Continuing to grow its suite of services aimed at mobile app developers, Amazon today announced App Engagement Reports, free app usage reports that are now a part of the company’s Mobile App Distribution Portal. The reports are designed for Amazon Appstore developers in need of information about app performance and revenue. → Read More
No, we still don’t have any word from Amazon on where it stands with a smartphone, but it’s definitely making its mobile ambitions clear anyway. Today, the e-commerce giant took two more steps in its strategy to scale up its Kindle Fire tablet business. It announced that it will now sell the two higher-end versions of the device, the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, in 170 countries. And it… → Read More
Amazon has reportedly submitted plans for a new futuristic headquarters in Seattle that couples a skyscraper and an accompanying tri-sphere bio-dome like structure. According to the plans, the structure will be able to hold various forms of plant life and become a place where employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.”
Because God forbid employees walk to the park… → Read More
Sometimes a writer creates a universe so compelling that others feel the need to join and help flesh out that world with their own tribute fiction. And sometimes you make something crappy like Gossip Girl and loads of people want to write using those characters and that world anyway. Now Amazon is introducing a way to let writers profit from their fan fiction, via “Kindle Worlds.” → Read More
In the wake of releasing eight comedy series pilots into the wild last month, Amazon is starting to make decisions concerning which pilots will be purchased for development and which will get the axe.
According to Reuters, the company has chosen to build out Alpha House, a show featuring John Goodman about four Senators in DC who live in a house together, as well as Betas. Betas tells the… → Read More
Google is under fire in the UK for its tax practices in the country, and a new key witness (who spoke to The Sunday Times) might put them in deeper hot water when he hands over a reported 100,000 emails and documents to the British Revenue & Customs (HRMC) services. Barney Jones, a former Googler who was at the company between 2004 and 2006, says he has material proof that Google’s London… → Read More
Amazon has just announced a new content deal with NBCUniversal, bringing a host of new television series to the video streaming platform.
Some of those titles include Covert Affairs, Defiance, Grimm, Hannibal, and Suits. And what’s more, the company is pulling content from NBCUniversal’s children series such as Curious George and Land Before Time, which will be available with Kindle FreeTime… → Read More
E-commerce leviathan Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming: Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency, is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth of the currency — equivalent to 500 Coins — into all Kindle Fire users’ accounts to use on apps and in-app purchases on its platform. The company says that this is equivalent to “tens of millions of… → Read More
Woot, the daily deals site that Amazon bought in 2010 for $110 million, built a reputation for its “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” business model for shifting goods. Now, the company is facing up to a shift of a different kind: that of its own talent. In the last week, TechCrunch has learned that five six key employees are parting ways with the company. → Read More
Amazon offers a range of hardware, including its Kindle e-readers and tablets, but now it’s looking to expand the line with two new smartphones and an audio-only device that streams music, according to the Wall Street Journal. The phones include a high-end one with a glasses-free 3D screen, as well as another about which details were not included in the report, which presumably would be a more… → Read More
Quidsi, the Amazon-owned parent company to a collection of single-word, e-commerce domains, including Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, Yoyo.com, and more, is today launching a new membership program called Familyhood Plus. The program offers consumers free two-day shipping with no minimum purchases and other exclusive deals.
Prior to today, Quidsi sites would only promise free two-day shipping… → Read More
Today, Amazon continued the trend, still finding itself in a bit of a hangover after missing expectations in Q4. The eCommerce giant reported earnings from Q1 after the market closed this afternoon, in which it saw cash flow increase 39 percent to $4.25 billion, compared to $3 billion for the prior year, while net sales increased 22 percent to $16.07 billion in Q1, compared to $13.18 billion in… → Read More
According to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek, e-commerce behemoth Amazon is preparing to launch a set-top box this fall, in hopes that you’ll consume all of your content through its spin on the now-common device. The company is already working hard to push its Kindle line to consumers, and this box would be for people who don’t want to deal with the fanciness of Apple products… → Read More
Amazon’s business model, CTO Werner Vogels reminded us today, is based on “low margins, high volume”, and today the company announced a development on how it’s applying that principle to its enterprise services. From today, it’s expanding to Europe its Redshift data warehousing service and its EC2 High Storage service. Amazon first announced the intention to go global in February; it’s actually… → Read More
Amazon is pulling a Netflix today, in the sense that it’s now touting the release of its original programming as the “most watched” TV shows on the Amazon Video service since launch on Friday. Netflix previously issued the same statement about its original show, “House of Cards.” But it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, here. When Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said that… → Read More
Back in March, Amazon Studios announced that it had ordered six comedy series pilots to debut on Amazon Instant Video, further proof that the current television model is desperate for disruption. Today those pilots are finally available, released into the hands of viewers here in the US and the UK. Based on user feedback, Amazon will decide which of the pilots will be ordered for a full season… → Read More
E-commerce giant Amazon looks like it is gearing up for the latest chapter in its international expansion: an operation in Russia. According to this article in Forbes (in Russian) the company has opened its first office in the country, headed by Arkady Vitrouk. Vitrouk is the former general director of ABC-Atticus, a publishing group owned by media barron Alexander Mamut. → Read More
A new patent published by the USPTO today (via PhoneArena) indicates that Amazon is looking into a way to limit the amount of data exchanged when two parties engage in a mobile payment transaction. The patent describes a way to sub in unique identifiers for information like name and email address that would otherwise be used to verify the identities of buyer and seller. → Read More
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was on stage today at AllThingsD’s Dive Into Mobile event in NYC, talking about his book and his vision for Google. When asked about how he and Google feel about projects that take Android as their base and then build something different with them, like Amazon’s KindleOS or Facebook Home. Schmidt’s response was extremely positive. → Read More
Amazon has launched a new store catering to mature adults and seniors, the company announced today. But while “Amazon Seniors” would have a nice ring to it, Amazon went with a more polite, if wordy, branding: “50+ Active and Healthy Living Store.” As the name implies, the new store will be focused on a variety of “healthy living” needs, including nutritional products, wellness, exercise, fitness… → Read More
After the U.S. cleared the deal, the European Commission has officially approved the proposed merger between two of the biggest book publishers in the world, Random House and Penguin. The two owners Pearson and Bertelsmann announced the new venture back in October. As it is seeking “new digital publishing models,” the merger has been widely commented on as a way to counter Amazon’s influence on… → Read More
Former Windows Phone developer evangelist, Charlie Kindel, has joined Amazon to head up an undisclosed project. Kindel left Microsoft in 2011 to work on his own startups but, according to his LinkedIn profile, is now at Amazon. The profile lists him as ‘Director, something secret’ at Amazon and notes he is “building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon”. → Read More
At the end of last year, Netflix suffered a prolonged outage because Amazon’s cloud services, which Netflix uses to host most of its infrastructure, went down. At the time, Amazon’s own video services continued to function without any issues. Last night, it was Amazon’s turn to suffer from a multi-hour outage. According to a number of tips we received, as well as a number of… → Read More
Today, Amazon has announced the acquisition of social reading service, Goodreads. Specific terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and it should close by the end of Q2. Goodreads had raised $2.75 million in funding from the likes of True Ventures since launching in January 2007. When we talked to them last August, the site had over 10 million members and had catalogued more than 360 million… → Read More
Amazon just announced that it is adding its X-Ray feature to TV shows. The feature already worked with movies thanks to data from IMDb, but the company will now use this very same data for other video content. The entire Kindle Fire family will receive the feature and the Amazon Instant Video app on Wii U will get is as well. As a reminder, X-Ray allows you to discover more about the content you… → Read More
Amazon just announced the launch of CloudHSM, a new service that provides Amazon Web Services users who need to meet corporate, contractual and regulatory compliance requirements for data security a way to do so by using a dedicated Hardware Security Module (the ‘HSM’ in CloudHSM) within the Amazon cloud. Until now, Amazon argues, the only option for many companies that use its cloud… → Read More
Shipping things to your house is so 2011, so companies like Amazon are setting up physical lockers for you to pick your online orders up from. Today, Walmart has announced that they’re testing a similar program in about twelve stores. Basically, you can go online, order all of the things that you want, and your items will show up in this locker rather than your doorstep. This means that you… → Read More
Continuing its investment in original content, Amazon today announced it is greenlighting “Zombieland,” a new comedy series based on the Columbia Pictures movie of the same name, which will be made available for free to Amazon Instant Video and LOVEFiLM UK subscribers. This is the seventh original comedy series added to Amazon Studios’ lineup, which also includes six children’s pilots, previously… → Read More
Amazon Web Services believes wholeheartedly that the cloud is the future. And not just the cloud, but the AWS public cloud. As a result, Amazon sees big opportunity for its technology in the enterprise market and has been making some aggressive moves to fluster the incumbents and stalwarts, like Microsoft. → Read More
How low will Amazon’s tablets go? We’re now hearing that a $99 Kindle Fire 7″ tablet is in production, and will be shipping this year. At a price that low, the Kindle Fire would be able to more easily compete at the tail end of the Android-based tablet market – an area which is today dominated by low-cost tablets out of China, often sold at the sub-$100 price point. → Read More
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