Articles about Amazon

Online retail giant Amazon on Tuesday launched a beta of new functionality intended to use data from Facebook to make recommendations. Once connected, the retailer would comb through the data in both your own profile and that of your friends.

Amazon said it would share no personal data with Facebook. The social networking site would be sending data over to Amazon, however: this would include the user's likes and favorites on Facebook as well as his or her friends, and their birthdays. In addition, Amazon would make it easier for a user to find a friend's wish list once the services are connected, but this would be a guess based on given information.

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Discovery Communications intellectual property subsidiary Discovery Patent Holdings filed suit against Amazon Wednesday, claiming Amazon's line of Kindle e-book readers infringe on two patents held by the company. The suit is the second between the two companies over such technologies.

Amazon was originally sued by Discovery Communications in March of last year, accusing the company of violation of a comprehensive patent on e-book readers titled "Electronic Book Security and Copyright Protection System" (#7,298,851). This covered the Kindle and Kindle 2 models.

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Keeping the Kindle momentum high, Amazon has announced the next generation of Kindle DX is available for pre-order today, and will be shipping on July 7th.

The new Kindle DX has the same 9.7" screen size, and the same free 3G wireless, but features a new graphite chassis and a higher contrast e-ink screen with a purported 50% improvement in contrast. Furthermore, all of this is available at a price about 25% less than the first generation DX.

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Woot said Wednesday that it had been acquired by Amazon, although it provided few details on what exactly will become of the online deal site other than it would become an independent subsidiary much like the online retailer's other acquisitions, Zappos and Audible.

Sources told technology blog TechCrunch that the sale price was in the neighborhood of $110 million in cash. In an e-mail to his employees, CEO Matt Rutledge seemed to suggest that not much would change as a result of the new owners.

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This month, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders have been engaged in some serious e-reader competition. Following the introduction of Borders' bargain-priced Kobo e-paper reader, both Barnes and Noble and Amazon cut the prices of their Nook and Kindle products to put all three products on a level playing field. All three book retailers have been pushing their cross-platform software readers too, jockeying for superiority in the e-book trade.

But retail price wars and marketing blitzes are only one side of the business. Today, Amazon made a significant appeal to another side: independent content publishers.

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No sooner does Barnes and Noble lower the price of its nook e-reader, than Amazon does the same with the Kindle.

Amazon.com has just announced that the 3G-equipped Kindle 2 e-reader is now $189 (down from $259,) making it $10 cheaper than Barnes and Noble's newly reduced 3G nook.

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Kindle is, without a doubt, the highest profile e-reader platform running. With applications on iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Windows, and OS X as well as its own line of e-paper Kindle devices, Amazon had an estimated 90% share of the e-book sales market last year.

Today, Amazon announced that a Kindle app will be launched on the Android mobile operating system this summer.

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We've always known that the Internet has evolved since 1996 (whose laws were based to some degree on the world circa 1978) to something that current US telecommunications law doesn't adequately describe. The whole court debate over whether the Federal Communications Commission could legally address how Comcast manages its network traffic wasn't really about whether it should, but rather whether current law designates that it can.

Up until yesterday, the two choices before the FCC were whether the broadband system it wants to regulate is more like a telephone (Title II) or a teletype (Title I). For years, its leaders argued that Title I of the Telecommunications Act, amended in 1996, was more fitting, making the case that since broadband services were usually piggy-backed over communications services anyway, its ancillary authority to protect information services could be attributed to its primary authority to protect communications services. In a decision very, very likely to survive judicial review, the DC Circuit said that's wrong.

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When Amazon debuted its first Kindle e-reader just over two years ago, we asked "...but will anyone buy it?"

We still can't say for certain.

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It has been just about one year since Amazon launched its Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod Touch; and today, thanks to popular demand, it has come to BlackBerry.

Like the iPhone app, Kindle for BlackBerry is free, and doesn't require a dedicated Kindle e-reader to use. Within the app, users can browse the Kindle Store and download e-books directly, and if you have already purchased Kindle e-books, you have access to your entire library, synced to the last place you left off in each book.

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Online retailer Amazon.com had quite a year. Yesterday, the company reported a 42% year-over-year increase in fourth quarter net sales, and a 71% increase in net income. For the full year 2009, Amazon's net sales increased 28% to $24.51 billion, and its net income increased 40% to $902 million.

This increase in profits and revenue is attributable to a number of factors, among them were the drop in price for its EC2 and S3 cloud services in October, for the November acquisition of Zappos.com, and of course, the launch of the Kindle 2 in the beginning of 2009.

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If you're selling a broadband-connected device these days, it's almost required to have a platform for application development that goes along with it. The mobile phone space is overrun with different development options, heck, even networked printers have got one now.

Amazon is about to see if the Kindle e-book reader is a viable platform for third-party apps.

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Amazon Kindle may be the go-to brand when someone considers buying a new e-reader in the U.S., but the popular device line is still only just getting its feet wet in the international market.

Last October, Amazon released a version of the Kindle 2 that is compatible with the wireless networks in more than 100 countries, but the content available in the Kindle Store is still mostly aimed at English speakers.

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Come November 1, Amazon's Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a "quadruple extra-large" AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).

The new high-end instances won't come cheap -- they'll carry a premium of $2.40 per instance-hour for Linux editions, and $2.88 per instance-hour for Windows Server 2003. The previous high-end AMI, still called "extra large," had been priced at nearly one-third that amount.

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Yesterday, I excitedly preordered Barnes & Noble's "Nook" ebook reader. Today, I cancelled the order -- and I'm none to happy about it. Why can't Barnes & Noble learn from its past mistakes? The bookseller's digital titles are way overpriced -- at least compared to Amazon (Sony charges even more than both booksellers for many titles).

Quick examples -- and more will come later in this post: Twilight by Stephanie Meyer: $6.59 from Amazon; $8.79 from B&N. Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?: $8.38 from Amazon; $11.20 from B&N. (Sony charges $9.89 for the first and $9 for the second.)

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