Amazon

While Amazon is not disclosing what exactly caused its site to fail for two hours on Friday, the world's largest online retailer may find its problem comes from the site design itself.

Amazon.com first failed around 1:25 pm EDT on Friday. For a two-hour period, customers attempting to access the site were greeted with an error message. Once the site began to return, portions of Amazon remained largely inaccessible.

An Amazon spokesperson has confirmed to BetaNews that it will be premiering a streaming video service in the upcoming weeks.

At the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California, sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos mentioned that his company has been working on an a la carte, pay-per-view streaming service.

Amazon has struggled to keep up with orders for its Kindle electronic book reader since the device debuted just before Thanksgiving, but with inventory back on hand, the retailer has lowered the price by 10 percent.

Wait times for customers to receive their Kindle sometimes reached months, leading Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to publish an open letter on the company's homepage in which he apologized for the delays. "We didn't expect the demand that actually materialized," Bezos wrote in March.

Texas is investigating Amazon.com to see whether the online retailer may owe four years of back sales tax for purchases made by customers in the state, but Amazon claims it has fully complied with the law.

At issue is a distribution facility located in Irving, Texas that the retailer has operated since 2006. Before 2006, Amazon utilized a third party to fulfill orders in the state. The Texas Comptroller's Office is looking into whether the Irving location means Amazon has a physical presence in the state.

OpenSolaris -- Sun's open source version of the Solaris kernel first announced in 2005 -- has been made available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) distributed computing service.

Today at the CommunityOne Developer Conference in San Francisco, California, Sun Microsystems debuted its new OpenSolaris distribution which includes a small core operating system, a network package repository, application packages, and the Sun-developed Image Packaging System (IPS). The root file system of OpenSolaris is ZFS, which promises continual checksum capability and instant rollbacks to chosen states.

Amazon, the world's largest online retailer sued the state of New York, claiming its new law requiring out of state retailers to collect New York sales tax was unconstitutional.

Amazon filed the complaint with the New York state Supreme Court on April 25, claiming the law was vague and overly broad. It also told the court that it believes the law unfairly singles the company out.

In an open letter to customers today, Amazon's Jeff Bezos reported the availability of fresh shipments of its popular Kindle e-book reader, after having been in short supply since its November debut.

The Kindle device was officially launched in November 2007, but sold out in less than six hours due to a combination of high demand and major supply issues.

A developer has found a way to host Google Apps on Amazon's Web services platform, and is open sourcing his solution.

When Google released App Engine, some saw it as a way to lock in applications created within Google Apps from being transferred to to any other Web services provider. This would essentially diminish the attractiveness of start-ups from an acquisition perspective, analysts said, for anyone other than Google, or those who may not mind allowing Google to continue hosting its data.

Those who purchased an HD DVD set-top player through Amazon will be eligible for a $50 credit towards a future purchase..

Customers can choose to spend the money in any way they see fit, including putting it toward Blu-ray player. It is not the first time a retailer has attempted to appease those who may have bought into HD DVD: Best Buy and Wal-Mart have done the same.

Mobile text messaging as a form of order placement has seen early adoption in the fast food industry, and now it comes to the Internet's largest retailer.

Late yesterday, Amazon launched TextBuyIt, a system that enables shoppers to text Amazon a keyword or a product's UPC/ISBN to compare prices and buy items.

A personal letter from Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos graced the front page of the online retailer Thursday, apologizing for the lack of Kindle electronic book readers and promising that production is being sped up.

Since the Kindle made its debut last November, the device has been in very short supply. Many buyers are waiting upwards of six weeks for their Kindle to arrive, and the situation hasn't improved much even after the holidays.

In a move that's about as surprising as the sun rising each day, Universal Studios said it would start to release titles on Blu-ray. Meanwhile, Amazon said it will give preferred placement to Blu-ray over HD DVD.

With Toshiba halting production of HD DVD players, the format is all but finished moving forward. Universal president Craig Kornblau said it's now clear what direction the industry must head to push adoption of next-generation optical discs.

Believe it or not, Microsoft isn't really serious in its bid to buy Yahoo, according to one financial analyst. Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research has reached the unusual conclusion that Microsoft's $44.6 billion merger proposal is really just a ploy to fend off a potential deal between Yahoo and Amazon.com. Could he possibly be right? Probably not.

Chowdhry's Amazon.com theory is getting a lot of play on the Web right now, largely because the well respected analyst has been covering Yahoo closely for at least the last ten years.

Amazon this week began offering Microsoft's HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 for only $79.99, but those wanting to take advantage of the deal may be too late, as the online retailer is currently sold out.

The $80 price tag follows a price cut in early December that made the drive available for just $129. It's not clear if the deal was a one-time offering from Amazon, or whether other retailers will follow suit. Making it all the more enticing, Amazon's 6 free HD DVD deal is also applicable to the Xbox 360 add-on.

The deal is likely to mean that audiobooks will become the latest addition to its fast-growing music download store.

It's not clear what will happen to Audible's deal with iTunes, if anything -- the company is the chief supplier of audio books to Apple's music service. However, Audible seems a good fit for Amazon considering the retailers core business is book sales.