Amazon Launches A 3D Printing Store With Customizable Goods

By Darrell Etherington at TechCrunch:  


Amazon has launched a new store for 3D-printed goods, which include items that can be customized to change their size, color, material and even aspects of their design. The store covers a range of types of products, including jewelry, electronics, toys and games, home decor and kitchen supplies, and items are supplied by a number of partners including Mixee, Scupteo and 3DLT.

Amazon is touting this as the debut of a new way for the ecommerce giant to offer even more specialized inventory that can better cater to specific customer tastes. “The introduction of our 3D Printed Products store suggests the beginnings of a shift in online retail – that manufacturing can be more nimble to provide an immersive customer experience,” said Amazon Marketplace Sales director Petra Schindler-Carter, in a press release announcing the new storefront.

Along with the launch of the store, Amazon is introducing a new personalization tool for customizing some of the 3D-printed designs, which opens up a widget that lets you choose from a number of basic designs, pick the color and finish of your plastic/metal material, and preview what it will look like with a 360-degree 3D preview. You can also tweak individual aspects of the design with some items, including thickness and other dimensions.

Prices on items vary, but the most affordable tend to fall into the $30 range, and they go upwards from there depending on size and material.

The introduction of the store does indeed mark a potential turning point in the sale of online goods – it means the largest online retailer in the English-speaking world is endorsing a means of direct production and selling that could change how future products are conceived and planned. One-offs and small runs are much more affordable via 3D printing, so theoretically the sky’s the limit on the range of things customers could order, provided 3D printing technology keeps evolving.

It’s worth noting that Amazon only sells a set catalogue of 3D-printed items so far – it hasn’t yet offered a way for customers to upload their own design and have them printed as does Shapeways, for instance. Amazon likely wants to maintain some kind of quality control and not have to concern themselves with educating customers about the ins and outs of 3D printing custom designs, however – and this doesn’t necessarily mean that refinements in the process wouldn’t open the door to this kind of thing in the future.

Amazon Asks FAA To Allow Shipping Drones

By Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch:   


Amazon has petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for exemption from rules barring it from testing drones in the United States.

The online shopping company made waves recently by showing off small unmanned aircraft that it claims will be able to deliver parcels to consumers in 30 minutes. The drone delivery service, called Prime Air, could greatly speed up Amazon’s delivery times, creating a competitive advantage for it over other digital marketplaces and lowering the time-threshold advantage that traditional stores still enjoy over their online competition.

The 10 Coolest Things About Amazon's New Fire Phone

Via TheVerge:


Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced his company’s first smartphone in Seattle on Wednesday, the Fire Phone, by first turning to a curiously ironic metaphor: a bucket of water. “You can fill a bucket with an eyedropper, if the bucket doesn’t leak,” Bezos said, striving to convey Amazon’s success at getting and keeping customers for its Prime subscription service. Now those Prime customers have a new reason to immerse themselves deeper into Amazon’s bucket of devices and services: a smartphone designed just for them.

The Fire Phone is designed for Amazon’s “most engaged customers,” Bezos said, and it shows. Like Amazon’s other devices in the Kindle family, the Fire Phone’s plain-looking body and sharp screen hide some decent — if not quite industry-leading — computing hardware. But it’s in the mix of the phone’s hardware and software that Amazon tries to stand apart, offering subtle 3D effects, unique gestures for using the phone, and gallons of Amazon-branded video and music features that work with its other devices. Starting at $199.99 on AT&T with a free year of Prime membership, it’s clear that Amazon wants the Fire Phone to rise to the top of an already crowded sea of competitors.


THE PHONE
Bezos introduced the Amazon Fire Phone by listing its hardware specs and some unique Amazon software twists. The Fire Phone has a 4.7-inch display, which Bezos claims is "perfect" for one-handed use and came after trying smaller and larger sizes. Amazon says its new phone is bright — and bright enough to read books outside. The Fire Phone body has Gorilla Glass on both sides; aluminum buttons, including a dedicated camera button; and a USB connector that Bezos said Amazon "obsessed" over, to avoid wobbling when connecting. Inside is a quad-core 2.2 GHZ processor with 2GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 graphics processor. The 13-megapixel rear camera includes built-in optical image stabilization, and the phone has two dual-stereo speakers arranged in landscape mode.

YES, BUT HOW MUCH?
When Amazon makes any hardware, there’s speculation that it will undercut competitors to get its services into users’ hands. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the Fire Phone: a 32GB model is selling at the standard $199.99 on contract with AT&T. $299.99 will get you a 64GB phone, but if you want to buy any model outright, you’ll pay at least $649. If you do buy one, though, you’ll get 12 free months of Prime, whether or not you’re an existing Prime customer. As rumored, it’s also exclusive to AT&T, a decision that will either be great for AT&T or terrible for the Fire Phone. Either way, you can pre-order the phone right now, but it won’t be shipping until July 25th.

SHARP CAMERA, UNLIMITED STORAGE
The Fire Phone doesn’t skimp in the camera department, and it even has its own dedicated camera button. The Fire boasts a 13 MP camera sensor, and a fast f/2 aperture lens. There’s also optical image stabilization, like you might expect. Test photos shown onstage looked impressive, though we’ll reserve judgment until we can test the Fire’s camera ourselves. Setting aside the device’s camera, viewing photos should also be a good experience. Amazon’s claiming that its phone is the brightest phone ever. And don’t worry about photo storage. Amazon’s offering to store all of your photos and videos for free in Amazon Cloud Drive. It’s not yet clear if the Fire will store your photos in full resolution once they’ve been uploaded to the cloud, however.


INSTANT TECH SUPPORT
As part of its mission to pack every single Amazon feature into the Fire Phone, the company is adding a feature from its Kindle Fire HDX tablets: Mayday. Mayday, launched last year, is a free 24 / 7 support line that Amazon promises can be reached within 15 seconds from the device. On the Fire Phone, it’s available over both Wi-Fi and 3G / 4G connections. Amazon is trying to create a seamless experience for its products, but the infomercial-like demo video beforehand drove home one idea: using a phone is really, really hard, and you’re going to need someone to hold your hand.


FIREFLY RECOGNIZES EVERYTHING
Firefly is so important that it gets its own button on the Fire phone. With one press, the Fire phone boots up its camera to see what you’re seeing and listen to what you’re listening to. If Firefly sees a barcode, it will pop up a button to buy the item on Amazon. If Firefly hears a song Shazam, it will prompt you to check it out on Amazon Music or buy tickets on Stubhub. If Firefly hears Game of Thrones, it will show you the show’s IMDB entry, and then of course offer options to buy or rent more episodes. Firefly even recognizes book covers and art. The service recognizes 100 million items.


DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE, LIKE 3D BUT NOT QUITE
Amazon’s long-rumored 3D phone display is actually not quite as eye-popping as leaks suggested. Instead, Dynamic Perspective is more of a motion-control system for the Fire Phone, with some added visual effects. Dynamic Perspective lets you tilt the Fire Phone in different directions to see more information from apps, play games, resize images, scroll through webpages without using your fingertips, and most impressively, move various "layers" of the user interface around as though they were physical objects in front of you. The effect, which varies in intensity depending on the app, relies on motion sensors and cameras that track your head in real-time to serve up the correct viewing angles.


FIRE PHONE TRACKS YOUR HEAD
So, how does that sort-of-3D display work? By putting cameras all over the phone to figure out where your head is, basically. Bezos described a long process of building a camera setup that would be able to reliably recognize a head and sense its depth in order to redraw images quickly and deliver something akin to glasses-free 3D. In addition to the main front-facing camera, four more depth-sensing cameras ended up on the front corners of the phone. Only two of those are required to actually produce a 3D image — the extras are for when your hand covers one or two of them. These cameras are also equipped with infrared light, which means they’re supposed to still watch you in complete darkness. And the final step was a long process of machine learning, so the phone can tell your real face from, say, a portrait on the wall. So, to sum up, Fire Phone is always watching. Let’s at least hope we get a cool new feature, and not just a gimmick, from it.


ACTIVE WIDGETS
Amazon’s new phone OS lets you pin apps and other content to your home screen, like a book or calendar app. But there’s also a carousel of apps you can swipe to, like on the Kindle Fire, that shows a tiny preview of each app underneath its icon. These tiny snippets are interactive — a calendar app would let you see events at a glance, and an email app might let you dive in and triage a few emails without having to open the email app. Amazon demoed a Zillow widget that showed nearby homes. The company is letting developers build their own Active Widgets, so expect to see a lot more of these bite-sized interactive app snapshots soon.

BlackBerry to Bring Amazon's Appstore to BlackBerry 10

By Ben Woods at TNW:  


BlackBerry has just announced a deal that will see more than 200,000 Android apps made available for BlackBerry devices via the Amazon App Store when the new version of BlackBerry’s operating system arrives later in the year.

According to BlackBerry, popular apps like Groupon and Netflix will be available for direct download from Amazon’s App Store, although BlackBerry 10.3 users will still obviously have access to the BlackBerry World app store too.

Before now, some Android apps have been available to run on the BlackBerry 10 OS, but installing them wasn’t a simple process. Now, users will have a far simpler, and wider, range of apps to choose from once the 10.3 update arrives “this fall”, according to BlackBerry.

In addition to offering apps from the Appstore, BlackBerry said it will also be offering third-party video and music services available via Amazon’s store. Perhaps a little unsurprisingly then, it also said it is shutting down its own music and video sections of its own store on July 21, but that previously downloaded content will remain accessible

This is Amazon’s Kindle Smartphone

By Zach Epstein at BGR:


After years of development, Amazon is finally close to unveiling the first of several own-brand smartphones.

At a distance, Amazon’s upcoming flagship phone looks much like any other touchscreen phone on the market. But the company has spent years creating a unique and, at times, novel user experience that has two main focuses: Amazon products and services, and a custom 3D interface unlike anything we have seen before on a smartphone.

And so begins the story of Amazon’s first smartphone.

Recent reports have shed some light on Amazon’s plans to enter the competitive smartphone market with an own-brand handset. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the company’s first crack at a cell phone will be announced in June and released in the third quarter. The report also claimed that the phone features a glasses-free 3D interface.

An earlier research note sent to investors by plugged-in KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo revealed a few key specs, including details about several internal components Amazon plans to use in the device.

BGR has spoken with multiple trusted sources and confirmed much of what has been reported thus far. We have also exclusively learned many new details surrounding Amazon’s upcoming smartphone, which is set to debut in the coming months.

Finally, we have obtained exclusive photos of a prototype of the unreleased device, giving the world its first look at Amazon’s hotly anticipated phone.

As can be seen in the images, the device is covered by a protective shell intended to prevent people without authorization from seeing the physical design of the phone. Some areas of the photos have also been blocked or otherwise obscured by BGR.

In the past, BGR has exclusively reported early unannounced details surrounding numerous Amazon products including Kindle eBook readers, Kindle Fire tablets, Amazon’s current-generation Kindle Fire HDX tablets and, most recently, the Fire TV.

Amazon’s first smartphone is one of at least two handsets the company is currently working on. We’re told that the second, an entry-level device that will feature lower-end specs and a very competitive retail price, will launch sometime after the phone pictured here.

The device set to debut in the coming months will be a higher-end model that has been in development at Amazon for several years.

According to details from multiple sources, Amazon’s first phone will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and it will also include 2GB of RAM. It will run a heavily customized version of Google’s Android operating system similar to the version that powers Amazon’s tablets.

Our sources state that the phone’s display will measure 4.7 inches diagonally, making the handset’s screen a bit smaller than recent flagship offerings from Samsung and HTC. The handset also have comparatively low pixel density, featuring 720p HD resolution compared to 1080p HD resolution on many rival devices.

Apple’s upcoming iPhone 6 is also rumored to feature a 4.7-inch screen with Retina resolution that falls short of full HD.

It’s not clear exactly what Amazon plans to call its first phone.

The most novel aspect of Amazon’s upcoming smartphone is its 3D software interface and the hardware mechanism that enables it.

Our sources state that the new Amazon phone includes a total of six cameras.

The main rear camera is thought to feature a resolution of 13 megapixels, and the phone also includes a standard front-facing camera for video chats as well as Amazon’s Mayday customer service feature.

Beyond those two units, the device houses an additional four front-facing cameras that work with other sensors to facilitate the software’s 3D effects. One source tells us these four cameras, which are situated in each of the four corners on the face of the phone, are low-power infrared cameras.

The device’s extra cameras are used to track the position of the user’s face and eyes in relation to the phone’s display. This allows Amazon’s software to make constant adjustments to the positioning of on-screen elements, altering the perspective of visuals on the screen.

The result is a 3D experience without the need for 3D glasses or a parallax barrier in front the LCD panel like the solutions used by the Nintendo 3DS portable video game console and HTC’s EVO 3D smartphone from 2011.

We’re told there are several areas of the phone’s software that utilize Amazon’s glasses-free 3D effects.

Since the 3D interface is the phone’s biggest point of differentiation, Amazon has tried to use its new technology in as many areas as possible. In fact, right from the start on the lock screen, Amazon’s new phone will include several special wallpapers with perspectives that shift as the user tilts the phone from side to side as well as up and down.

Moving past the wallpapers, Amazon’s 3D effect will also apply to application icons and other core elements of the user interface. Several main apps will be compatible as well; for example, we’re told that moving the phone while using the maps application will change the view of various objects on the screen.

Another smart use for the phone’s 3D effects is across Amazon’s various stores, such as its book store, music store and the main Amazon digital market. By shifting the position of the phone, users are able to see three-dimensional product images at different angles to reveal surfaces that cannot be seen in 2D photos.

One source tells us Amazon is also working to recruit big outside developers in an effort to have a number of key third-party apps available at launch that take advantage of the phone’s 3D interface. Amazon will make a set of APIs available to third parties and it will also assist them with development in other ways, we’re told.

A report late last week from Re/code also said that Amazon is working to get third-party developers on board.

Our sources are not clear on exactly when Amazon’s first smartphone will be released, though we’re told the company may be targeting an announcement in the next two to three months and a launch sometime late this summer. We were also told the phone will initially be available only in the United States.

Amazon Fire TV: The Things You Need to Know

By Mashable Team:


Amazon dove headfirst into the video hardware business on Wednesday with Fire TV. The online retailer hosted a product launch event in New York City and Mashable covered it live.

Below are the most important highlights

Five things you need to know

1- Amazon launched into the video hardware business on Wednesday with a set-top device.
2- You can buy it for $99.
3- The device is Amazon's Trojan horse into your living room -- it's all about the content.
4- Its $40 controller, and variety of available games, means it could rival to traditional gaming consoles.
5- Gary Busey is the product's spokesperson because why not.


Why Amazon is releasing a set-top box

Apple TV's pointer makes it frustrating to use. Roku's search needs work. Chromecast has "poor performance."

That was the message Amazon delivered at a press event on Tuesday before it announced plans to release a set-top box of its own called Fire TV. The device has dual-band WiFi, 2GB of RAM and voice search, among other features, and goes on sale Tuesday for $99.

The new product, which was originally rumored to be scheduled for last year, may give Amazon more footing in customers' living rooms and pit the company against the likes of Apple, Google and Roku. As with pretty much everything Amazon does, though, it's not really about the hardware — it's about what you can buy through the hardware.


Hands on with the new device





Gary Busey is Fire TV's spokesman


Amazon has found the face of its ambitious new set-top device, and that face is Gary Busey's. In a video that now appears on Amazon.com, Busey says, "If you’re like me, you like talking to things. It’s frustrating when things don’t listen. Especially high-tech things."


What sets the Fire TV apart

Amazon introducing a new living room game console option pretty much blows up the industry.

If this device costs, say $99, it will be game over for Sony and Microsoft in their attempts to lure causal gamers to their platforms. Consumers like simplicity and this little box may offer it. Plus, Amazon has trumped Apple, which, thanks to its vacillating in the state of their AppleTV product has missed a huge opportunity.

It's not the video content or even the Amazon-extras like Free Time and X-Ray mode that sets Fire TV apart. It’s apps and games. This is what makes a Fire TV different and unique from a Roku. Again, this reinforces our earlier remark that Amazon wants to be on as many devices as it can, but it also wants to integrate on its own devices when possible. In this case, that’s about apps and games.

With Fire TV, Amazon could become the first company to successfully bring mobile apps en masse to the TV. Google TV couldn’t do it. Apple hasn’t done it. Amazon will


Amazon one-ups the gaming industry

The Fire TV is not just taking on the Roku, it is effectively taking on the Ouya and GameStick and pretty much every gaming console on the market. The big advantage it has over those devices is a huge native library of games made for the Fire TV.

“We wanted to build a streaming media device that allowed customers to play a variety of games at affordable prices,” Mike Frazzini, the head of Amazon Games Studios, announced on Wednesday.

By next months thousands of games will be available for customers to play, and customers can use the Fire TV remote. They can also use an app for phones or tablets as a controller, and a dedicated game controller available as an accessory.

We’d heard rumors that there would be a streaming game component on this device, and assumed it might mean non-Android games. It looks like instead, this is a hybrid, wherein, the game is streamed and downloaded at the same time, but not necessarily permanently stored on the device.


Voice Search FTW!

Amazon is highlighting its search feature: voice search. The idea of solving the set-top-box search problem is pretty cool. The microphone is in the remote. No more shouting. This is why the connection is Bluetooth, not Wifi. It is instantaneous. The microphone is in the remote control, which is connected from Bluetooth. Voice search works anywhere in the system.

You can search “princess movies” in genre, as an example. And we will.

All that power, by the way, helps with voice search, but does not account for the separate GPU. I'm waiting for the gaming portion of this presentation. What if, for example, they made a deal with Steam? Could be a game-changer.




Read the full story >>

10 Best Comparison Shopping Engines to Boost Your Sales

By Mark Hayes at Shopify eCommerce Blog:


Comparison shopping engines (CSE's) give ecommerce merchants the opportunity to attract new customers, increase sales, and go head-to-head against the competition.

This is an important guide that will explain what comparison shopping engines are, tell you the 10 best, and show you how to get your products listed.


What are Comparison Shopping Engines?

Comparison shopping engines collect product information, including pricing, from participating retailers and then display that collective information on a single results page in response to a shopper's search query. In this way, shoppers can compare each retailer's price, shipping options, and service on a single page and choose the merchant that offers the best overall value.

Example: Lets say I want to buy a Rubik's Cube and want to see what my options are. I go to Google Shopping (one of the most popular CSE's around) and do a search. Here's what comes up:

For ecommerce merchants, comparison shopping engines are an opportunity to put your products in front of very interested buyers. These are not people perusing a virtual storefront like a window shopper at the mall, rather CSE users typically have already made the decision to buy and are simply looking for the best deal.



10 Popular Comparison Shopping Engines 

1. Google Shopping

Google Shopping is probably the largest and best know comparison shopping engine. Products submitted to Google Shopping will also be displayed on standard Google search results and are integrated with Google's pay-per-click platform, Adwords.



2. Nextag

Nextag has been in operation since 1999 and has as many as 30 million visitors each month. Nextag is consistently a top performer for traffic and conversions on CPC Strategy's quarterly review of leading CSE's. You can list products, event tickets, real estate, and even travel bookings.



3. PriceGrabber

In addition to presenting products on its site, PriceGrabber has a market research tool, Market Report, that allows retailers to track consumer purchase and product pricing trends. When you list your products on PriceGrabber, you'll also be listed on Yahoo Shopping which is a nice added bonus.



4. Shopping.com

Shopping.com is part of eBay's family of companies and is another great channel for merchants to put their products in front of perspective buyers. Shopping.com also partners with The Find, another CSE on this list.



5. Shopzilla

With about 40 million month visitors and a pedigree dating back to 1996, Shopzilla is one of the best choices for ecommerce merchants looking for some extra sales. This comparison shopping engine has an impressive 100+ million products listed.



6. Become

Become is another leader in the CSE space, allowing thrifty shoppers to compare prices, read or write product reviews, and simply search for the best possible online shopping deals.



7. Bing Shopping (Free)

Bing Shopping offers free product listings that appear directly on Bing search results pages. Bing Shopping has earned a lot of consumer praise for doing an excellent job of providing consumer friendly results. The service does not accept new merchant feeds during high-traffic shopping seasons, so get started early with Bing in 2013.



8. Pronto

With about 70 million product listings sorted into various retail verticals and millions of visitors monthly, Pronto certainly merits consideration for any retailer's 2013 CSE campaigns.



9. The Find (Free)

In addition to showing product and price comparisons, The Find can help shoppers discover new products with personalized results.



10. Amazon Product Ads

Amazon isn't technically a comparison shopping engine, but they work in a similar fashion. When you register for Product Ads you can upload your products manually or via FTP. Amazon will then create ads for your products using the information provided in your product file. When you set your budget, your ads will go live and you'll pay-per-click.



The Cost of Comparison Shopping Engines
Although some of the CSE's are free, most are going to charge you per click-through or per action. With pay-per-click, sellers pay a set fee or bid each time that a potential customer clicks on that merchant's link. Here's an example using Amazon:

In a pay-per-action model, retailers will pay a percentage of the value of a sale made as a result of being listed on the CSE. No one pricing model is best, so choose which works best for you.






Via Shopify Blog.

Amazon Planning A Free, Ad-Supported, Video-Streaming Service

By Jay Yarow at Business Insider: 

Amazon is planning to release a free video-streaming service, Greg Bensinger at The Wall Street Journal reports.

The video service will focus on television shows, making this an attack on traditional TV, as well as Hulu and Netflix, which both stream TV shows.

It will also have music videos, Bensinger reports.

This is a major strategic change for Amazon. Previously, to watch video on Amazon, consumers either paid for movies and TV shows, or with a required $99 a year Prime membership, got access to certain programs.

Amazon offering a free, ad-supported video streaming service sounds like one of those things that is radical, but the business model is an old one. Basically, Amazon is launching its own broadcast TV network — it just happens to run through the Internet.



Read the full story >>

New Samsung Ad Burns the Kindle, Surface and iPad

By T.L Stanley at Mashable:

Oh, you poor Luddite, with your keyboard, battery dock and mouse. You call that a tablet? It’s positively Neanderthal. And that iPad? Why can’t it do two things at once? Let’s not even get started on the Kindle, because that dinosaur only lets you read books.


That’s the tart, smug and rather effective message in a new ad that will air on national television for Samsung's Galaxy Tab Pro on March 19. The spot not only shows the souped-up tablet's capabilities (multitask, mainly), but also casts aspersions on other leading devices on the market.

The commercial, which advertises a trio of new Galaxy Pro tablets, comes from agency McKinney. It continues the finger-wagging at competitors for having bulkier products with lower-quality visuals, a quality present in its previous ads. Its tagline: "It can do that?"

People who use lesser gadgets will have to defend them, the ad says, but not without being the target of colleagues' withering stares. Even if your device has the “retina thingy,” it’s still a hunk of junk — according the patronizing looks from folks in the ad.



Read the full story >>

Amazon's Set Top Box Will Be A Stick

By Darrell Etherington at TechCrunch:

Amazon is readying a game console/set top box of its own, and we’ve learned from multiple sources familiar with the device that the Lab126-produced gadget will have a form factor similar to the Chromecast, or in other words it’ll be a stick or dongle as opposed to something like the Apple TV. In addition, one source claims it should have support for streaming full PC game titles, and as such might be able to compete with consoles including the Xbox and PlayStation, instead of just Android-powered living room game devices.

The stick form factor is not a surprise, given that Roku has just launched its own device using the same design, and the Chromecast has done so well in terms of attracting buyers. But the interesting component could be the way the gadget approaches gaming. Streamed PC titles is in keeping with some of what we’ve heard before in whispers around Amazon’s efforts, and makes sense given that the company sells digital download titles for PC and Mac direct from its ecommerce website.



Read the full story >>

Kindle Fire HDX 8.9" Is Now Available

In mid-October, Amazon unleashed the Kindle Fire HDX upon the world. The 7-inch tablet immediately became a critical and commercial darling thanks to its affordable price and superior specs. It’s now been a few weeks since its launch, and Amazon is letting its big brother have a chance in the spotlight.

Amazon announced today that the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9″ is now available and shipping to all those who pre-ordered the device back in September. Much like the 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX, the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9″ is a major improvement over its predecessor.

“The 8.9” Fire HDX is startlingly light—at just 13.2 ounces, it’s the lightest large-screen tablet. This is combined with a 339 ppi, perfect-color HDX display, 3x the processing power, 2x the memory, 4x the graphics performance, and backed by Fire OS 3.0, with exclusive features like the revolutionary new Mayday button—and all of this is just $379, much less than you’d pay for a comparable tablet,” said Peter Larsen, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “This is the best tablet we’ve ever built, and we can’t wait to see what our customers think.”



Read the full story >>

‘Login And Pay With Amazon’ Now Available

Amazon revealed a new payments product today called Login And Pay With Amazon, which lets websites allow people to do exactly what you would think (use their Amazon accounts to make purchases).

This is a product that many have been expected for years, but is finally coming to fruition.

“Amazon has more than 215 million active customer accounts,” said Tom Taylor, Vice President, Amazon Payments. “Login and Pay with Amazon enables companies to make millions of our customers their customers by inviting online shoppers with Amazon credentials to access their account information safely and securely with a single login.”

Read the full story >>

Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder and CEO) Is Buying The Washington Post

The Washington Post Company just announced that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is buying its publishing business, including The Washington Post newspaper for $250 million.

I bet you didn’t see that coming.

To be clear, Bezos is buying it. Not Amazon. It will not become an Amazon property.

“Everyone at the Post Company and everyone in our family has always been proud of The Washington Post — of the newspaper we publish and of the people who write and produce it,” said Donald E. Graham, Chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company. “I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post (after a transaction that would be in the best interest of our shareholders). Jeff Bezos’ proven technology and business genius, his long-term approach and his personal decency make him a uniquely good new owner for the Post.”

Read the full story >>

Dropbox vs. Google Drive vs. Amazon vs. Skydrive: Which One Is Fastest?

By David Sobotta at ReadWrite:

As cloud computing services become ever more popular, you might begin to wonder how much you can really trust them to perform when you need them? I decided to find out - by testing the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services.

In many ways, getting a file from one computer to multiple computers is the most challenging task for the cloud. And because I like to use multiple computers running multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows and the Mac, that function is particularly important to me.

Cloud Services Can Lag

I am pretty agnostic when it comes to cloud providers - as long as they are free or close to it. However, as I was moving files around while preparing my most recent book A Week at the Beach The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide I was a little surprised at the lags I sometimes experienced using the big-name cloud-based file-transfer services.

More than once when I wanted to use a file from one computer to another, I was disappointed by my cloud services. There were a few times that I got so tired of waiting for a file to show up on my other computer’s cloud drive that I resorted to sneakernet using a USB thumb drive.

After my book was published, I decided to go back and run some simple tests to see just how long the four best-known file-transfer/backup services actually take to put the files where you want them.

To compare Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive I started by exporting a 500K JPEG test image from Lightroom on my Windows 8 computer directly to each of the four services.

Fighting The Randomization Factor

After running the tests a few times, I noticed what can only be described as random operating system differences. Sometimes the file would pop up first on my Mac and other times it showed up first on my Windows 7 laptop.

In order to eliminate the operating system differences, I restarted the tests and this time stopped the timer when the file showed up on either my Mac running Mountain Lion or my Windows 7 laptop. I also reran my tests with a variety of sizes and types of files. In all I ran twenty-five sets of tests.

The differences were significant, if not overwhelmingly huge. The fastest synchs took less than 3 seconds, while a few others took several minutes. The biggest chunk of tests clocked in between 10 seconds and one minute. A few synchsnever completed. But which service recorded the best times with the fewest problems?

Dropbox FTW!

Dropbox ended up being fastest 56% of the time. Even more importantly, it was slowest only 4% of the time.

Skydrive brought up the rear. It was fastest on 12% of the tests, but but slowest on a whopping 80% of the tests. It also had two files that never showed up on the Mac and one that never showed on the Windows 7 laptop.

The Amazon Cloud slightly outpaced Google Drive - which had one file that never showed up on the Mac and another that took a very long time to complete.

If my tests convinced me of anything, it is that Skydrive is a work in progress and has a long way to go. I even had trouble setting up the tests on Skydrive.

My tests also revealed a number of odd results. When testing files saved from Word, strange extra files sometimes showed up on all the cloud drives except Dropbox. The file names always began with the characters “~$”. Sometimes the mystery files disappeared and sometimes they hung around.

Cloud Drive Recommendations

So here are some quick recommendations:

• First, do not treat your cloud drive as one huge dumping ground. Create folders and try to force a little organization on yourself.
• If you save a file to the cloud in order to work on it from another computer, quit the application or close the file on the first computer after you have saved the file to the cloud drive.
• Make sure you have a local copy of important files in your documents folder - not just the replicated cloud folder on your computer. Interesting things sometimes happen when cloud files get updated or deleted from another computer. When you come back to the computer where you first created a file, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
• If you cannot get a cloud folder on your computer to update, trying quitting the cloud application or rebooting your system.

Dropbox and Amazon appear to be the most reliable solutions with only occasional delays. Google isn't far behind, and I can't imagine that Microsoft won't work hard to improve Skydrive - the company's subscription model depends on it.

Even so, I have no plans to throw away my USB thumb drives.

Amazon to Acquire Book Lovers’ Network Goodreads

By Devon Glenn at Social Times:

Amazon has reached an agreement to acquire Goodreads, a community for book lovers.

Founded in 2007, the San Francisco-based company has a member base of 16 million avid readers who have collectively formed more than 30,000 book clubs.

Amazon’s selection of eBooks for Kindle, as well as its emerging publishing division, will benefit from the recommendation power of the social network, where members have written more than 23 million book reviews.

As Hugh Howey, best-selling author of WOOL, put it: “I just found out my two favorite people are getting married. The best place to discuss books is joining up with the best place to buy books – To Be Read piles everywhere must be groaning in anticipation.”

Read the full story here

Amazon Enters World Of Facebook Gaming

 

Via AllFacebook:
NewsOnline retailer Amazon announced Monday that it is expanding its offerings and moving into the world of social gaming. The company has launched a Facebook game, Living Classics.

The company has been working on Living Classics for a while, but it finally opened the game up to play on Monday. The new development team — Amazon Game Studios — plans to roll out more games on the Facebook platform in the future.

Amazon explained why it’s getting into the social game market:

Why is Amazon making social games, you ask? Good question! We know that many Amazon customers enjoy playing games – including free-to-play social games – and thanks to Amazon’s know-how, we believe we can deliver a great, accessible gaming experience that gamers and our customers can play any time

Living Classics takes users inside their favorite stories, such as Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and King Arthur.

Read the full story here

Google, Facebook & Amazon Quietly Forming Tech Lobbying Group?

By V3 at Search Engine Watch:
Technology giants – and often competitors – Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay are expected to join forces to form a lobbying group known as the Internet Association (IA), Reuters reported.

The IA plans to launch sometime this September and will focus on getting Internet-related legislation passed by the U.S. government. Former congressional policy adviser Michael Beckerman will lead the group.

The group will be the first lobbying association to combine the forces of Internet companies for the sole purpose of advancing web-centric legislation.

"The Internet isn't just Silicon Valley anymore, the Internet has moved to Main Street. Our top priority is to ensure that elected leaders in Washington understand the profound impacts of the internet and internet companies on jobs, economic growth and freedom," Beckerman said in a statement. "No one can predict what innovations will happen next. But we do know that the internet's decentralised and open model is what has enabled its unprecedented growth and innovation. We must guard against misguided attempts to handcuff this incredible source of job creation, freedom and creativity,"

Beckerman is a former adviser to the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton. During his time with Beckerman chairman Upton came out against legislation like net neutrality and the creation of an Internet tax.


Read the full story here






 

Amazon Game Network Launch Hints at Kindle Smartphone

By Emily Price at Mashable:  
Amazon is taking on Apple’s GameCenter with the launch of its own gaming network for Kindle Fire gamers: GameCircle.

GameCircle brings achievements, leaderboards and — most interestingly — makes sync APIs accessible for Kindle Fire games. Sync will save your place to the cloud, allowing you to pick up playing on one device right where you left off on another.
Amazon describes the feature thus: “Players will not have to worry about losing progress, scores or achievements between Kindle Fire devices, as all data is securely stored in the cloud.”

Curious wording, and a curious feature — given that the Kindle Fire tablet is currently the only device with that branding.

Probably the only reason for having such a service — unless you happen to have bought multiple Kindle Fire tablets — is if those hints of an Amazon smartphone are for real.
Sure, you could also use the feature to transfer game progress on your current Kindle Fire to the next generation if and when that becomes available, or to a new Kindle Fire if your current device is lost, stolen, or broken. The functionality; however, would lose its luster long-term if you didn’t have a few Fire devices to use it with.


Read the full story here

Monitor Your Pinterest & Your Other Social Media Accounts on Cyfe

By Devon Glenn at Social Times:
If you’ve been using Pinterest to connect with your audience, here’s a way to keep track of all your activity on the site. Cyfe, the all-in-one business dashboard that organizes every social network you use for your job on one screen, now connects to Pinterest.
Launched in January, the service also monitors your Twitter, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, MailChimp, Amazon, and Zendesk accounts, loading them onto one screen for easy viewing.  The dashboard allows you to see when you have new messages or other activity without having to leave a bunch of browser windows open. The company has added Pinterest to the list in response to customer feedback.

Wrote the Cyfe team in an email to its current customers:

This widget will allow you to track your Pinterest metrics (e.g. boards, pins, likes, followers, following) right from within your dashboards.
This is one of over 20 updates we’ve released just within the last 30 days. Other updates include a new Twitter Search widget, larger Twitter feeds (up to 100 tweets), user account management, multi-sheet Google Spreadsheets, improved chart performance, and so much more. All possible because of your continued feedback and support!

The email also included instructions for adding Pinterest to your dashboard:

You can add the Pinterest widget to your dashboard simply by logging into Cyfe, clicking on the “Add Widget” button and navigating to the “Social Media” category on the subsequent screen.