Amazon just launched the 14 pilot episodes for its original series showdown—six kids shows and eight comedies. Surely at least one of these programs will be good. Actually, we're pretty excited for a few of them, and why not check them out because they're free with your Amazon Prime account.
As president of Microsoft’s server and tools division, a $19 billion-a-year business devoted to databases, servers and other software products, Satya Nadella has a predictable cast of competitors to worry about. There is Oracle, VMware, SAP and a bunch of other makers of highly technical products that make everyday services like banking and airline reservations work, even if the software running them is invisible to most consumers.
But one of Mr. Nadella’s competitors – Amazon – is not like the others.
The Internet retailer is beloved by consumers for its seemingly infinite online selection of merchandise available for one-click purchasing, speedy delivery and Kindle e-readers. Out of view of most of the public, though, it has transformed itself into a huge player in the field of cloud computing. By renting capacity on the industrial-strength servers and beefy Internet connections in its data centers to anyone willing to pay for it, Amazon has become the virtual landlord of choice for technology start-ups, including the likes of Instagram and Foursquare.
Amazon is the definitive e-commerce monster and the go-to destination for buying anything you could want over the Internet.
Here are the tips and tricks we use to make our Amazon shopping easy, painless, and incredibly convenient.
Those of you that follow the tech world closely enough might already think tablets are so last year. It’s not impressive when they get a power upgrade, as those upgrades are expected, and the industry norm of iterative upgrades don’t raise the specs enough to warrant a raised eyebrow. The future of the tablet seems to just be a stronger tablet, but what if that future involved getting rid of batteries and processors? A new patent aims to do just that.
A recently published patent application, that happens to list Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as an inventor, describes a device similar to tablets that is essentially just a remote display. Imagine a tablet, but then you rip out all of its guttyworks — battery, processor, etc. — and leave the Retina-class display. What do you have? Perhaps the future of tablets, if this patent application ever becomes reality, at least. The tablet would work with the help of — you guessed it — cloud computing. A central box would handle all of the processing and beam it over to the device, and more amazingly, would also wirelessly power the device. (See: How wireless charging works.)
The current, entry-level Kindle Fire is looking a bit over-priced lately, and it appears Amazon has noticed, as according to a new rumor the company is working on a Kindle Fire tablet which will cost just $100. This is according to an anonymous source speaking to TechCrunch, who has told the site the cheap tablet will be more like the Kindle Fire HD than the non-HD original model.
Apparently, the screen will be another 7-inch panel, but the resolution will be upped to 1280 x 800, which is identical to the Kindle Fire HD. A Texas Instruments processor will keep the tablet up and running, but it’s not clear whether it’ll be the OMAP 4430 found in the standard Fire, or the OMAP 4460 with its improved 3D graphics performance used in the Fire HD.
A Kindle Fire HD costs $200 at the moment, making a comparable Kindle tablet priced at $100 look like a real bargain. Recently, Amazon cut the price of its Kindle Fire HD 8.9 tablet to $270 for the Wi-Fi model, and launched the device internationally; could this signify we’re about to get a new Kindle range entirely, and Amazon are attempting to get rid of the outgoing hardware?
Amazon may be expanding its Kindle Fire line of tablets with a new, low-cost version of the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, according to a report from TechCrunch. Allegedly, this new Kindle Fire HD will have a TI processor just like its more expensive stablemates, and it will have a 1280 x 800 pixel display like the current 7-inch HD model, which sells for $199. Amazon still offers the older version of the Kindle Fire, which has a lower resolution display, for $159.
It's not clear what will be different with this new lower cost model compared to Amazon's current tablets, or when it will be available for purchase. Amazon did recently announce a price drop on its larger Kindle Fire HD 8.9, slashing the price by up to $100 depending on configuration.
Last year, Amazon CEO and space enthusiast Jeff Bezos discovered the underwater whereabouts of Apollo 11's F-1 engines and announced his plans to bring them up to the surface. Now, nearly a full 12 months later, Bezos' team has recovered a number of F-1 engine parts and brought them out of the ocean — his blog goes into full detail, with a variety of great photos and a quick video showing the underwater recovery. Bezos says that his team recovered enough "major components" to put together displays of two flown F-1 engines. "We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface," Bezos writes. Unfortunately, many of the serial numbers from the recovered parts are missing, which will make determining which exactly Apollo mission the parts are from quite a bit more difficult.
The CIA is on the verge of signing a cloud computing contract with Amazon, worth up to $600 million over 10 years, reports Frank Konkel at Federal Computer Week.
If the details about this deal are true, it could be a game-changer for the enterprise cloud market.
That's because Amazon Web Services will help the CIA build a "private cloud" filled with technologies like big data, reports Konkel, citing unnamed sources.
The CIA is pretty closed-lipped about its business, as spies are apt to be. This is no exception. It won't confirm the deal or comment on it, so details are sketchy. But the contract is expected to be for a "private" cloud, which is not what AWS is known for.
eBay is debuting a new fee structure and incentives for sellers today in an effort to remain the most competitive commerce platform next to e-commerce marketplace Amazon. For the first time, eBay is launching free listings for both non-stores and stores on the platform, as well as simpler pricing.
Non-stores previously had fixed-price listings that charged $0.50 insertion fees, and then various “tranches,” or levels, of final value fees, depending on the amount of the item. Fixed-price, non-store, final-value fee tranches didn’t have a cap, either. Now, non-store pricing has one, flat final-value fee rate of 10 percent capped at $250. So the max that any non-store seller will pay is 10 percent of the transaction. Non-store consumer sellers are also allowed 50 free listings (no insertion fees) if they list auction-only or buy-it-now items. After 50 listings, sellers will be charged $0.30 per listings.
For merchants with storefronts on eBay, listing fees were previously required in addition to the monthly subscription charge. That’s changed with today’s announcement. Sellers get a discount for yearly subscriptions, and they also get up to 2,500 free listings per month with a choice of buy it now or auction depending on store level. Previously there were no free listings available to stores.
Buried in his big report on Apple's iPhone, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek reveals that Amazon and Microsoft are pushing back their plans for releasing smartphones.
There isn't much information from Misek. It's literally a two-sentence update: "Our checks indicate that Amazon’s phone seems to have been delayed. Also the launch of the Surface phone from Microsoft has been pushed out."
Both Microsoft and Amazon have been rumored to be developing their own smartphones to match their tablets.
Despite the failures of Facebook Credits, Microsoft Points, and the dot-com virtual currency Flooz, Amazon has decided to mint its own money. The ecommerce giant announced today that customers will soon be able to use a new virtual currency called Amazon Coins to buy apps and make in-app purchases in the awkwardly-named Amazon Appstore for Android on Kindle Fire.
Customers tend to dislike, nay abhor, the unnecessary process of transferring between their home currencies and virtual tender — just look at Microsoft, which forces customers to spend $1 to buy 80 Microsoft Points in order to make purchases in the Xbox Live Marketplace. With the Nintendo Points system, customers must buy a different set of points in order to purchase games for the Wii versus the handheld DSi console. Gamers loathe this practice, which at the very least forces them to do math before they can tell how much a rental or purchase truly costs.
Amazon's got a new way to buy stuff for anyone who has a Kindle Fire. Amazon Coins are a virtual currency that will come out in May, and work for all app and in-app purchases on the Kindle Fire.
The Coins will function exactly the same as real money, and developers will still get their standard cut. Amazon thinks it will help drive more business, and that makes some sense. Especially with apps and games for kids, it seems like a nice addition where you can maybe set up a Coins purse without allowing access to another payment method. And since Amazon will obviously never stop accepting real money—unlike virtual currency-only merchants like Xbox Live—you don't have quite the locked-in headache here, either.
If you go buying a text-to-speech software maker, you're not exactly going to stay quiet about it, right? Amazon this morning announced its acquisition of Ivona, the company behind the Kindle Fire's Text-to-Speech, Voice Guide and Explore by Touch features. Ivona, currently carrying the tagline "an Amazon company" on its site, offers its technology in 44 voices in 17 languages. It also works closely with organizations for the blind and visually impaired. More information on the acquisition can be found after the break.
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When current and aspiring tech entrepreneurs are asked who they look up to the most, they give the usual names: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe a few will mention Bill Gates. But, unfortunately, there aren’t many who mention Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.
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 access to over 33,000 titles right off the bat.
Other features you may have grown accustomed to on Amazon’s media streaming platform are also present, including Whispersync, which lets users pick up right where they left off on another device. Like, say, a Kindle Fire.
Every year Amazon puts out a press release with a bunch of goofy facts about its business.
It's free of hard facts about Amazon's business, so if you're trying to get a lead on its earnings, this is the wrong place to look. But, it's a fun read for some context about Amazon's sales.
This year it says it sold 27 million items on Cyber Monday, or 306 items per second, which is a record.
In this era where we think of “The Big Five” technology companies that dominate our computing experience, we tend to classify each company into its own distinct bucket. Facebook is the social giant, Apple is the runaway device maker, Google controls search and advertising, Amazon is the beast of e-commerce and content and Microsoft provides us productivity and business solutions. In reality, the lines between the five companies are not so clear cut.
Think of it like the Olympic rings logo as a Venn diagram. The top five companies share features with each other and compete in the same markets. For instance, Google versus Microsoft’s Bing. Or Apple’s iOS against Google’s Android against Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Facebook versus Google+. Apple’s Mac OS X versus Windows.
Could social sharing through Google+ and the rise of the Android give Google Play an advantage over iTunes and Amazon?
This infographic breaks down the online music market with a side-by-side comparison of the leading app stores.
Even with 500 million members, Google’s social network is still a limited playing field for Google Play, when Amazon and iTunes both link to Facebook, which has more than one billion users.
However, Google customers can share entire tracks with their friends on Google+, while iTunes and Amazon users can only “like” a track or share a link on Facebook.
Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are at each other’s throats in all sorts of ways.
It is an epic story of warring factions in a strange and changing landscape, a tale of incursions and sieges, of plots and betrayals, of battlefield brilliance and of cunning with coin.
The sequence of doorstop fantasy novels that George R.R. Martin began with "A Game of Thrones", and which HBO has now turned into a hit television show, provides the sort of immersive experience of an alien world that has always been popular among techies.
But these days the escapism they offer may be tinged with an eldritch sense of recognition. Silicon Valley offers few dragons or direwolves, but Mr Martin’s tales of a world that has lost its king echoes the reality of today’s technology industry, where the battle lines between the four large companies seen as dominating the consumer internet — Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon — are in furious flux.
