Items tagged with Amazon
What's the company that owns the Kindle brand to do? Why, buy a social reading engine, of course! Some deals just don't make sense (anyone recall HP buying Palm?), but others -- like this one -- couldn't be more perfect. Amazon's reading ecosystem has grown into its own monster, with the Kindle brand becoming nearly...
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Walmart hopes to put the hurt on Amazon by taking a page from its online rival and using in-store lockers to holder items ordered on the Internet. In doing so, customers will be able to get their hands on their purchased goods much faster than waiting for delivery. The mega chain said it will put lockers in about a...
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Amazon just greenlit an original TV series pilot based on the 2009 cult-comedy Zombieland, which is one of 13 pilots that will be made into full-season productions for its Prime Instant Video service. If that doesn't excite you, then you've obviously never seen Zombieland, or you're one of the infected and dead inside. Sadly, there's no cure...
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eBay announced that it's restructuring its fees for sellers on its online auction site, the timing of which has everything to do with Amazon recently raising fees for merchants on its e-commerce portal. As the price of doing business through Amazon goes up, eBay hopes to attract disgruntled sellers looking to jump ship. In order to do that,...
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It may have taken awhile for Android tablets to hit their collective stride, but these days there are a several worthy options. What's more, the prevalence of quality Android slates has driven down the cost of entry and forced vendors to lower the price on existing models. So it goes with Amazon and it's Kindle Fire HD 8.9" slate. The large...
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A pair of publishing groups -- the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers -- are against Amazon's plans to take control of new top-level domain (TLD) names that recently became available. The publishing groups argue that giving Amazon access to addresses that end in ".book," ."author," and ".read"...
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Google apparently isn’t going to be opening any brick and mortar stores anytime soon to compete with Apple and Microsoft on that front, and it appears as though that’s because the company isn’t interested in piddly local retail. Instead, the tech behemoth has its sights on a far greater retail prize...
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I doubt it needs to be said, but curing cancer is far from easy. Today, gathering required data isn't so much the problem, but rather having enough people to analyze it is. Wouldn't it be great, then, if there were a way for ordinary people to chip in? It might seem a little outlandish, given we're not all scientists...
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The music streaming market is already kind of crowded (and Spotify might have already perfected it, obviating the need for any more players anyway), but because Google is Google, the company is reportedly in talks with music labels to develop its own music streaming service. According to the Financial Times...
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Intel is trying to break into the streaming content business -- again. At the AllThingsDigital media conference today, Erik Huggers, vice president of Intel Media, told assembled journalists that the company has been hatching a new idea for the TV space. "We have been working for (the past) year to set up Intel media, a new group focused on...
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Much like it's possible to sue for anything these days, it's apparently not all that difficult to patent anything. While that's something of a stretch, Amazon has just nailed a surprisingly broad patent that could have an impact on the consumer electronics economy as a whole. At its most basic level, the patent -- which was awarded in the...
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If you're not yet ready to buy that special someone a diamond for Valentine's Day, perhaps an Android tablet is in order. It sends a message that you care on a level higher than chocolates and flowers, but without the clingy commitment that a diamond suggests. Lucky for you, Amazon has slashed the price of its Kindle...
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Wondering how Amazon seems to consistently offer excellent pricing on products? Because it barely makes any profit per item sold. In the company's latest quarterly earnings report, we're told that Amazon raked in an astounding $21.27 billion dollars in the past three months alone. No, there's no typographical error...
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Amazon on Thursday announced the acquisition of Ivona Software, a text-to-speech firm out of Poland. Ivona Software's voice recognition technologies are already utilized by Amazon's line of Kindle Fire tablets, and the company also provides text-to-speech products and services for thousands of developers, businesses, and customers around the...
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You’ll soon be able to buy in-game content with your Amazon account, thanks to a new Amazon service. Amazon is wooing game developers with a service for making in-app purchases on games for Mac, PC, and browser-based games. Game developers get the benefit of Amazon’s stable purchasing infrastructure, while gamers (who already have...
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Apple perfected a vertical market when it developed the iPhone, iOS, and the App Store, effectively walling off the garden, as it were. In fact, the only real loophole for evading the standards and practices of the App Store was the Safari Web browser, which of course flung open the doors to the Internet with a single...
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For years, brick-and-mortar retailers have been crowing about the unfair advantage Amazon has in the retail space in territories where it doesn't have to collect sales tax, and now that the playing field is starting to level, their sales are going up. Best Buy, for example, noted that holiday online sales increased in three states where Amazon...
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If you're still hanging on to your original Wii, or you managed to pick up a Wii Mini on a recent trip to Canada, you may be in luck. If you're an avid viewer of content from Amazon's Instant Video library, you'll be delighted to know that original Wii owners can now stream those movies, documentaries and TV shows...
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In an effort to make CDs more attractive, Amazon is adding a new service known as AutoRip. If you purchase an AutoRip CD through Amazon, the retailer will now give you a free MP3 version of that same album. The MP3 version will be delivered to your Amazon Cloud Player library so you can access it from your computer...
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Amazon continues to flesh out its Prime Instant Video service, which allows Prime members to watch streaming movies and TV shows for free. The online retailer signed a content licensing agreement with A+E Networks to add prior seasons of popular TV shows from A&E, bio, HISTORY, and Lifetime, Amazon announced...
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Don't tell Microsoft, but the top selling notebook on Amazon isn't running Windows 8, or any flavor of Windows for that matter. It's not running Mac OS X, either. Interestingly enough, the biggest seller in the notebook category on the world's largest online retail site is a Chromebook. Samsung's Chromebook, to be exact. It's Samsung's newest...
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For the second time in about a week, Netflix is experiencing an outage. On Christmas Eve, many users lost streaming capabilities and didn’t get it back until well into Christmas morning. Netflix pointed the finger at Amazon Web Services, and indeed it appears that an Amazon facility in Virginia was to blame. This time around, Netflix...
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