The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) should smack themselves in the head harder than the people who should have just had a V8.  The Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) subsidiary has finally decided to take connect videos to their database of actors, actress, movies, and TV shows. 

“IMDb’s mission has always been to be the world’s most comprehensive, user-friendly destination for all movie, TV and celebrity-related information, products and services,” stated Col Needham, founder and managing director of IMDb.com. “We’re excited to offer our users a simple online experience to watch
full-length movies and TV episodes for free. Our goal is to show our users every movie and TV show on the Internet for free on IMDb.com.”

IMDb will have shows like 24, Big Brother, CSI, Family Guy, Heroes, House M.D., The Office, 30 Rock, Chuck, Life, Lipstick Jungle, and The Simpsons.  These videos are provided by CBS, Hulu, and Sony.  Over 500 indie filmmakers are also providing content.  The videos are all available on the homepage.

IMDb launched in October 1990.  Amazon.com bought IMDb in 1998.  IMDb has 57 million visitors per month and 17 million registered.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has launched a new service called Video on Demand. This is a direct rival of Apple iTunes’ movie download services. This new service replaces Amazon Unbox.

Amazon Video on Demand has about 40,000 movies and TV shows in their library. These shows and movies are ad-free and can be streamed on Macs, PCs, and on Sony Bravia flat-screens. This service was launched in partnership with Sony.

Movie rentals are about $2.99-$3.99 and TV shows are about $1.99. All rentals must be watched within 24 hours.

(more…)

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) subsidiary IMDb is launching a musician database called SoundUnwound.com. SoundUnwound is a Wikipedia-style open source website. SoundUnwound utilizes tags and features Profiles, PR Photos, Discography, YouTube videos, band member profiles, Timelines, Shoutbox, and similar artists.

Below is a screen shot of the site:

Discographies can be filtered out by All Releases, Studio Albums, Singles, Compilations, Remix Albums, and Unknowns. Feedback can be sent to the webmasters from any page as well.

SoundUnwound pulls information from Musicbrainz, an open source CD database. Amazon partnered with Mechanical Turk for building SoundUnwound.

Related Links:
1. SoundUnwound
2. SoundUnwound Blog

The Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle is a highly underestimated gadget.  While many people scoff at it’s lack of color and it’s old fashioned design (it looks like a Nintendo Game Boy), consumers have found it highly useful.  Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) stated that he expects about 380,000 Kindles to sell in 2008.  This is equal to around the same amount of iPods sold during it’s debut year.

Mahaney also stated that he expects the Kindle to generate $1 billion in revenues for Amazon.com by 2010.  This would account to 4% of Amazon.com’s total revenues.  After the announcement about Kindle’s expectations, Amazon.com shares rose by about 10% and closed at $88.09.  The Kindle is currently sold at a price of $359.  The device works wirelessly and has a library of 150,000 books to download along with newspapers and blogs.

Amazon.com doesn’t sell the Kindle outside of the U.S.  Amazon’s first round of Kindles sold out in less than 5.5 hours of it’s release.  The Kindle downloads content through the Sprint EVDO network.

Related Link:
1. CNET
2. Amazon.com Kindle

Amazon.com’s Alexa Internet Inc. subsidiary company is usually very reliable.  However, there was a temporary outage that caused some concern to many online publications.  Between May 20 and June 3, Alexa was not reporting updated traffic rankings on a daily basis.

Alexa is best known for their toolbar, an add-on to browsers that report a site’s 3 month ranking and harvests data for generating rankings.  On May 23, Alexa updated their toolbar for Firefox 3.0.

Amazon bought Alexa for $250 million in Amazon.com stock in 1999.  Alexa Internet is based in San Francisco, Calif.

The Internet traffic measurement company, Alexa Internet, Inc. has been down for quite some time now.  Today is June 1 and Alexa’s Internet traffic rankings has not updated since May 19.

Normally, Alexa updates daily.  Why isn’t Alexa updating?  There hasn’t been an official announcement, but Allen Stern’s theory is that they might be pulling a Twitter.

There is a sign of life at the company.  I received a notification from the Firefox browser that Alexa launched Sparky version 1.2.1, a plugin that works with Firefox 3.0 in the status bar.

I’m assuming that Alexa’s actual Internet traffic rankings should be working again soon.  This post will be updated when I notice that Alexa starts becoming functional again.

Over the past couple weeks, there have been some interesting changes in the Alexa Top 10 Global sites.

Battle of The Searches With A Little Video Website In Between (1-5)
1.) Yahoo! has retained their #1 position.  They have millions of users chatting away on their Messenger software, watching Yahoo! Videos, listening to Yahoo! Music, and playing Yahoo! Games.  For Google or Microsoft to take away their user loyalty, it’ll be tough.  Microsoft seems this as being an issue, hence the $44.6 billion offer.

2.) YouTube is the most surprising of all.  YouTube surpassed Google, its own parent company.  This is an indication that everyone that uses the Internet all over the world is interested in video content now more than ever.  Google acquiring YouTube for $1.7 billion was such a bargain for the search company.  Considering that Yahoo! is worth $44.6 billion and they are one rank higher than YouTube, YouTube must be worth at least $30 billion today.  Video startups, this is your time.

3.) Live.com.  This ranking was inevitable for them since Microsoft switched a majority of their online services under this domain name.  Hotmail is now Mail.Live.com, MSN Messenger is now Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces is their free blogging platform, etc.

4.) Google dropped by 1.  They are still in the close running against Microsoft and Yahoo!, but YouTube made up for their fall.  Google could easily pass Live.com if they put YouTube under the Google.com domain, but that would just look ugly.  Imagine having a friend sending you an IM that says “Check out this video at http://YouTube.Google.com/watch?v=raGuLfAruNM” instead of “Check out this video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=raGuLfAruNM.”

5.) MSN.com is becoming the personalized arm for Microsoft.  MSN.com, a news portal also includes My.MSN.com, MSN Video.  MSN.com used to be #3, but is losing traction due to its sister-site, Live.com

The Social Networks And The Open Source Encyclopedia (6-10)
6.) MySpace.com is currently the world’s biggest social network and is owned by News Corp.  MySpace was originally an indie site made for musicians to connect with each other and was created by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe.  MySpace is now being used by News Corp. as real estate for advertisements.  News Corp. is also pushing the MySpace brand in major aired events like the Super Bowl.  During the Super Bowl, it was pointed out that advertisements can be watched on MySpace.com/SuperBowlAds

7.) Facebook is the $15 billion valuated social network that is now an exclusive advertisement partner with Microsoft.   Facebook quickly lifted the mat from under MySpace.  In the last 2 years, Facebook started allowing applications and allowed anyone to register for their site, characteristics that were very MySpace and Friendster-like.  But Facebook has grown rapidly on the Alexa top sites and those are a couple of the reasons.  Will Facebook beat MySpace within the next few months?  Very likely.

8.) Hi5 is one of the biggest social networks in Latin America.  The company has 98 million users and was founded by Ramu Yalamanchi in 2002.   Hi5 recently launched a Chinese version of their site and raised $15 million last month.

9.) Wikipedia is the most well-known use of open-source today.  Content on Wikipedia is all provided by its users.  The company was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.  By the end of 2007, Wikipedia had 9.25 million articles written in 253 languages.  Not too shabby for a 7 year old online encyclopedia.

10.) Orkut, another Google property founded by Orkut Büyükkökten is another social network. This is also the most visited web site in Brazil.  I bet if you go to an Internet Cafe in Brazil, at least half the people will visit Orkut at least once or twice, just like if you go to any college campus in America, you’ll see Facebook loaded on many of the screens in the libraries.  As a matter of fact, 55% of all Orkut’s traffic is from Brazil and 17% is from India.

The Alexa Blog is located at: http://awis.blogspot.com/.

Recently Amazon.com placed a job posting on Gamasutra indicating that they will be introducing a new feature for Video Game and Software Downloads.  This feature complements their Unbox service where users can download software, movies, and music right away.  A softawre development engineer position is open with The Software and Video Games Digital Technology Team at Amazon.  This Team is responsible for “digital distribution of software and video game products from the Amazon website, including the newly launched Amazon Software Download store.”

I did a search for PC Games on Amazon and it seems like they have a lot available for purchase.  Being able to download them right away would save consumers time in having to wait for the shipping and handling.  And with all the reviews available for each game on the web site, it helps consumers be able to decide whether certain games are the right fit for them.   More to develop on this story later.

[Information Source: Download Squad]

IMDb, subsidiary of Amazon.com has filed a trademark application for the term SoundUnwound.  The trademark would cover:
“Providing information regarding, and in the nature of, social networking services; online social networking services designed for people with a common desire to meet other people with similar interests; Social networking services for music enthusiasts.”

This means that IMDb may be interested in putting together a social network for those who are interested in music.  IMDb has a little bit of social networking built around their website in terms of discussions, reviews, comments, and the ability to put together a profile.  Building a network that revolves around music would put them in a market that complements the one that they are already in: movies.

IMDb could be building a music database that could be potentially drawing from the same data Amazon.com has.  Amazon.com has a full listing of all the tracks on almost every music album selling on their website.  Building a social network around that has potential to become successful.  Other music social networks out there include Amie Street and iLike.

[Found via Mashable]