Sources with Good E-Reader has suggested that Amazon.com is opening a retail store to push for sales of the Kindle. The Amazon.com retail project is to gauge the market to see if a chain of stores would be profitable. Amazon.com’s store would be boutique and the shelves would be stocked with only high margin and high-end items. They will also stock the stores with cases, screen protectors, and USB adapters. The Amazon retail store would also give customers a way to physically buy books and sample e-books via WiFi. The store is expected to launch by the end of the year to capitalize on the holiday season.

Today Amazon.com has announced their financial results for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2011. Their net sales have increased 35% to $17.43 billion in the fourth quarter. The company’s operating cash flow increased 12% to $3.90 billion compared to $3.50 billion for the trailing twelve months in the year before. Free cash flow decreased 17% to $2.09 billion.

Actress Huong Hoang is suing Amazon.com subsidiary IMDb for revealing her age. She believes that IMDb violates her privacy and opened her up to age discrimination by revealing that she is 40 years old. She also changed her name to Junie Hoang because her Asian name is hard to pronounce. Hoang has been in small-budget movies such as Gingerbread Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver and The Custom Mary. She also played the voice of a character in the Street Fighter II animated TV series. Amazon.com asked a federal judge to force the plaintiff to reveal herself saying that the judicial process’ strong preference for transparency and its belief that proceeding openly would not subject Hoang to a measurable discrimination in the movie industry. The judge ruled that Hoang had to come forward with a new complaint under her own name or the case would be dismissed. The case has been refiled. [THR]

Amazon.com has released information about how many Kindles have been sold during the holiday season. In December alone, four million Kindles have been sold. “We are grateful to our customers worldwide for making this the best holiday ever for Kindle,” stated Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. The #1 and #4 best-selling Kindle books released in 2011 were also both published independently by their authors using Kindle Direct Publishing.

The Amazon.com EC2 service is considered the 42nd fastest supercomputer on Earth. What’s interesting is that the EC2 service is virtual and is built on top of the company’s Elastic Computer Cloud. EC2 is a web service that is able to set up virtual servers on an on-demand basis. Best of all, anyone can use it.

Amazon.com has announced that the Kindle Fire now has an over-the-air update that will help resolve many of the complaints that customers have had. Kindle Fire owners will now be able to select and remove items from the carousel. The WiFi system now supports passwords and is more robust. The touchscreen response has been improved as well. The Kindle Fire Update 6.2.1 is expected to arrive soon or you can force an update by doing these steps:

Comedian Conan O’Brien has put together a funny skit about how to go about fixing the Kindle Fire using an actor playing Jeff Bezos. The actor makes some excellent suggestions such as putting duct tape over the power button. I’ll let you judge the rest in the video above. [Fortune]

Looks like Amazon.com was not the only interested buyer in RIM. Microsoft and Nokia “flirted with the idea” of teaming up and buying RIM as well. The idea did not get any further than casual talks between senior executives at both companies. It may have even been a joke according to sources with the Wall Street Journal. I would not put it past Microsoft to considering how much they are investing in Windows Phone to gain traction. [WSJ]