puts real pressure on the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. Will Apple match the price? I don’t think so. That’s not the game they want to play. But the game is on, nevertheless, and users can only benefit from competition.

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Google is in a tough spot. Apple suddenly looks like an ally now that Amazon has unveiled Kindle Fire HD. Both companies stand to lose big time should the tablet achieve any meaningful sales success. Google Play doesn't offer strong enough ecosystem to battle with either iPad or Kindle Fire, but Amazon's tablet is more likely to scorch Android's earth. Amazon's vertical integration -- store, software and services -- is tight, as good as Apple's and in many respects superior. No matter which wins, Android loses.

Here's the problem: Only Amazon has done any meaningful Android customization on tablets, creating a curated experience similar to Apple's. Like iOS, Amazon Android is tightly vertically and horizontally integrated with siloed services. Kindle Fire is designed to mainly work within the Amazon content/retail sphere and little outside it. Amazon runs its own stores -- everything from apps to movies -- while shunning Google Play. Meanwhile, Kindle Fire supports the custom Silk browser rather than the stock Android one or Chrome. Amazon Android is a competing platform/ecosystem within the larger, more open one Google champions. (The original Kindle Fire is customized Gingerbread and new HD models customized Ice Cream Sandwich.)

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Amazon on Thursday unveiled four new Android tablets in the Kindle Fire family: two models with a 7-inch screen, and two with an 8.9-inch screen.

Irrespective of how many Kindle Fires Amazon actually sold, it's hard to argue that the retailer has done anything wrong. It built a content ecosystem first, and then delivered the hardware with which to consume that content. The icing on the cake was that the device was one of the cheapest brand-name tablets on the market.

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Just hours ahead of Amazon's debut of a new Kindle tablet on Thursday, Kobo, the e-book company that can be thought of as "Canada's Kindle" debuted a new color Android tablet called the Kobo Arc.

Kobo Arc is the company's second Android tablet, following up on the Kobo Vox which debuted around this time last year.

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Consumer and enterprise cloud storage company Pogoplug on Thursday announced it has integrated Amazon Glacier long-term archival storage into the Pogoplug service. In its usual fashion, Pogoplug mirrors content from your local drives in the cloud and makes them accessible through a Web interface and mobile apps. Now, with Glacier integration, PogoPlug can also back content up to cold storage at the same time.

This announcement comes just two weeks after Amazon Web Services announced Glacier, making Pogoplug the first consumer cloud service to integrate with Amazon's new offering.

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I've seen some desperate bone-headed, PR moves before, but Amazon's newest is one to long remember. When Apple announces a press event, the InterWebs erupt with speculation about what it can be. When product inventory is low in stores on some fruit-logo product, rumors explode about something new in the pipeline. Amazon has to work harder, issuing today a press release that Kindle Fire has sold out, ahead of next week's press event. Could the retailer be any less subtle, while revealing sales data that is absolutely nothing but meant to be something.

BetaNews founder Nate Mook nails exactly what's wrong with Amazon's gambit to drum up excitement ahead of the September 6 event. Earlier today he forwarded the Kindle-Fire sell-out email, writing: "It's SOOOO successful. So we're not making any more". That sums it up.

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