Yesterday at a Wired conference, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos indicated what direction the Kindle device and the Kindle book store may be taking. Bezos said that he foresees the Kindle books and Kindle readers becoming two separate businesses.
“We are going to give the device team competition” by having Kindle books available on “mobile devices and other computing devices,” stated Bezos. Bezos did not specify which other devices Kindle books would be offered.
Amazon.com was even considering whether to offer the Kindle at a lower price with a monthly subscription price. But he preferred a one time higher price to keep things simple.
In 2000, Amazon.com signed a deal with Toys “R” Us to handle the online aspect of their business. Toys “R” Us handled the inventory and procurement. Amazon.com would make sure that Toys “R” Us’ website would run as seamlessly as Amazon.com. Every time a purchase would be handled on the website, it would connect to Toys “R” Us’ inventory system.
Toys “R” Us filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com in 2004 for breach of contract. This is because Amazon.com did not make Toys “R” Us the exclusive provider of toys on their website as agreed. In 2006, a judge ruled in favor of Toys “R” Us. Amazon.com finally settled with Toys “R” Us yesterday by paying them $51 million.
“On June 11, 2009, Amazon.com entered into a settlement agreement in its lawsuit with Toys “R” Us, Inc., and its affiliates, with terms that include, among other things, (i) a one-time payment from Amazon.com of $51 million in the third quarter 2009, substantially all of which was unanticipated and will be charged to ‘Other operating expense’ in the second quarter, (ii) dismissal of all claims and counterclaims, and (iii) mutual releases,” stated an Amazon.com filing with the SEC.
Some of the other retailers that is powered by Amazon.com includes Target Corporation, Egghead.com, Pitara.com, etc.
Peek is a device that works as an e-mail only handheld. The handheld is supposed to appeal to small businesses. This past March they were selling for $150 for a 5 pack. The device costs $20 per month after that.
For a limited time only, Amazon.com is selling the light blue version of the device for $20 (free shipping). No contracts are required.
The Peek has a QWERTY keyboard. Other colors gray and cherry cost $49.99. The Peek Pronto costs $80.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is suing Discovery Communications (NASDAQ:DISCA) for violating four e-commerce patents that relate to search and recommendation technology. In March, Discovery Communications filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com over the Kindle. Discovery filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com at the U.S. District Court in Delaware because of a patent around an encyption system used for e-books.
Now that the two companies are suing each other over patents, it will most likely be settled and perhaps a partnership will come out of it. This is what happened between Microsoft and TomTom.
The problem with patents is that a lot of them are too general and they are overly abused. BusinessInsider pointed out that Apple has a patent on multi-touch mobile UI technology which the Palm Pre has as a feature. But Palm has a lot of patents and Apple may inadvertently be violating them.
Let’s say that you own a Kindle and bought several books that are publicized by Random House. You will no longer have the ability to have the text-to-speech feature, meaning having the book read back to you. If you are blind, then you are getting shafted here.
Random House decided to have the feature turned off as part of an option that Amazon.com gave to publishing companies. The Authors Guild decided to protest against the text-to-speech feature shortly after the device was released. So far at least 40 books have had the feature removed including those by authors Stephen King and Toni Morrison.
For those of you that use Amazon.com for purchases, you may recall how obnoxious the URLs are for individual products. Back in 2002 Google even had to increase the number of URL characters that can be indexed. For example, below is the URL of a purple 14GB Apple iPod nano (4th generation):
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPod-nano-Purple-Generation/dp/B001FA1NF0/ref=br_lf_m_1000274311_1_2_ttl?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&s=electronics&pf_rd_p=471618271&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1401&pf_rd_i=1000274311&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1K9D0AM24F1SDP4RPBF7
A lot of this URL is just extra fluff for analytics and inventory purposes, but within that URL is an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). In the case of the URL above it is B001FA1NF0.
A developer by the name of Dustin has created a Mozilla Firefox plugin that automatically changes the URL from the big one above to a smaller one and still take you to the same page. The plugin is called AmazonLinks. The above URL is converted would be converted to http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B001FA1NF0/
Currently the add-on is experimental so it would require registering with Mozilla’s download directory.
Amazon.com has invested in an online cooking encyclopedia website called Foodista recently. The Series A amount was not announced, but rumor has it that the value is around $600,000.
“In less than a year, Foodista has created an exciting new way for food lovers everywhere to share their culinary passion online,” stated Jorrit Van der Meulen, the Amazon.com VP of Content Sites. Foodista was launched in December 2008 and is powered by user-generated content. The website also has a wiki that showcases cooking styles, recipes, etc.
Foodista also hired Van der Meulen (quoted above) and Tracy Sarich to their board of directors as part of the Series A announcement. Sarich is an Executive Director at the Children’s Trust Foundation.
Tim Arango, an editor at the New York Times wrote an article yesterday criticizing the Text-to-Speech feature built in to the Kindle. Arango stated that the Kindle pronounces Barack (rhyming with black) and Obama (rhyming with Alabama). Gawker likens the New York Times homepage to having the same type of content as the Digg homepage based on this article and suggests that the newspaper company is being on the defensive.
If the Times really is being on the defensive side here, they have some work to do. Criticizing a feature that may assist illiterate or dyslexic people understand what is written isn’t exactly the most politically correct target to go after. The text-to-speech feature is provided by Nuance Communications. The correct pronunciation has been added to the President’s name now. The correct pronunciation will be added through a wireless update to the devices.
“These things happen a lot,” stated Nuance executive Steve Chambers. “It’s not even considered a bug. If it encounters a word it has never seen, it approaches it almost like a kid, phonetically.” Now that Arango helped fix a glitch regarding the President’s name, I’m wondering if the Kindle can pronounce Arango correctly.
Amazon.com has just launched the third version of their Kindle e-book reading device. The screen is 9.7″ which is about two and a half times the size of the Kindle’s display. The DX has an auto-rotating screen, support for PDFs, and enough storage to hold 3,500 books (3.3GB memory). It is available for pre-order for a cost of $489.
Books can be downloaded in less than 60 seconds using a 3G wireless system. There are no monthly fees. The battery life is 25% longer and pages turn 20% faster. Like the Kindle 2, there is a Read-To-Me (text-to-speech) feature built-in.
The Samsung HMX-H106 is a small HD camcorder that features a 64GB SSD internal hard drive. It is able to store 12 hours of video with 1920×1080 pixels. It can be expanded further using an SD/SDHC card. It has launched in Korea already, but will not be arriving to the U.S. until May 22. Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for the camera at a price of $900. The camcorder is H.264 and features Schneider Kreuznach Varioplan HD lens. The lens has 10x zoom and has 37mm wide-angle focal length.
Amazon.com has bought Lexcycle, the parent company of Stanza. Stanza is an iPhone application and desktop software that lets users download and read e-books in different formats. Stanza works with PDFs, EPUB, XML, and eBook content protection technology used by Adobe. This interets Amazon.com because users can export ebooks to the Kindle.
Stanza has been used by over 1.3 million users across 60 countries. “We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition,” stated the website of Stanza. “Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.”
You may have noticed there tended to be some wild Alexa ranking fluctuations lately. For example, Techmeme went from being close to 100,000 Alexa to about 10,000 instantly. While many people don’t appreciate Alexa much anymore given the increase in other competitive services that assign a ranking to websites such as Technorati, Compete, Quantcast, etc. But I still prefer to use Alexa as a good way to determine the valuation of blogs and other websites. For example if I see a website that is over 20,000 on Alexa I can only assume it gets lots of hits and could make quite a bit of money based on its traffic.
Now Alexa has overhauled their system to give more advanced analytical information regarding the websites they track. For example on top of the countries that most users come from, there is contact info, related links, keywords, clickstream, and demographics. This is impressive considering that Alexa does not need websites to install a piece of code to track the analytics.
Other information provided by Alexa’s analytics system include daily traffic rank, reach, average pageviews per visitor, bounce %, average time spent on the site per visitor, and the % of users that arrive on the website through a search engine. All things considered, I still heavily judge how important a website is by its Alexa ranking. Alexa is owned by Amazon.com.
Oh the irony! Around the same week that Amazon.com was hit by a glitch in the system where the sales rankings for gay and lesbian books on the website were dropped, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded the company with a patent that they filed about 4 years ago. The patent is titled “Automatic identification of unreliable user ratings.” A hacker nicknamed Weev claimed responsibility for the Amazon.com sales ranking and reviews glitch.
Ironically, the Amazon.com patent for Automatic Identification of Unreliable User Ratings invention focuses on providing a feature that automatically detects product ratings from being gamed by flagging inappropriate content. All of the gay and lesbian novels in the Amazon.com system were flagged as inappropriate content by the glitch that the hacker put together. Once it was noticed, bloggers and Twitter users got upset and coined a term called “AmazonFAIL” in response to the situation.
Over this past weekend, Amazon.com removed the sales rankings for gay and lesbian books. Bloggers and Twitter users were furious so they coined a term, “AmazonFail.” Mark R. Probst first blogged about the incident after he received a message from an Amazon representative when he noticed that his rankings had disappeared from “Transgressions” and “False Colors” which are two new gay romance novels.
In the message from Amazon, they said that they exclude adult material from searches and best selling lists. However the “adult” classification was not being applied to an edition of “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds” according to Probst.
This past Sunday, about 20 Amazon employees were told that several novels were being improperly flagged as adult. AmazonFail was being more used than the words “Easter” and “Jesus” on Twitter.
“People got pulled away from their Easter thing when this whole thing broke,” stated an Amazon employee. “It was just a screwup.”
Amazon.com launched a store for Xbox LIVE. Through the Xbox LIVE store on Amazon.com, consumers will be able to buy Xbox LIVE Arcade games, subscription cards, and Microsoft points directly from the website. Whoever buys the goods from Amazon.com will receive a key code that can be redeemed by the console owner. Giving Xbox LIVE Arcade games as gifts to others was not previously available before Amazon.com opened this storefront. The Xbox LIVE Store on Amazon.com will also have customer reviews and a recommendation system built-in.
