Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Jeff Bezos

Amazon Hits $17.43 Billion In Fourth Quarter

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:08:59 +0000

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.

Amazon’s operating income dramatically dropped in this quarter compared to the same quarter the year before. Operating income in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $260 million compared to $474 million in the year before. Net income decreased 58% to $177 million.

“We are grateful to the millions of customers who purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season, making Kindle our bestselling product across both the U.S. and Europe,” stated Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Our millions of third-party sellers had a tremendous holiday season with 65% unit growth and now represent 36% of total units sold.”

Amazon.com Sold Over 4 Million Kindles This Month

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:33:55 +0000

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 top three spots of Amazon’s best seller list includes the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, and the Kindle. The Kindle Fire was the most gifted and wished for product on Amazon.com. Another random fact: Amazon customers also purchased enough copies of the “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson to create a stack that is taller than Mount Everest.

[TechCrunch]

Conan O’Brien Shows How To Fix The Kindle Fire [VIDEO]

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:36:53 +0000

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]

Car Request Servicer Uber Raises $32 Million From Menlo Ventures, Benchmark, Goldman Sachs, and Jeff Bezos

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:04:51 +0000

Uber is a private car service company that has raised $32 million in Series B funding from Menlo Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Jeff Bezos. Previous investor Benchmark Capital also participated in this round.

Uber was founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp. Kalanick previously founded a company called Red Swoosh that he sold to Akamai for $19 million. Garrett Camp is also the founder and CEO of StumbleUpon.

Kalanick made the funding announcement at Le Web on stage. They launched their European operations in Paris today. currently they have 60 cars on the street and they are seeing heavy demand. The company plans on using the funding to expand to two cities per month.

[TechCrunch]

Amazon Starts Selling Every Smartphone For One Penny Until Monday

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:28:26 +0000

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has become extremely aggressive when it comes to selling smartphones this holiday season. Amazon.com has started selling every non-iPhone smartphone for $0.01. The smartphones cost $0.01 with a 2 year contract. The smartphones that are on sale include the Motorola Droid Razr, the Samsung Galaxy S II, the Epic 4G Touch, the HTC ThunderBolt 4G, the Samsung DROID CHARGE 4G, the BlackBerry Torch 4G, etc.

Bezos was also aggressive in the development of the Amazon.com Kindle Fire tablet. The Kindle Fire currently sells for $199, which is $300 less than the iPad 2. Because of the aggressively low price, Amazon.com is expected to sell about 5 million Kindle Fire devices in Q4. The number of Android smartphones that have been activated has doubled in the last six months from 100 million to 200 million. During an earnings call in July, Google said that they activate 550,000 new Android handsets every day.

[Launch]

Amazon.com Reports That They Are Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 19 May 2011 19:18:02 +0000

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has published a press release today that reveals that their customers are buying more Kindle books than print books (hardcover & paperback) from them. Amazon.com started selling books in July 1995. The original Kindle was released in November 2007.

“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly – we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years,” stated Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. “In addition, we’re excited by the response to Kindle with Special Offers for only $114, which has quickly become the bestselling member of the Kindle family. We continue to receive positive comments from customers on the low $114 price and the money-saving special offers. We’re grateful to our customers for continuing to make Kindle the bestselling e-reader in the world and the Kindle Store the most popular e-bookstore in the world.”

[Amazon PR]

Is Amazon.com Making A Multipurpose Tablet? “Stay Tuned,” Says Bezos.

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 13 May 2011 06:57:34 +0000

In an interview with Consumer Reports, Jeff Bezos replied “stay tuned” when asked about Amazon.com possibly building a multipurpose tablet. “We will always be very mindful that we will want a dedicated reading device,” said Bezos. “In terms of any other product introductions, I shouldn’t answer.” [Consumer Reports]

Amazon.com Reports Higher Sales, But Lower Income In Q1

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 03:37:28 +0000

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has recently reported their first quarter 2011 financial information. They posted $9.86 billion in revenues for the first quarter, which puts them up 38% during the same quarter last year. But Amazon.com’s net income has decreased 33% to $201 million for the first quarter. During the same quarter last year, Amazon.com reported a net income of $299 million.

“In the last 90 days, we announced Kindle with Special Offers, Kindle Library Lending, Audible audiobooks on Kindle, Appstore for Android, Amazon for Windows Phone 7, Checkout by Amazon in both Germany and the U.K., a Kindle Store in Germany, Cloud Drive, Cloud Player, and Prime Instant Video – just to call out a few of the things we’ve been working on…We love inventing on behalf of customers and have never been more excited about the long-term opportunities,” stated Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.

The Kindle Store now has over 900,000 books available for purchase and millions of people are downloading Android applications from the Amazon.com Appstore.

In North America (U.S. and Canada), Amazon.com’s sales were at $5.47 billion, up 45% from the same quarter last year. International sales were at $4.39 billion, which was up 31% for the same quarter last year.

[TechCrunch]

Wal-Mart Acquires Kosmix For Over $300 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:10:27 +0000

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) has acquired Kosmix for over $300 million according to a source with AllThingsD. Kosmix is a social media platform company that has raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Jonathan Miller, and Ed Zander.

Kosmix is best known for developing TweetBeat, a website that monitors live events being talked about the most on Twitter. Kosmix will be rolled into a division called @WalmartLabs. Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. These two built and sold an e-commerce company called Junglee to Amazon.com in 1998.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Wanted To Hire Steve Jobs Back In 2000 As CEO

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:28:08 +0000

Back in 2000, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to hire Apple CEO Steve Jobs as their company CEO. Around then, Google’s investors said that their company needed some adult supervision through with an experienced CEO. John Doerr arranged interviews between Page and Brin with Andy Grove (Intel) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com). “…they would only consider one person: Steve Jobs,” wrote Wired senior writer Steven Levy. Jobs was too busy running Apple at the time and was gearing up to launch the first iPod. Eventually Doerr convinced the two to hire Novell CEO Eric Schmidt. [CultOfMac]