So I finally finished watching the first season of House of Cards this weekend. Which is crazy, right? It’s been a full month and a half since all 13 episodes went live on Netflix. How could I wait so damn long to watch every episode, especially since traveling to South by Southwest meant that I had to wait two whole weeks before I could find out what happened to [REDACTED] after… → Read More
Amazon just announced that it would be dropping the price of the 8.9-inch version of its Kindle Fire HD. The tablet will now cost $269 for the Wi-Fi only version and $399 for the Wi-Fi and LTE version. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is now available in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan as well. Canada won’t get the device this time around. → Read More
Rocket Internet, the e-commerce startup incubator started by the Samwer Brothers, is once again ramping up its operations in emerging markets. Today it is announcing that Jumia, an Amazon clone launched last year in Africa, has received a €20 million ($26 million) investment from Summit Partners. Jumia is already active in Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco, and the company says that it will be using… → Read More
The race for online consumers continues to heat up in the UK, and local retail giant Tesco wants to make sure that it doesn’t blink and let Amazon get the upper hand. Tesco today announced the launch of an all-encompassing digital entertainment service rebranded under blinkbox — blinkboxmusic, blinkboxbooks and Clubcard TV will join the blinkbox video streaming service, which Tesco acquired back… → Read More
Amazon is again announcing an expansion to its Amazon Instant Video lineup, with today’s addition of back catalog content from Scripps Networks, home to HGTV, DIY Network, Food Network, Cooking Channel and Travel Channel. The deal involves “hundreds” of episodes of past seasons, and is notable for being the first online-only distribution agreement Scripps has signed to date, according to Amazon’s… → Read More
Only a couple of weeks after announcing Amazon Cloud Player integration with Ford SYNC’s AppLink platform, the company has today updated its iOS application with native support for the Apple iPad. The new application isn’t remarkably different from the previously launched iPhone counterpart, so it’s unclear why it took a company with resources like Amazon’s around half a year to add this support. → Read More
Amazon yesterday updated its Kindle for iOS app, which works across iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, to version 3.6.1. The update was meant to fix a few bugs as well as the registration process. Instead, that update seems to be wreaking havoc on bookworm-style iThing owners who watched as their Amazon digital libraries and saved settings were erased before their eyes.
Here’s just a taste of the… → Read More
According to a number of reports, beleaguered bookseller Barnes & Noble could be shuttering its Nook hardware division and focusing primarily on connecting its digital content to other tablets and readers. In a related report, B&N founder Leonard Riggio is considering a buy-out of the company’s consumer division and spinning out the Nook and collegiate sales divisions while maintaining the… → Read More
Editor’s note: John Geraci is head of marketing for innovation agency faberNovel, where he and his colleagues help organizations think and act like startups.
Two years ago, faberNovel published a study called “Amazon.com: The Hidden Empire.” Detailing the strategies by which the company had gone from a scrappy startup to a world-dominating e-commerce site in the course of 17 years, the study… → Read More
Amazon’s onslaught in disrupting enterprise IT services continues. The company today announced that it would be making Redshift — its cloud-based data warehousing service — widely available, after first launching the product on a limited release at the end of November. The product, part of Amazon Web Services, is aimed both at startups who are looking for cost-effective ways of… → Read More
Literally days after Amazon announced a unique content deal with CBS for in-season streaming of Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” series this summer, the company today added that now has an expanded relationship with CBS for additional content. Previously, Amazon had access to much back catalog content from CBS, in a deal similar to the one Hulu finally closed this November. → Read More
Amazon Cloud Player, the company’s online and mobile music streaming service fueled by purchases of MP3′s, uploads and even previously bought CDs, is now going to be available in Ford SYNC AppLink-enabled vehicles. The service will allow drivers to connect their Android smartphone running the Amazon MP3 app to their SYNC system, in order to stream their Cloud Player library over the car’s stereo… → Read More
This won’t come as a surprise, but the publishing industry is in trouble. Digital technologies have transformed the publishing landscape — just as they did for music — from the way companies distribute content to how we consume it, and our reading habits are fundamentally changing as a result. Book publishers and traditional booksellers are struggling to stay afloat amidst the rising digital… → Read More
A little victory both for Amazon and the world of virtual commerce, today: the online retailer has topped the ranking for best reputation in a poll of 14,000 U.S. consumers, according to Harris Interactive. Apple, which was last year’s winner, slipped down to number-two. At number four, Google was the other tech company to make the top-five in the Harris Poll, now in its 14th year, with Disney… → Read More
Editor’s note: Charles Edward Hudson is a venture partner with SoftTech VC and the CEO and co-founder of Bionic Panda Games.
I have been trying to wrap my head around Amazon’s decision to launch Amazon Coins as a currency. It struck me as curious because most major platforms who have offered universal, platform-wide virtual currencies have dialed back those efforts or simply abandoned… → Read More
Mobile payments company Bango — provider of carrier billing services to the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Telefonica, Google, Blackberry, Opera and more — doubled down on its emerging market strategy. The publicly-traded company announced today that it has raised £6.5 million ($10.2 million) through a placing of 3,250,000 new ordinary shares on the London Stock Exchange at 200 pence per share… → Read More
Amazon wants to sell your used ebooks. It recently won a patent to allow people to hock off their read ebooks on its marketplace. Of course, ebooks don’t suffer from wear and tear, but think of the resale process as more of a way to transfer your book licences. This is already in action in a way—users can currently “lend” out Kindle books, which then disappear from your device as your… → Read More
Diapers.com, the Amazon-owned e-commerce site targeting parents with new babies, is today launching a native app on the iPad, after seeing its mobile traffic increase more than 100 percent year-over-year. In December 2012, the company found that 40 percent of the website’s visitors came to shop via a smartphone or tablet. → Read More
Amazon, like competitors Hulu and Netflix, is set on producing original content for its Instant Video library.
Along with various children’s series, the company is also working on six new comedy pilots which users will then vote on, deciding who keeps on filming and who shuts down. → Read More
Amazon earlier today experienced an outage of its main Amazon.com homepage that lasted for nearly one hour, the company confirmed today. It is still not explaining what the problem was but TechCrunch understands that it is looking unlikely that any outside group was involved — as would be the case in a hack or DDoS attack. At the time of the outage, Amazon’s mobile sites, other pages… → Read More
Apple’s iPad led the charge as total worldwide tablet shipments hit a record of 52.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to IDC’s preliminary data from its Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, but its market share continued to slide due to competition from Samsung. Meanwhile, PC shipments declined during the quarter for the first time in more than five years. The tablet market… → Read More
The moves in different directions for Amazon and Apple have been about expectations and guidance. Wall Street has higher expectations for Apple and ‘different’ expectations for Amazon. Wall Street wants Apple’s ‘gross margins’ to grow. They don’t expect Amazon’s ‘profits’ to grow. It sounds silly, but if Apple has reported lower profits and a huge gross margin increase the stock… → Read More
You really have to hand it to Jeff Bezos and Amazon, which seem to continuously defy reality — and gravity. Amazon just announced its fourth-quarter earnings, and if you listen to the press, you’d think it was another home run. And if you are watching Amazon trade after-hours, you’d think this is the most buyable stock since the last time MG wrote about AAPL. Amazon is up nearly 10 percent since… → Read More
Another move today from Amazon that speaks to its growing presence in content delivery and enterprise services, done at competition-beating prices: today the company launched Elastic Transcoder, a new service that lets people upload digital video and put it into formats — h264, AAC and mp4 for now — that are usable on devices like smartphones and tablets, as well as PCs. Amazon hopes to lure in… → Read More
Android tablets have nearly caught up to iPad devices as the world’s most popular tablet platform, and some project that they may even overtake iPads later this year. According to new research from app analytics company Localytics, the U.S., and specifically Amazon, should take the most credit for that trend: some 59% of all Android tablet usage came from the U.S., with over half of that… → Read More
Look out, Google, Facebook and Dropbox? Amazon has now added automatic mobile photo uploads to its Amazon Cloud Drive Photos Android app, in an update released yesterday evening. The functionality makes the otherwise fairly bare bones photos app more of a competitor in the space, given that Google (via its Google+ app), Dropbox, and Facebook (iOS-only for now), have all recently eased the… → Read More
Amazon today announced that it is acquiring Ivona Software, a Polish-based specialist in voice technologies that competes with Nuance and is already used in the Kindle Fire for services covering text-to-speech, voice commands and “Explore by Touch.” The terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
Amazon today announced that it would extend its in-app purchasing API to cover games for Mac, PC and Web platforms, letting players purchase virtual currency and goods in games using its back-end billing for titles that appear in the Amazon Digital Games store, extending a service it made available for apps in its Android Appstore last year. → Read More
Amazon today announced a new version of its MP3 store, designed to work on iPhone and iPod touch devices from Apple. The HTML5 web app now allows iOS mobile device users to make direct purchases of tracks from Amazon’s 22 million song library via Safari, which will then make it instantly available to Amazon’s Cloud Player app for those devices. → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
