Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Amazon.com

Paramount Bringing Hundreds Of Movies To Amazon Instant Video

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:21:53 +0000

Amazon.com’s Prime Instant Video service is continuing to grow as evidenced by a recent partnership with Paramount Pictures. Paramount is bring hundreds of new movies to the service. Amazon was able to add 3,000 new titles when they signed a deal with Discovery two months ago. Some of the big name movies being added as a result of the Paramount partnership include Clueless, Mean Girls, Braveheart, Star Trek, Top Gun, The Truman Show, The Italian Job, Forrest Gump, etc. Amazon Instant Video will now offer over 17,000 movies and TV episodes for unlimited streaming for Amazon Prime customers. Amazon Prime customers pay $79 per year, which also includes two-day shipping and access to the Kindle Lending Library.

Samsung Galaxy S III Pre-Orders On Amazon Available For $799.99

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:01:14 +0000

The official phone of the London 2012 Olympics known as the Samsung Galaxy S III is now up for pre-order at Amazon.com. The Galaxy S III is selling an international version of the phone for $799.99 in either blue or white. The blue version starts shipping on May 29th and the white one is expected to start shipping on June 1st. The S III will be compatible with AT&T’s HSPA network, but it won’t work on LTE. If you use T-Mobile, you likely won’t get HSPA because the S III lacks support for the 1700 band. The device also will not work on Sprint or Verizon since it is not a CDMA phone. Your best bet here is using AT&T without LTE data speeds.

Amazon.com Kindle Fire Welcome Screen Ad Price Starts At $600 Grand

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:44:38 +0000

The Amazon.com Kindle Fire is the company’s best selling device according to their Q1 release. The Amazon.com sales team is pitching ad space for the welcome screen. Ad agencies are being told that they would have to spend $600,000 for any package that includes an ad on the welcome screen. The ad would run for two months and includes inventory for Amazon.com’s “Special Offers.” For $1 million, ad agencies would get more inventory and would be included in Amazon’s PR push. However it is unknown whether the ad space is for the current or the next generation Kindle Fire reportedly arriving in July.

Amazon sells ad-supported versions of the Kindle that shows full-screen ads known as “sponsored screensavers” when users shut down the device. It is uncertain whether the Kindle Fire ads being pitched will appear in a similar manner or when the devices are powered on.

Agency executives have declined to participate because they have several concerns. Amazon has not guaranteed a number of devices that the welcome screen ads would reach. “It’s kind of an expensive buy to not get a guaranteed audience and measurement,” said a source with AdAge. “It doesn’t comply with a lot of our necessary planning rigor.”

This pricing level is similar to what Apple was demanding for iAd. Apple was asking for a minimum of $1 million deals when iAd first launched. Over time they cut the ad requirements from $1 million to $500,000 to $300,000 to $100,000.

Amazon Updates Cloudfront CDN To Handle Interactive Web Content

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:05:50 +0000

Amazon.com has updated their Cloudfront to handle dynamic and interactive web content. CDNs help websites get web pages faster by caching popular pages closer to likely user. CDN providers like Akamai have moved on from static pages to streaming video. Amazon has been working closely with Zynga for traffic bursts of their online games. Amazon’s CDN has only been dealing with delivered static and streaming content for business customers, but relied on Akamai for dynamic content. The company has now made several changes to Cloudfront to speed up delivery.

Amazon Cloudfront will now allow customers to serve content from multiple sources. Amazon Cloudfront works with Amazon’s own S3 storage service, dynamic content from EC2, and third party websites.

Akamai is still the dominant CDN company with over 1,700 CDN websites on their network compared to Cloudfront’s 30 locations.

Below is an infographic describing the new service:

Harry Potter Hitting Kindle Owners’ Lending Library On June 19

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:54:19 +0000

Harry Potter is one of the few book franchises that has stayed off electronic forms offered through Amazon or Barnes & Noble up until March. “Wizardry is on the way,” said a tagline on Amazon.com. Starting June 19th, all seven Harry Potter books will be added to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Amazon Prime will members will be able to borrow the books for free.

Amazon To Host Part Conference In Las Vegas This November

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:46:45 +0000

This November, Amazon will be hosting a conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas. The company has posted a “save the date” for the three-day AWS re:invent show on their blog. The event will run between November 27-November 29. Amazon recently launched the AWS partner program, which offers incentive programs. AWS re:invent is for developers that want to learn about AWS architecture, configuration management, performance optimization, etc. There will “all day coding challenges” as well. The conference will also be for Amazon to encourage startups looking for cloud infrastructure and enterprise IT. Sounds like another reason for nerds to take over the Las Vegas strip.

Amazon Kindle Fire Shipments See Massive Drop

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:41:09 +0000

The Amazon Kindle Fire has been looked at as being one of the biggest rivals to the Apple iPad. However the Fire did not have much of an impact on Apple’s iPad sales for the March quarter. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said that Apple is selling new iPads “as fast as we can make them.” Global shipments of the Fire has dropped from 4.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011 to less than 750,000 last quarter.

Analysts believe that the drop in worldwide market share from 16.8% to 4% could be because customers are postponing their purchases for a new version of the device or because the Fire was a well-executed holiday play, but the novelty has worn off. Another reason why the Fire has been dropping in sales is because the iPad 2 is being sold at a lower price. The iPad 2 is being sold for $399. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the iPad 2′s new lower price point has unlocked demand among price sensitive customers.

There is also a believe that the number of units shipped is not the same as the units being sold. There may have been a drop-off in shipments because of the large inventory build up in the first few months that the device has been in the market.

Twenty Percent Of Zynga’s Traffic Handled By Amazon

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:31:59 +0000

Before Zynga launched FarmVille in 2009, they did not have much trouble dealing with servers. When the game really gained popularity on Facebook, the company had a hard time maintaining their servers. “We couldn’t get power fast enough. We couldn’t get servers fast enough. We just couldn’t scale our infrastructure to match the needs of FarmVille,” stated Zynga CTO of infrastructure Allan Leinwand in an interview with Ars Technica. Zynga became dependent on Amazon’s cloud services to keep things running smoothly, but eventually they had to build their own data centers to have more control of their infrastructure. Zynga’s own data centers now handle 80% of their gamers and the remaining 20% is run by Amazon. Zynga would not have been able to scale without Amazon’s help like when Alec Baldwin revealed that he was addicted to “Words With Friends.”

Amazon Studios To Produce Original Sitcom Programming

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 02 May 2012 19:07:34 +0000

Amazon.com is getting ready to launch their own original sitcom programming. “Amazon Studios” has dabbled a bit in the movie business, but now Amazon Studios Roy Price said that the company is soliciting scripts for new productions via the Internet. An option will be paid $10,000 and there is $55,000 if a show gets produced plus royalties if Amazon likes the content. Amazon Studios will then make the shows and distribute them through Amazon Instant Video. Amazon Studios sends movie scripts to Warner Brothers.

comScore: Amazon Kindle Fire Now Has Over Half Of Android Tablet Market

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:27:38 +0000

Today comScore has announced the next generation of their Device Essentials service. Device Essentials is based on comScore’s Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) data, which uses census-level information from tagged web page content. Device Essentials includes reporting of brand and operating system for digital devices and Internet page views from computers, smartphones, and tablets. Using this new method of analysis, comScore has reported that the Amazon Kindle Fire has doubled its share of the Android tablet market in two months, giving them the lead in the Android tablet market. Check out the graph below to see a breakdown of the Android tablet numbers.