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
Basho is open-soucing Riak CS, its storage software that integrates with Amazon Web Services. Riak CS will be available under an Apache 2 license.
The move is a smart one for Basho, which has built a reputation for Riak, its distributed high performance database. → Read More
Amazon has yet to turn on any services on the back of a deal it signed with carrier billing specialist Bango over a year ago, but it looks like we may finally see the first fruits come out later this year, according to a source, with the launch of carrier billing in Amazon’s Appstore for Android. This points to a more aggressive push from the tech giant not only on services, but also devices … → Read More
Amazon just launched the Send to Kindle button, which clips Web content and saves it to Kindle readers and apps, for Web developers and WordPress bloggers. The button is also now available on The Washington Post, TIME, and Boing Boing. → Read More
Amazon introduced Whispercast for Kindle back in October of 2012, and now the service is getting an update that allows it to deploy not just books and documents, but also apps. that means organizations like schools and businesses can now widely deploy apps across a number of Kindle Fire devices quickly and easily. → Read More
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
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