Andreas Weigend, formerly chief scientist at Amazon, has some ideas for how businesses can do more with their customers’ data. A few come from his old employer, while others stem from personal experience. Read more »
Many long-standing legal rules of engagement between publishers and consumers tilted the playing field in unexpected ways in the first quarter. The period also saw a major expansion in the amount and quality of original productions for web-based video platforms and a major move by chipmaker Intel to stake a claim in the digital living room. Read more »
Cloud computing is finally starting to add value to business, as those in charge of cloud within enterprises are moving from talking to doing. That much was very evident in the first quarter of 2013. Read more »
Folks looking to browse or buy on Amazon.com’s site are getting a blank page. Read more »
Although some believe the death of brick-and-mortar retail is inevitable, Mark Sigal, CPO of Unicorn Labs, thinks we all have a vested interest in seeing the industry reboot itself for the modern age. He outlines three paths for physical retail stores to avoid extinction here. Read more »
When Google launched the program, retailers, bloggers, book publishers and other website owners earned referral fees ranging from 6 to 10 percent of a book’s selling price, depending on the number of sales referred. That was a higher rate than the one offered through Amazon’s referral program… Read more »
Amazon has turned off the buy button on nearly 5,000 Kindle titles from distributor Independent Publishers Group after IPG refused to capitulate to Amazon’s demand for better terms… Read more »
Amazon says its new Simple Workflow Service (SWS) will run applications that are distributed between customer sites and Amazon cloud infrastructure, thus further blurring the line between the customer’s own data center and their chosen cloud. Read more »
While the iPad has solved the problem of too many paper magazines accumulating in my office, it has created another problem — me spending way too much on impulse magazine purchases. Here are my experiences with Zinio, the Amazon Kindle app and Apple’s Newsstand. Read more »
As the former CEO of OpenTable, Jeff Jordan can attest that most CEOs believe they intuitively know which product developments will make the biggest impact. In this article, Jordan makes a compelling case for letting data — and not the CEO — drive product development. Read more »
In a move that echoes Amazon’s purchase of Zappos back in 2009, Russian web store Ozon is buying online shoe seller Sapato.ru — a deal that Ozon CEO Maelle Gavet says will turn it into a “powerhouse online retailer”. Read more »
Zynga the newly public company behind the games played by gazillions of people, is relying far less on Amazon’s public cloud than it has in the past: 80 percent of its daily average users now run on Z Cloud — not on that other cloud. Read more »
If you didn’t think that Amazon was the king of cloud, just look at what other cloud companies announced Monday. Even paragons of the private cloud world are trying to cloak themselves in the glow cast by Amazon, which is squarely in public cloud realm. Read more »
Add Amazon Studios to the list of online video providers that could soon release some new original programming. The company is looking to hire creative executives to develop and produce original comedies and kids shows for online and traditional distribution. Read more »
Microsoft’s ambitious Windows Azure cloud is many things — it’s a full-fledged PaaS for developers. But beneath that, it is also a huge pool of foundational storage infrastructure for rent. And in that arena, it could be the only real competitor to Amazon. Read more »
As Amazon adds more content to Prime Instant Video, some expect the company could create a standalone service to compete with Netflix. But Digital Content Acquisition Head Brad Beale said Amazon will stay focused on the Prime bundle, at least in the near future. Read more »
Amazon continues to add content to its Amazon Prime Instant Videos service. It announced a deal with Viacom that will bring the number of titles available to more that 15,000, or three times the amount of content it launched the service with. Read more »
In its bid to stay the high-volume, low-margin provider of cloud storage, Amazon cut prices on standard S3 storage, according to the Amazon Web Services website. The price changes — good for the U.S. region — are retroactive to February 1. Read more »
99designs’ use of Amazon services to run its crowd-sourcing site is seen as a model for how small companies can leverage cloud services. The company’s site claims to handle hundreds of thousands of unique visitors and tens of millions of pageviews monthly. Read more »
Amazon is reportedly preparing to dip its toes into the brick-and-mortar retail market with its first boutique test store in the Seattle area. The move, which could face a lot of challenges, makes sense as Amazon extends its buying experience to retail stores. Read more »
As more companies put workloads on Amazon Web Services or other public cloud platforms, many are paying for more cloud than they need. That overprovisioning is the problem Cloudyn, an Israeli startup, is taking on with its new software as a service. Read more »
As more authors choose to do an end-run around the traditional book industry, publishers are going to have to try harder to defend their continued existence — self-published author J.A. Konrath says that most are tied to a “broken, outdated and increasingly irrelevant business model.” Read more »
Apple’s iPad still the tablet market leader in terms of sales, despite gains by the Kindle Fire, and a recent survey of tablet user satisfaction suggests it’s well-poised to stay ahead. Setting the standards for tablet-buyer expectations will help Apple continue to lead the pack. Read more »
The most striking thing about Amazon’s Q4 filing was that head count was up a whopping 67 percent to 56,200 full- and part-time employees, compared with 33,700 from a year ago, according to Amazon’s 8-K filing; 67 percent is a very big number — even for Amazon. Read more »
Sumo Logic emerged from the shadows on Tuesday with $15 million in Series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Greylock Partners and Shlomo Kramer, bringing its VC take to $20.5 million since April 2010. The company aims to help businesses monitor and protect their cloud infrastructure. Read more »
Apple is the king of the PC heap, so long as you consider the iPad among those devices. Research firm Canalys does, and its most recent look at PC sales, focusing on the fourth quarter of 2011, shows the PC market growing with the iPad included. Read more »
Microsoft announced a partnership with TechStars today that will allow it access to more than 400 startups around the world so it can sell its Azure cloud platform. But as Microsoft tries to sell startups on its services, can it compete against Amazon? Read more »
The Pew Internet and American Life Project shed light on one of the biggest challenges for retailers: more than half of U.S. adult cell phone owners used their mobile phone during the recent holiday season to get in-store help for their purchases. Read more »
The Kindle Fire in just a couple months has barely edged passed the Samsung Galaxy Tab as the most used Android tablet with 35.7 percent of application user sessions, according to Flurry. This is despite the fact that the Fire only hit the market in mid-November. Read more »
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is the latest example of a growing trend to move traditional computer activities to tablets and smartphones. AlwaysOnPC, a $25 mobile app, connects the Kindle Fire to a cloud instance of Fedora Linux with Open Office, Firefox, Chrome and integrated Dropbox support. Read more »
The top 20 Internet retailers changed their prices 30 times more often than their peers who had lower sales during the holiday season in 2011, according to BlackLocus, a startup that helps companies set competitive prices online. Its goal is to transform retail pricing with data. Read more »
Joe Coyle, CTO of global integrator Capgemini, sees a lot of cloud pitches from all the major technology vendors — and God knows they all have a cloud strategy. Here’s what he thinks of the current state of the market. Read more »
Joyent will use the cash to fund expansion of its cloud services and take on Amazon, the behemoth in that space. The company hosts its own public cloud services and sells infrastructure that customers use to field their own public or private cloud services. Read more »
Executives at NoSQL startups are keeping a brave face in response to Amazon Web Services’ new DynamoDB offering. They cite the new product as a validation, while generally dismissing the competitive ramifications of having Amazon now playing in the same pool. But is that confidence justified? Read more »
U.K. Netflix clone Lovefilm just announced an app for LG’s smart TV’s, and the company is also getting ready to launch on Roku’s media streamer once the device becomes available to Britons. Details on the Roku app are scarce, but it could launch in early February. Read more »
Somewhat lost in the greater story of Amazon Web Services’ new DynamoDB NoSQL database is that the new service runs atop a solid-state storage system. By abstracting those SSDs behind a NoSQL service, AWS is trying to prove that hardware presents greater opportunities than Infrastructure-as-a-Service alone. Read more »
It’s time to start placing bets as to how many iPads Apple will sell in 2012. Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu is starting things off with an estimate of 48 million, he said Wednesday morning. Wu says that number could end up being “conservative,” and I agree. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is adding a home-grown NoSQL database to its roster of cloud computing offerings. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels calls DynamoDB a “fully managed” NoSQL implementation the company built over the years and and tested by customers for a few months. Read more »
After publishing his first print book, photographer Trey Ratcliff started his own e-book publisher, FlatBooks. Why? Because the painful process taught him everything that’s wrong with the old model of publishing and opened his eyes to the near-limitless potential of e-books. Read more »
Amazon will let customers run micro-instances of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 for free on its EC2 service starting now, according to a new post to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog. Such try-before-you-buy tactics have helped Amazon win converts to its cloud platform. Read more »
