Andreas Weigend, formerly chief scientist at Amazon, has some ideas for how businesses can do more with their customers’ data. A few come from his old employer, while others stem from personal experience.
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Reviews of Amazon’s new Kindle TV Ad and Microsoft’s Bing TV spot bashing Google… By Igor Beuker for ViralBog.com
When Google launched the program, retailers, bloggers, book publishers and other website owners earned referral fees ranging from 6 to 10 percent of a book’s selling price, depending on the number of sales referred. That was a higher rate than the one offered through Amazon’s referral program…
Amazon has turned off the buy button on nearly 5,000 Kindle titles from distributor Independent Publishers Group after IPG refused to capitulate to Amazon’s demand for better terms…
Amazon says its new Simple Workflow Service (SWS) will run applications that are distributed between customer sites and Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure thus further blurring the line between the customer’s own data center and their chosen cloud.
As the former CEO of OpenTable, Jeff Jordan can attest that most CEOs believe they intuitively know which product developments will make the biggest impact. In this article, Jordan makes a compelling case for letting data — and not the CEO — drive product development.
In a move that echoes Amazon’s purchase of Zappos back in 2009, Russian web store Ozon is buying online shoe seller Sapato.ru — a deal that Ozon CEO Maelle Gavet says will turn it into a “powerhouse online retailer”.
Zynga the newly public company behind the games played by gazillions of people, is relying far less on Amazon’s public cloud than it has in the past: 80 percent of its daily average users now run on Z Cloud — not on that other cloud.
If you didn’t think that Amazon was the king of cloud, just look at what other cloud companies announced Monday. Even paragons of the private cloud world are trying to cloak themselves in the glow cast by Amazon, which is squarely in public cloud realm.
Add Amazon Studios to the list of online video providers that could soon release some new original programming. The company is looking to hire creative executives to develop and produce original comedies and kids shows for online and traditional distribution.
Microsoft’s ambitious Windows Azure cloud is many things — it’s a full-fledged PaaS for developers. But beneath that, it is also a huge pool of foundational storage infrastructure for rent. And in that arena, it could be the only real competitor to Amazon.
In its bid to stay the high-volume, low-margin provider of cloud storage, Amazon cut prices on standard S3 storage, according to the Amazon Web Services website. The price changes — good for the U.S. region — are retroactive to February 1.
99designs’ use of Amazon services to run its crowd-sourcing site is seen as a model for how small companies can leverage cloud services. The company’s site claims to handle hundreds of thousands of unique visitors and tens of millions of pageviews monthly.
Amazon is reportedly preparing to dip its toes into the brick-and-mortar retail market with its first boutique test store in the Seattle area. The move, which could face a lot of challenges, makes sense as Amazon extends its buying experience to retail stores. 
As more companies put workloads on Amazon Web Services or other public cloud platforms, many are paying for more cloud than they need. That overprovisioning is the problem Cloudyn, an Israeli startup, is taking on with its new software as a service.
As more authors choose to do an end-run around the traditional book industry, publishers are going to have to try harder to defend their continued existence — self-published author J.A. Konrath says that most are tied to a “broken, outdated and increasingly irrelevant business model.”
The most striking thing about Amazon’s Q4 filing was that head count was up a whopping 67 percent to 56,200 full- and part-time employees, compared with 33,700 from a year ago, according to Amazon’s 8-K filing; 67 percent is a very big number — even for Amazon.
Apple is the king of the PC heap, so long as you consider the iPad among those devices. Research firm Canalys does, and its most recent look at PC sales, focusing on the fourth quarter of 2011, shows the PC market growing with the iPad included.
Microsoft announced a partnership with TechStars today that will allow it access to more than 400 startups around the world so it can sell its Azure cloud platform. But as Microsoft tries to sell startups on its services, can it compete against Amazon?
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