Mobile payments company Bango — partner to Facebook, Amazon, BlackBerry and others to enable app and content charges directly to your mobile phone bill — has announced another major carrier partner: Telefonica is enabling Bango payments via its payment API. → Read More
Apple and Amazon are fighting over made up words, as you may well be aware. Apple takes issue with Amazon’s use of “Appstore,” the name for the online retailer’s marketplace of Android software, which came after Apple had already been using its own App Store branding for a mobile apps market for a couple of years. A judge now says that before the issue actually goes to trial in August, the two… → Read More
Another day, another content licensing agreement in the online streaming space. Amazon-owned LOVEFiLM, a European Netflix competitor, has signed a new streaming deal with NBCUniversal International TV Distribution to further bolster its catalogue of content. LOVEFilm subscribers will now be able to enjoy on-demand access to “hundreds” of episodes of U.S. TV series. → Read More
If you own a Wii, you were probably a little bummed out to hear that Amazon would be serving up Instant Video to the Wii U and not to your older console.
But fret no longer, as Amazon has just announced that its library of streaming video content is now available to Wii owners.
Amazon’s Instant Video library is home to over 145,000 titles, and if you’re a Prime member you have automatic… → Read More
Audiobooks.com, a one-year old subscription service that competes with Amazon’s Audible.com, is today dropping its prices. Previously, the company had charged users $24.95 per month for unlimited access to its catalog of some 25,000 titles. Now it’s offering two plans to cater to perhaps less voracious listeners, with plans starting at $14.95 per month instead. → Read More
Amazon is today introducing a new service called “Amazon AutoRip,” which automatically gives customers free MP3 versions of any CDs they’ve purchased from Amazon since the launch of its Music Store back in 1998, as well as a growing number of new releases. The digital music is being placed in users’ Amazon Cloud Player account, the company’s answer to Google Music, iTunes Match, Rdio, and other… → Read More
Microsoft Open Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, just announced the launch of VM Depot, “a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure.” Azure, of course, already has a store that allows developers to deploy premium applications to its Azure cloud computing service. With VM Depot, Microsoft now also offers a service that’s similar to what… → Read More
Target today made a huge move to counteract the practice of “showrooming,” the term that refers to how consumers are using retail brick-and-mortar stores to go hands-on with items, which they then order online for less – often from competitors like Walmart and Amazon. The company announced that it is now extending its holiday price matching policy year-round, in order to match those prices offered… → Read More
Amazon today announced that its membership program Amazon Prime is now available in Canada, offering customers free two-day shipping for an annual fee of CAD $79.00 and one-day shipping at $3.99 per item. Amazon Instant Video and Kindle ebook lending, which are both major benefits to the U.S. version of the service, are not being included with the deal, despite similar pricing. In the U.S., it’s… → Read More
Amazon has inked another content licensing deal to beef up its Prime Instant Video streaming and download service for members of its pay monthly Prime service. The deal is with A+E Networks and means Amazon Prime members will be able to access prior seasons of “popular series” from the A&E, bio, HISTORY and Lifetime channels — including Pawn Stars, Storage Wars and Dance Moms. → Read More
Amazon’s Lab126, the secretive R&D group behind the Kindle, is apparently on a hiring spree, as noted by the EETimes, which speculates that the organization may be planning to spin out the lab as a stand-alone company. There are currently about 250 job openings available, with most based in Silicon Valley, but several in Hyderabad, India, one in Shenzhen, China and another in Tokyo. → Read More
Following Amazon’s end-of-the-year announcement touting its record-breaking holiday sales, the company today released figures for its third-party sellers marketplace, which also saw record sales growth. Although Amazon declined to provide hard figures, it says that sellers’ sales were up 40 percent year-over-year from 2011, and that sellers on Amazon sold “hundreds of millions of units worth tens… → Read More
Same-day shipping became the big retailer craze this holiday season. Why? As the New York Times points out, retailers are living in fear of Amazon.com and trying to match what the online retailer offers.
The fear factor — Wal-Mart once had a trance on retail. Now it’s Amazon.com. But it’s not just retail that has begun to show deeper anxiety about Amazon. Its’ the enterprise giants, too, that… → Read More
S3 is Amazon’s cloud storage service for developers, but you can also use it to host static web pages on the cheap. Amazon introduced this feature about a year ago and today, it is making it even easier to run basic sites on S3 with the addition of root domain hosting (using Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service) so users can access your site without specifying the “www” in the address and enhanced… → Read More
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even those in the lighthearted holiday fare you were planning to watch on Netflix, which has been down since 1pm PST for some customers. Netflix confirmed the outage with a tweet on its official channel, though Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft said on Twitter that the service is still working on… → Read More
Today, Amazon announced that it has brought Kindle Singles to the UK, with the Kindle Singles store now open for business this side of the pond. The company also says that in the U.S., “over” 4 million Kindle Singles have been sold to-date. → Read More
Amazon might enjoy only very thin to nonexistent margins on its Kindle hardware, according to most industry watchers, but it looks to be cooking up a plan to extend device sales revenue thanks to extended warranties. That’s according to trademark filings uncovered by GigaOM in a new report today. The wording of the application suggests Amazon is following Apple’s lead, hoping to replicate the Mac… → Read More
Amazon Studios, the online retailer’s department responsible for sourcing scripts and developing original video content, today announced the development of six original comedy series pilots. When production is completed, the series will air on Amazon’s Instant Video platform, which delivers video content like TV and movies to users’ set top boxes, phones, tablets, and computers.
Perhaps the… → Read More
Amazon has announced that Kindle e-readers are now available for sale in Brazil–but not from Amazon’s website for that country. Instead, the e-reader is available from electronic e-tailer Pontofrio.com.br and Livraria da Vila bookstores with a suggested retail price of R$299 (about $143). → Read More
Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) allows developers to create storage volumes that can be mounted by Amazon EC2 instances, among other things. While it was always relatively easy to move an EC2 instance to a new availability region the company’s network, moving EBS instances was always a bit more involved. Now, however, Amazon has introduced EBS Snapshot Copy. This new service, the company says… → Read More
Following last week’s move to bring its Instant Video service to iOS devices, Amazon is today expanding its content library yet again with two more licensing deals, this time with Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) and Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution. However, unlike some previous deals which see dozens or sometimes thousands of titles added in one fell swoop, today’s deals offer… → Read More
Editor’s note: Chris Potter is co-founder of ScreenLight, a cloud video collaboration service for video producers to review and approve video with their teams and clients.
Google recently rolled out a number of enhancements to its Cloud Platform products. With these changes, it’s clear that Google is aiming its sights directly at Amazon Web Services and other IaaS providers, such as Windows… → Read More
Amazon has announced a number of new platform expansions for its streaming media services today, including Cloud Player apps for Samsung Smart TVs and Roku set top boxes, as well as dedicated Amazon Instant Video apps for iPhone and iPod touch. The move indicates a strong push to get streaming media content on as many platforms as possible, which is the right move for a company now competing with… → Read More
The long-anticipated release of Kindle devices in China may finally become a reality. On Wednesday, the Kindle iPhone and iPad apps launched in the Chinese App Store; the Android version is also available for download. Meanwhile, Amazon China’s Kindle bookstore is now stocked with about 22,500 Chinese language titles. → Read More
Amazon today announced a new feature called Friends and Family Gifting, aimed at helping customers better organize their gift lists and gift ideas for others, generate Facebook-enabled gift suggestions, receive reminders, and share their gift lists out via email or to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. → Read More
The Kindle Paperwhite is Amazon’s latest ereader. After four generations of devices, Kindle users expected a slight incremental update from the previous Kindle Touch. But everything was improved in the Paperwhite, from the operating system to the display resolution. On top of that, Amazon added frontlighting. After two months of use, it remains the best reading device. → Read More
Eliyah Finkelstein and his team of Bagggers have a dream: to make it simple for users to shop. Their new product, baggg.it (I told them to maybe try for bagg.it or something a bit easier, so hopefully that extra g will go away soon) is a way for you to shop online by collecting items from disparate sites into separate bags. → Read More
Amazon today announced a feature meant to entice more Android developers into bringing their applications to Amazon’s Appstore platform: A/B testing for Android applications. What this means is that developers can now upload apps with different variables in order to experiment with features and changes, then iterate quickly after gathering learnings from their customer base. → Read More
Amazon today launched FreeTime Unlimited, a subscription service that offers movies, games, and books for the kids. The launch follows the recent software update to Kindle Fire, which introduced FreeTime, a profile system designed to restrict access to certain content. → Read More
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