Articles about Amazon

Today, Amazon announced that it will be acquiring popular Internet clothing and footwear store Zappos.com for approximately $807 million. The closing price of Zappo's stock will actually drive the deal up to around $880 million when it closes this fall. Additionally, Zappos employees will receive $40 million in cash and restricted stock. The company was voted #23 in Fortune's Hundred best companies to work for in 2009 poll.

Zappos will retain the same management team that's helped the brand get as popular as it has. The company's CEO, Tony Hsieh issued a statement today saying, "Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say 'Amazon acquires Zappos' or 'Zappos sells to Amazon'. While those headlines are technically correct, they don't really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline 'Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree...') We plan to continue to run Zappos the way we have always run Zappos -- continuing to do what we believe is best for our brand, our culture, and our business. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are switching out our current shareholders and board of directors for a new one, even though the technical legal structure may be different."

Continue reading →

UPDATE: Amazon issued a statement Friday night saying, "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances." However, the company did not touch on whether it would monitor more closely what books get uploaded as part of its self-serve system for publishers to avoid such circumstances altogether.

The press loves a juicy story, and Amazon served one up on a silver platter this morning by automatically deleting certain copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles. But many facts were left out of this media frenzy, namely that the ebooks were essentially pirated copies sold for 99-cents by a company that had no rights to the material.

Continue reading →

Nokia earnings sequentially up, at least

Morning of Thursday, July 16, 2009 • One of the most wince-inducing earnings calls for reporters in recent months has been Nokia's, but things seem to be a tiny bit brighter at the Finnish phone firm as sales rose 7% in Q2 from the previous three months. They're still down 25% year-over-year, of course, but company officials Thursday said they believe the market for mobile devices to be "bottoming out." (The company still chose to revise its earlier target of raising its market share; now the company says it aims to maintain that share at 2008 levels.) Earnings per share were likewise down year-to-year (65.5%) but up sequentially (233.3%).

Continue reading →

Microsoft has known about 0-day vulnerability for months

Since spring 2008 • Really, Microsoft? All the work you've put into getting right with the security community, and this is the result? Computerworld's mighty Gregg Keizer leads the charge on the news that Redmond has known about the recently publicized DirectX vulnerability for years. Years.

Continue reading →

Marking the second generation Kindle's fifth month of availability and its passage into the "majority phase" of the Rogers adoption curve, Amazon has lopped 15% of the popular e-reader's price. The device's price today was dropped to $299.

Though Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said the company may never disclose the Kindle's sales figures, an estimated 300,000 Kindle 2 units were reportedly shipped in April. In May, Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX, which has actually struggled to keep up with demand.

Continue reading →

In March, Discovery Communications, the company responsible for the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet cable networks, filed a patent infringement suit against Amazon.com for its Kindle e-reading device. The patent is property of Discovery founder John S. Hendricks, and was granted in 2007, nearly ten years after it was filed. The company sought damages and royalties from Amazon and its successful Kindle.

Amazon fired back at Discovery on May 15, in two separate legal actions. The first is a categorical denial of all of Discovery's complaints and countersuit in the US District Court in Delaware. And the second is a suit in US District Court in Western Washington, claiming that the Discovery Channel's online store uses search and recommendation methods that infringe on four of Amazon's patents. Like Discovery's suit beforehand, it asks for royalties and damages sufficient to compensate for the infringement.

Continue reading →

Just three months after rolling out Kindle 2.0, Amazon's hosting an event in New York on Wednesday, during which it's expected to preview another upgrade -- one with a bigger screen, PDF support, and annotation capability. The unit will be tested this fall at various universities.

An assortment of magazine and newspaper publishers are also invited to the event, hinting that a change in the relationship between those content providers and Kindle's no-ads-no-pricing-control philosophy may be at hand.

Continue reading →

TiVo was definitely an early adopter with Amazon's movie download service, equipping its Series2 and Series3 set-top boxes with Amazon Unbox more than two years ago. As streaming video-on-demand has gained popularity, TiVo's roster of services has grown substantially.

Today, TiVo's version of the Amazon Video on Demand service gains more than 500 high-definition titles from major studios, including new-release films "Frost/Nixon," and "Twilight," and popular TV shows like "Gossip Girl," and "Californication."

Continue reading →

Big businesses are now moving to the clouds "en masse," through a deal between Capgemini and RightScale. The 50-or-so corporations are all clients of IT consulting firm Capgemini's emerging Cloud Computing Center of Excellence, said RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, in a briefing with Betanews.

After starting to migrate the customers' existing Web sites to "cloud-style, elastic-type applications and grids" in Amazon's EC2, Capgemini turned to RightScale's pre-configured templates for assistance.

Continue reading →

What's being called a "glitch" on Amazon.com has exclusively affected books dealing with gay and lesbian themes.

On one side, Amazon's Kindle 2 is the central element in the civil rights conflict between authors and those with reading disabilities. On the other side, Amazon.com is now accused of de-ranking and re-classifying content as "adult literature" simply because it contains homosexual themes or characters. Specifically, the complaint is that listings for some books with homosexual content are not displaying comparative sales rankings.

Continue reading →

Take it as a sign that the digital music industry is finally reaching maturity. The labels that once clamped down on digital distribution with absolute prejudice have generally loosened up, allowing DRM-free distribution to flourish. Now, the business is expanding to make room for fully variable pricing.

The cost of digital music has long been an issue of concern for me, as a fan of short, fast, and loud music. I always felt that there was a problem with the 99¢ per song across the board pricing scheme iTunes employed. While you cannot measure musical enjoyment in minutes, cents, or kilobytes per second, it just never felt fair to have to pay 99¢ for a twelve second song like "Wienerschnitzel" by The Descendents, when it could buy a nine-minute song like Dream Theater's "Metropolis, Part 1..."

Continue reading →

While downloadable content has become the norm in home video gaming, a gamer who wants to purchase new games or add-in content via download has very limited options. Generally, it has been limited to the console's built-in app store, or direct from the console manufacturer. With the PlayStation 3, it's the PSN Shop, Wii it's the Wii Shop Channel, and with the 360, was the Xbox Live Marketplace or on Xbox.com.

Today, Amazon announced that it has opened the beta of the Amazon Xbox Live Store, where users can download Xbox Live Arcade games, or buy subscription cards and Microsoft Points. Transactions, however, are cash only and Microsoft Points do not yet look to be accepted.

Continue reading →

Another morning, another projects involving Hadoop and the cloud. This time, Amazon's the proprietor, announcing the beta launch on Thursday of their

Continue reading →

In a move that could help cloud computing leader Amazon realize much of its revenues almost a year earlier, the company this morning announced an alternative payment structure for users of its EC2 cloud-based hosting service. For subscribers willing to pay up front for a one-year contract between $325 for a standard virtual machine instance and $2,600 for a CPU-intensive instance, their per-hour usage charges can be reduced around 75% - 80%.

The typical usage charge for a standard hosted Windows Server 2003 instance is $0.125 per hour, or $0.10 for Linux. Those charges will both decline to $0.03 per hour for subscribers who pay up front $325 for a one-year contract, or $500 for a three-year contract. "Extra Large High-CPU" instance usage charges drop from $1.20 per hour ($0.80 for Linux) to $0.24 per hour, for up-front payments of $2,600 for one-year, or $4,000 for three-year.

Continue reading →

Amazon's on-demand video streaming service on the Roku set top box began beta tests in early February, and today has officially been released to the public.

Roku announced today that software updates for its $99 set top box will be rolled out over the course of the week, giving customers access to a library of 40,000 movies on demand that cost between 99¢ and $3.99 per rental.

Continue reading →