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Tag: Amazon

  • Apple’s Injunction Against Amazon Is Denied

    Amazon can keep using the phrase “App Store” in its Appstore for Android, which, according to Apple’s recently-filed injunction, it would cause confusion for consumers. This means that, according to Apple, people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an iPhone and an Android phone when it comes to searching out apps for their devices. While it’s simply a battle for control for marketing purposes — the abbreviation “app” is an incredibly popular term in today’s vernacular — the reason Apple used is downright silly.

    Are iPhone users really not going to be able to tell the difference between these two services — “Amazon Appstore for Android” and “Apps for iPhone?” If so, these users have issues that extend far beyond getting confused by services that use the phrase “app.” As it stands, Apple’s injunction, which was seeking the immediate removal of the term from Amazon’s service.

    After reading Apple’s reasoning for the injunction, it’s easy to see Apple is using the terms “confusing” and “misleading” the same way ISPs use the “stifle innovation” catch-all whenever they’re backed up against a legal wall. Even though these “reasons” fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny, these entities continue to push their excuses on the public. Good thing not all judges are as gullible. According to a number of reports, including PhysOrg, Apple’s injunction was dismissed by US District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton because the company did not prove it’s confusion argument:

    “The evidence does show that Apple has spent a great deal of money on advertising and publicity, and has sold/provided/furnished a large number of apps from its App Store,” Hamilton wrote in her ruling. “However, there is also evidence that the term ‘app store’ is used by other companies as a descriptive term for a place to obtain software applications for mobile devices.”

    Essentially, Judge Hamilton ruled that the “app store” phrase was more descriptive than it was distinctive.

    While Apple’s injunction was dismissed, the suit filed against Amazon, which seeks damages from the online retailer, is still active. For what it’s worth, according to Reuters, Apple’s spokesperson is sticking to the “confusion” and “misleading” argument, even though Amazon’s app store clearly has the name “Android” in it.

    Apparently, Kristin Huguet and the rest of Apple’s legal team don’t think iPhone owners can tell the difference between their phone and an Android device.

  • Should the Internet be Taxed?

    On Friday, a new California state law goes into effect that will tax Internet sales through affiliate advertising. Rather than pay such taxes, online retailers like Amazon will instead shut down their affiliate programs in the state. For Amazon, that is said to come to 25,000 sites in California alone.

    Was this a wise move by the California government? Tell us what you think.

    Democrat Governor Jerry Brown has called it a “common sense idea,” according to one report from the LA Times. Though clearly many disagree with that notion, thinking that it will do more harm that good. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said in the past that the company is protected in the U.S. constitution’s prohibition of state’s interference in interstate commerce:

    And in the U.S., the Constitution prohibits states from interfering in interstate commerce. And there was a Supreme Court case decades ago that clarified that businesses — it was mail-order at that time because the Internet did not exist — that mail-order companies could not be required to collect sales tax in states where they didn’t have what’s called “nexus.”

    So there’s that, but as my colleague Josh Wolford noted in a recent related article about Texas, more and more states are saying that Amazon affiliates count as physical presences and are enacting sales tax regulations already.

    That’s why Amazon has been shutting down affiliate programs. Amazon has told affiliates in the past that they’d have to move to another state to continue earning commissions on referrals. Overstock.com has reportedly done that before too.

    It’s worth noting that California’s sales tax rate in general will be dropping to 7.75%. Here is the bill that was signed into law (pdf).

    Some groups representing brick and mortars feel the law should be extended on a national level, claiming the taxes take away competitive advantages from Internet retailers that don’t have a physical presence in a particular state. Consumers are able to avoid fees from purchasing from these retailers that they’d otherwise have to pay by buying in-state.

    Affiliates have been informed of the termination of their contracts with Amazon. They have received a letter from Amazon saying:

    (The bill) specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers – including but not limited to those referred by California-based marketing affiliates like you – even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.

    We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It is supported by big-box retailers, most of which are based outside California, that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that we must take this action.

    Danny Sullivan, a California resident wrote Bezos an open letter “thanking him” on his personal blog Daggle. It begins:

    “Thank you for your letter today, informing me that after seven years of being one of your affiliates — and having earned for you about $150,000 in that time — that you “deeply regret” unilaterally terminating my contract with Amazon to be an affiliate. I also especially appreciated the part where you reassured me that this action wouldn’t affect my ability to keep buying from your company. Nice touch.”

    He goes on to add that while he is fortunate enough to have a successful day job, the loss of income will have a far greater impact on many other affiliates. He also makes a good point about how Amazon will continue to get paid from existing affiliate links without the actual affiliates getting paid.

    “I’m not sure how many affiliate links I have on the blog,” Sullivan writes. “Not that many, maybe 25 to 50 in all. But until about an hour ago, those links were worth something to you. Now, because of your squabble over the sales tax issue, you’ve decided to just take for free what you’d previously paid for. If I don’t find time to track down and kill those links, you keep grabbing orders that get made through them and keeping the cut I previously received”

    “Over the next day or so, you’re going to get a lot of orders this way,” he adds. “Bigger affiliates will eventually move. Plenty of smaller ones won’t be bothered to change. But those small ones that don’t will add up into plenty of money for your company. You, of all companies, really understand how all that long tail stuff can mount up, right?”

    Danny makes some fair points, but the fact that the law was passed is likely to drive businesses away from the state, as clearly they will have no choice if they wish to continue relying on Amazon for income.

    jjlwils55, commenting on the LA Times report says, “Okay, here’s the answer…start buying products from overseas companies.  In this day of internet technology, this is a job killer and at the end of the day will not raise additional taxes.”

    In the same thread, a small business owner says his company was a victim of similar circumstances all the way back in the early 80’s. “We operated out of Pennsylvania until they ‘needed $65 million’ and ‘targeted only 4 industries’ for a ‘new sales and use tax’. Lots of Exemptions only to the connected cronies in Harrisburg (lawyers of course). WE VOTED WITH OUR FEET AND MOVED TO FLORIDA. We moved the Business and Six Families after ‘growing up there’. We are still angry.”

    From the sound of it, there are plenty of people getting ready to pick up and move, or at least consider it, as a result of this California law now. But how long before they are greeted with similar issues at their next destination. You can see how the ordeal has been playing out in various states in this map from TheStreet.com:

    Amazon State Map

    Amazon isn’t the only one the law will affect, by the way – just the biggest.

    What do you think? Should states tax online retailers the way California is doing? Should about federal law? Share your thoughts in the comments.

  • 10000 Year Clock Gets Funding From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos

    Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is throwing some of his capital behind an ambitious project that has been decades in the making. $42 million to be exact. A team of scientists and engineers is currently working on giant clock that will be stationed inside of a mountain. The clock will run for 10,000 years.

    According to Wired, the project is already underway. Last year, contractors began assembling the components to the clock and excavation began at the mountain site that will become the clock’s final resting place. As the clock will run on solar power, computers at Jet Propulsion Laboratories have spent the last year calculating sun positions for the next 10 millennia.

    The “father of the clock” is a man named Danny Hillis. The millennium clock has been on his mind since 1989. For him and for Bezos, it’s all about long term thinking. Bezos has set up a website for the project, at 10000yearclock.net.

    There, he describes the project in brief. The clock will be stationed deep inside a mountain in the West Texas Sierra Diablo Mountain Range. The clock will tick once a year, and the century hand will advance every 100 years. And every time it hits 1000 years, a cuckoo will emerge.

    Visiting the clock, once it is completed in the next few years, will not be an easy venture. Here’s what Wired says about accessing the clock according to their interview with Bezos and the team –

    To get to the clock, you’ll need to hike half a day to the base of the mountain in which the clock is embedded. You’ll walk up into a narrow notch of stone, coming at last to a door made of stainless steel with panels of green nephritic jade. The door leads into a tunnel, which ends at the base of the vertical shaft, in darkness. Taking a flashlight to see, you’ll start climbing up the spiral staircase, winding around the outer wall of the shaft, going past various parts of the clock as you go.

    One of the first sections you’ll pass is the power train, with huge suspended stone weights and a capstan that you can turn to raise the weights and wind the clock. Once wound, the energy of these weights will help power the clock and its chimes.

    You’ll then walk past the mechanical computer (a complex collection of gears and linkages) that rings the clock’s chimes, and a bit further up, the actual chimes.

    If it’s been wound, the clock will ring the bells once a day, playing a different tune each time. The mechanical computer will rearrange the notes to create a unique melody for almost every one of the next 3,650,000 days. (Musician Brian Eno is helping compose the music the chimes will play.)

    The clock itself will be impressively huge and mechanical, with giant gear wheels made out of stainless steel turning on ceramic bearings, as well as smaller pinions made out of titanium. There will be no way to see it all at once — you’ll have to climb through a couple hundred vertical feet to see all its parts, one by one, ending at the clock face in the uppermost room.

    Brian Eno Chimes! Awesome.

    If you still want to make the commitment to go see the clock once it is completed, Bezos asks you to send a blank email to [email protected].

    What is the point of this millennium clock? Why take on such an undertaking and invest so much money into a project that will be located in such a remote area? Long-term thinking. According to Bezos, we now have the technology to build this amazing clock so we should.

    “Over the lifetime of this clock, the United States won’t exist,” Bezos says. “Whole civilizations will rise and fall. New systems of government will be invented. You can’t imagine the world — no one can — that we’re trying to get this clock to pass through.”

    Bezos and the crew are thinking about this clock in the same way we think about the Pyramids. They are symbols of time, and of history. Thousands of years from now, Bezos wants people to visit the clock and see it still working. Whatever civilization looks like in 10,000 years, those people will have a glimpse into the past. And by building a clock like this, it allows us in the present to glimpse into the future.

    But it sure is a lot of money, even for a project this cool. Some people are asking if the project is truly necessary –

    @hownottowrite
    Jamie Grove    What do you think about my new blog idea? “Crazy People With Too Much Money” Subject of the first post: http://bit.ly/iiP6Xv 2 hours ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    @7son75
    Mark Pannell    Jeff Bezos is clearly sitting on too much cash. 1 hour ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

    @TekJim
    Jim Amato    Is it just me or is this the definition of a guy with a lot of money and too much time on his hands(no pun intended)? http://t.co/sRvb3z3 4 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    Most of the internet chatter surrounding the project seems to be positive, however. The most commonly used phrases to describe it are “Wow,” “Amazing” and “Awesome.” I believe I fall into that camp.

    Bezos is also looking for future generations to create “anniversary chambers” for the clock. Here’s what he has to say about that on the site –

    Carved into the mountain are five room-sized anniversary chambers: 1 year, 10 year, 100 year, 1,000 year, and 10,000 year anniversaries. The one year anniversary chamber is a special orrery. In addition to the planets and the Earth’s moon, it includes all of the interplanetary probes launched during the 20th century, humankind’s first century in space. Among others, you’ll see the Grand Tour: Voyager 2’s swing by of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The Clock will activate and run the orrery once a year on a pre-determined date at solar noon.

    We aren’t planning to build the animations for the 100, 1,000, and 10,000 year anniversary chambers, but will instead leave those to future generations. We are providing a mechanical interface into those chambers that provides those future builders with power and the correct Clock triggering events. We do intend to build the animation for the 10 year anniversary chamber, but haven’t decided what it will be yet. If you have an interesting idea for the 10 year anniversary chamber, please feel free to email it to [email protected], and we’ll add it to the mix of ideas.

    Sounds like a awesome project. Maybe whoever inhabits this planet in 10,000 years will stumble upon the clock and will view it like we view Stonehenge. At least I’m sure that’s what Jeff Bezos hopes.

  • Amazon Attempts Sales Tax Workaround in Texas

    The debate regarding the way Amazon.com does its online business has been going on for some time now. The major point of contention has been the fact that for years, Amazon has been able to sell and ship goods across most of the country without charging any state sales tax.

    It’s not hard to see why this practice upsets some groups within the states, especially those who protect the interests of brick and mortar stores both large and small. Why would a customer buy a $700 home theater system from a local electronics retailer and pay 6% sales tax (or more) when they can get it shipped to their door free of that state-imposed sales tax via Amazon?

    Some states have stepped up and voted to approve new tax laws that require online retailers to collect state sales taxes. Most recently the state of California voted on this issue as part of their new budget.

    Here’s how it usually goes – a state decides to enact laws requiring companies like Amazon to collect sales tax. Amazon threatens to sever ties with the affiliates in that state. TheStreet.com has a nice map that shows the current state of the union when it comes to the Amazon tax wars.

    The law of the land for a while has said that states cannot force businesses to collect sales tax if it doesn’t have a physical presence within the state. In states like Kentucky, Kansas and New York, Amazon already collects sales tax because those states contain Amazon offices. But no actual Amazon offices equals no sales tax. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has said that it is protected in the U.S. constitution’s prohibition of state’s interference in interstate commerce –

    And in the U.S., the Constitution prohibits states from interfering in interstate commerce. And there was a Supreme Court case decades ago that clarified that businesses — it was mail-order at that time because the Internet did not exist — that mail-order companies could not be required to collect sales tax in states where they didn’t have what’s called “nexus.”

    But now, more and more states are saying that Amazon affiliates count as physical presences and are enacting sales tax regulations on the company. Texas is one of those states that is currently in battle with Amazon.

    Apparently, Amazon has extended a compromise to the Lone Star State. Amazon proposes that they would spend $300 million in the establishment of distribution centers across the state that would provide over 5,000 jobs to Texans. All they ask in return is to remain exempt from collecting sales tax for the next 4 1/2 years.

    They also suggest that Texas’ comptroller sets up a separate website for the collection of voluntary sales tax owed on Amazon purchases. That money would then go directly to the state. It’s highly suspect that many people would choose to pay a sales tax, however.

    The current push for online-tax regulation in Texas is part of a pending school finance bill. Governor Rick Perry is unable to line-item veto that online-tax provisions, so he would have to veto the entire school funding bill if he wanted to keep his state online sales tax free.

    Texas will certainly not be the last state to debate this issue. What do you think? Should Amazon be forced to collect sales tax? Or does that interfere with interstate commerce laws? Should the federal government step in and mandate a standard online sales tax? Let us know what you think.

  • Google’s Matt Cutts on Why Amazon Often Ranks Well

    Google’s Matt Cutts on Why Amazon Often Ranks Well

    If you search for products a lot, using Google, there’s a fairly good chance you’ve seen Amazon at or near the top of the results pages quite a few times. Someone sent a question about this to Google, and Matt Cutts used a Webmaster Help video to discuss the subject.

    The question was phrased as: “Search for a physical product usually ranks Amazon #1, even though it may not provide the best user experience. What is being done to prevent large corporations from dominating search engine results?”

    Matt’s responded by saying, “I think in general, not to call anybody out, but I think Amazon does have a relatively good user experience in general. I wouldn’t necessarily agree that Amazon always ranks number one for every physical product.”

    “So typically when I do a search for a book, Amazon is up there, but if there is an official homepage for a book, it often ranks very well, and sometimes number one as well,” he continued. “The interesting thing is not every book has a home page. This is something that still surprises me. You’ll have a very savvy author. They’ll have a webpage, but they may not have a landing page or a page dedicated to that specific book. Sometimes it’s just a lack of savviness.”

    He brought up one book that he had recently looked at, noting that no other content about it was on the web, other than Amazon, GoodReads, and Google eBooks.

    “The best answer is, make sure there is an actual page for your product,” said Cutts. “In general, Google does try to figure out what are the official home pages whether it be for governments, universities, or states or whatever, and we try to make sure we return those when possible.”

    “We are mindful of whenever users do a search, and then they complain to us, if they complain that they’re not finding an official homepage for a product, then that’s something that we do take into consideration,” he said. “In general, we do look at the number of links. We look at the content of the page, and if one particular website is able to get a lot of links, because a lot of people thank it’s a great site, then in general, usually it should rank relatively well, and I think that by itself isn’t necessarily a problem.”

    Looking at this a little bit myself, I did find that a search for my wife’s book, “The Fireman’s Daughter” did return an Amazon result within the first few results (a band with the same name is ranking above it), while the landing page for the book from the actual publisher is buried 5 pages in. There are pros and cons to Amazon outranking this page. She makes more in royalties if the book is purchased directly through the publisher, but on the other hand, the Amazon brand also lends a bit of trust from the user’s perspective, as not as many people will be familiar with the publisher itself (this may be a different story with some more well-known publishers).

    The question is not just about books though. Looking at it from the perspective of the average online store, the consumer trust factor likely plays a big role in Amazon’s rankings. Remember Google’s list of questions you could use to assess the quality of your site? It included something like “Would you feel comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?”

  • Amazon Local Launches for Daily Deals

    Amazon Local Launches for Daily Deals

    Clearly the daily deals space is on fire. That was true even before Groupon filed for its IPO today.

    Now the web’s largest retailer has something called Amazon Local, which is featuring deals from LivingSocial, the Groupon competitor that Amazon has invested in.

    @AmazonLocal
    AmazonLocal    #AmazonLocal, our new daily deals service, just launched in Boise with a sweet deal on ice cream http://bit.ly/jXk8CJ via @AmazonLocalBOI 5 hours ago via Social Manager Publisher · powered by @socialditto

    @AmazonLocal
    AmazonLocal    Not in Boise? Subscribe now and we’ll send you deals when #AmazonLocal is available in your area. http://bit.ly/kHlAwR 5 hours ago via Social Manager Publisher · powered by @socialditto

    The Next Web gets credit for first reporting on this service, which didn’t launch with any big announcement from the company. The service itself is only available in Boise, Idaho at the moment, and this was evidently inspired by Boise State’s football field. The company told TNW, “[The] blue football field represents just the kind of adventurous spirit we want our customers to experience every day. We will quickly be expanding to other cities, but we liked the idea of starting in a city that embraces fun.”

    Rather than offering its own Groupon clone, Amazon will provide deals from other providers, and LivingSocial is just the first. Aggregation and the method/timing/location of the delivery of deals is going to keep becoming more important in this space, which makes Amazon’s decision seem pretty smart. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at Business Insider makes some pretty good points to this effect:

    “The daily deals market is huge and Amazon needs to be there. At the same time, it’s a bit difficult to tackle. It requires a huge sales force and a presence in every state. It poses serious tax issues for Amazon. And daily deals are as much about advertising as they are about commerce, and does Amazon really want to tackle Google and Yelp and Foursquare in local advertising?”

    So the aggregation route, like investing in LivingSocial, is a smart way to get intelligence, relationships, and of course money, in a huge fast-growing space without having to go all-in. 

    Amazon Local stores deals purchased by customers in their Your Deals section, and until the end of the year, users can reportedly earn five points for each dollar they spend at Amazon Local with the Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card. After that these customers can earn 3 points on each deal.

  • Cost Effectiveness of Amazon RDS Pay-Per-Usage Software Pricing

    Established software vendors face a difficult balancing act between meeting customer demands for pay-per-usage cloud pricing models while guarding against revenue erosion on traditionally priced offerings. If Amazon’s price for Oracle Database on RDS becomes the norm for price discrimination between traditional and per-per-usage licenses, IT buyers could find themselves paying over a 100 percent premium for the flexibility of pay-per-usage pricing.

    Note, I am only using Oracle as an example here because the pricing of Amazon RDS for Oracle Database is public. This post intends to make no judgments on Amazon or Oracle’s price points whatsoever.

    Pay-per-use software pricing limited to entry level product
    Amazon RDS for Oracle Database offers two price models, “License Included” or “Bring Your Own License (BYOL)”. The License Included metric is fancy terminology for pay-per-usage, and includes the cost of the software, including Oracle Database, underlying hardware resources and Amazon RDS management.

    Three editions of Oracle Database are offered by Amazon, Standard Edition One (SE1), Standard Edition (SE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), listed in order of lowest to highest functionality.

    It’s important to note that pay-per-use pricing is only offered on the lowest function edition, namely, Oracle Database SE1. This should not be a surprise as Oracle, like other established vendors, is still experimenting with pay-per-usage pricing models. Customers can also run Standard Edition One using a BYOL model. This fact, along with Oracle’s list pricing, helps us do some quick and interesting calculations.

    Oracle Database SE1 software price-per-hour ranges between $0.05 to $0.80
    The License Included and BYOL prices both include the cost of the underlying hardware resources, OS and Amazon RDS management. The only difference between the two options is the price of the Oracle Database software license.

    This allows us to calculate the per hour cost of Oracle Database Standard Edition One as follows:

    The Oracle list price for Oracle Database SE1 is $5,800 plus 22 percent, or $1,276 for software update, support and maintenance. Like most enterprise software, customers could expect a discount between 25 to 85 percent. For lower priced software like Oracle Database SE1, let’s assume a 50 percent discount. Although, most customers buying Oracle software are encouraged to enter into Unlimited License Agreements (ULAs) which frequently offer discounts at the higher end of the spectrum.

    All told, Oracle Database SE1 after a 50 percent discount would cost a customer $3,538 (($5,800 + $1,276) x 50%) for 1 year or $4,814 ($5,800 + $1,276 + $1,276 + $1,276) x 50%) for 3 years on a single socket quad core machine like this low end Dell server. Note that Oracle doesn’t use their typical processor core factor pricing methodology for products identified as Standard Edition or Standard Edition One as they are targeted at lower performance servers.

    A single socket quad core machine would offer the performance of somewhere between the Amazon “Double Extra Large DB Instance” and the “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance”.

    Consider the long term costs of per-per-usage

    Using “Double Extra Large DB Instance” pricing, with our calculated cost an Oracle Database SE1 software license on Amazon of $0.40/hr, we can calculate a 1 year cost of $3,504 and a 3 year cost of $10,512. These figures represent a 1 percent lower and 118 % higher cost of using Amazon’s per-per-usage offering versus licensing Oracle Database SE1 through Oracle for on premises deployment or a BYOL for deployment on Amazon RDS.

    There are obviously multiple caveats to consider, like the ability to get lower or higher discounts from Oracle, or comparing with the “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance” price point.

    A customer that is unable to get a 50 percent discount from Oracle could save licensing costs by using Amazon’s pay-per-usage offering for Oracle Database SE1. For instance, with only a 25 percent discount from Oracle, the customer could save up to 34 percent on a 1 year basis, but stands to pay an extra 46 percent a 3 year basis.

    Comparing the cost of Oracle Database SE1 using traditional licensing on premises with Amazon’s pricing through RDS, it appears that customers should look hard at Amazon’s per-per-usage offering for up to a 1 year term, but stick with Oracle’s traditional pricing model if the software is going to be used for the typical 3 to 5 year period that companies like to amortize costs over.

    The obvious rebuttal to the above calculations would be that a customer electing for a pay-per-usage model would not necessarily run for 24 hours a day for a full year. While this is true, buyers should understand the long term cost implications before making short term decisions.

    Originally published on rand($thoughts);

  • Amazon Mac Download Store Launched to Compete with Apple Mac Store

    Amazon has launched the Mac Download Store, a direct competitor to Apple’s own Mac App Store, which was launched earlier this year. This follows another recent move by Amazon, when it released its own version of the Android Market.

    Amazon’s Mac Download Store has a reported 250 available titles in the software and games categories, and those include some things Apple’s store doesn’t sell. For one, Amazon features Microsoft Office for Mac right at the top of the store – this being one of those titles not available from Apple.

    According to The Loop, it also has games from Feral Interactive, Electronic Arts and Aspyr.

    Apple’s store launched with 1,000 apps, and I’m sure has gained a significant amount since then, but Amazon’s store is sure to grow, and just may have more lenient policies in terms of what apps are accepted. This could be incredibly attractive to developers who have famously had to battle with Apple’s regulations.

    Mac App Store Coming Soon

    Amazon is quoted as saying, “Mac Download store features an install-less download process where the customer gets just the product without any unwanted extras, making for faster and easier purchases. Plus, downloads are conveniently backed up in your Games and Software Library where you can download an unlimited number of times for personal use.”

    Amazon’s move to launch the Download Store comes after a bit of bickering with Apple over the “App Store” name, which Amazon is actually using for its Android app market. It also comes just in time for Apple’s new MacBook Air, which is expected within the next two months, as well as Apple’s Mac OS upgrade to be unveiled next month at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference.

  • Amazon Tries Lady Gaga Release Again

    When Lady Gaga’s newest album Born This Way was released, Amazon offered the release in digital format for $0.99. Naturally, their web infrastructure almost collapsed. The special price was done in order to demonstrate Amazon’s cloud music service, and while the initial results were disappointing — hey, there are a lot of Gaga fans out there — Amazon is try, try, trying again.

    That’s right, Gaga’ new release is once again available on Amazon for 99 cents. Granted, the format is digital, but in this day and age of mobile device dominance, does that even matter? The promotion is humorously called “This Time We’re Ready,” although, the proof of that will obviously be in the way Amazon performs.

    Of course, most Gaga fanatics already have the “Born This Way,” so the rush shouldn’t be as taxing as it was on May 23rd. Craig Pape, director of music for Amazon, had this to say about the re-release, er, release at the special price deal:

    “Clearly customers are really excited for Lady Gaga’s new album – we saw extraordinary response to Monday’s promotion – far above what we expected – she definitely melted some servers. So we’re doing it again, and this time we’re ready. We’re pleased to offer ‘Born This Way’ – the whole album – for $0.99 today only. Along with this purchase, customers get 20 GB of free Amazon Cloud Drive storage so they can store and play their music anywhere. If you missed it the first time, don’t miss it today.”

    Upon its release, “Born This Way” went directly to the top of Amazon’s top-selling MP3s list, and it hasn’t changed since. Undoubtedly, the “This Time We’re Ready” promotion will solidify Gaga’s standing as ruler of Amazon’s MP3 department. What are your thoughts on the Gaga’s newest release? Love it? Hate it? Let us know what you think.

  • Amazon Kindle 3G with “Special Offers” Arrives

    As the price battles heat up in the world of e-readers, Amazon has announced that it is offering its Kindle with 3G at a lower price – if you can tolerate the advertising.

    The new Kindle 3G with Special Offers will run customers $164, 25 bucks cheaper than the original Kindle 3G which retails for $189. The new member to the Kindle family will have all the features of the original – free 3G, Pearl e-ink display and an 8.7 ounce body. The only difference is that it is ad supported.

    @AmazonKindle
    Kindle Team    In response to customer requests, introducing Kindle 3G with Special Offers for $164—the lowest priced 3G e-reader. http://amzn.to/mr0F0M 16 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    The Kindle 3G with Special Offers will work the same way as the Kindle with Special offers that Amazon launched in April. That Kindle only has wi-fi capability and costs $114, $25 less than the regular Kindle wi-fi.

    The ad supported Kindles have promotions sponsored by Amazon partners like Visa, Olay, Buick and Chase that appear on the home page and as screensavers. The ads do not interfere with the text of your e-books.

    The “special offers” that are promoted via the device are things like “$10 for a $20 Amazon gift card” and “Save 20% on over 200 HDTVs available through Amazon.com.” So if you are strapped for cash and don’t mind putting up with some minor advertising, these “special offer” Kindles are for you.

    The Kindle wi-fi with Special offers looks like it was a big success for Amazon:

    “Kindle is the bestselling e-reader in the world. It’s been just six weeks since we introduced the new $114 Kindle with Special Offers, and already customers have made it the bestselling member of the Kindle family,” said Jay Marine, Director, Amazon Kindle.

    This news comes on the heels of Barnes & Noble’s announcement of their new Nook Simple Touch Reader for $139. It boasts a touch screen and is the smallest, lightest e-reader on the market. And Monday, Kobo announced its new eReader Touch Edition for $130.

    These new releases and price wars can only signal good news for consumers, as e-readers continue to get more affordable.

  • Kindle Outsells Print Books, Says Amazon

    Kindle Outsells Print Books, Says Amazon

    The news is coming in today from Amazon that digital books on their popular Kindle e-reader are now outselling all print books on Amazon.com. Surely this signals the end of print books and the bricks and mortar stores that sell them, right?

    Well, probably not. But it is a significant statistic.

    Last July, Kindle sales overtook hardcovers on Amazon. When that was reported, Amazon sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcovers on Amazon.com. That differential is undoubtedly much greater today.

    In January of this year, Amazon reported that Kindle books had overtaken the sale of paperbacks. When that was reported, Amazon was selling 115 Kindle books for every paperback.

    And today, Amazon is reporting a great milestone for digital content – Kindle books are now outselling hardcovers and paperbacks combined. The Kindle was launched in November of 2007, so that means this feat only took 3 1/2 years to achieve. For every 100 print books Amazon sells, they now sell 105 Kindle books.

    Now, of course the “outselling” is based on number of units, not revenue. 790,000 of the 950,000 Kindle books available are $9.99 or less. Paperbacks and Hardcovers usually sell for more, anywhere from $10 to $17 in most circumstances. Amazon also notes that the 105 to 100 Kindle to Print ratio does not include free Kindle books – which would spike it up considerably.

    “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,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com.”

    Here are some more statistics concerning the Kindle:

    • Only 5 weeks old, their ad-supported “Kindle with Special Offers” is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family.  It retails for $25 less than the regular Kindle
    • Amazon has sold three times as many Kindle books in 2011 than it did in the same period in 2010
    • Amazon.co.uk is selling Kindle books and hardcover books at a near 2 to 1 ratio
    • In the last 5 months, over 175,000 books have been added to the Kindle store.

    Should we look at this as any sort of signal concerning the state of print books and bricks and mortar bookstores? Possibly. It is non-debatable that e-books continue to increase in popularity. And very few would argue against the upside of e-readers. I mean, they basically are one pound libraries.

    But print books aren’t exactly dying. Along with this release about the Kindle, Amazon also says that hardcover sales have grown as well. For many people, like this writer, the tactile nature of a print book is something with which I could never part. And the collection factor – having a physical personal library is also something that many people cherish.

    And for the bookstore question, it is true that large bookstore chains have faltered as of late. A few months ago Borders announced it was filing for bankruptcy. Popular stores under the Joseph-Beth and Davis-Kidd names have also closed recently. The growth of online book retailers, with their ease of use and most of the time cheaper selections have definitely moved in on the territory of bigger booksellers.

    But this has allowed for many small booksellers to flourish. They have been able to create a niche for book lovers with a combination of nostalgia and customer interaction. Small shops can specialize simply in books and can survive and even prosper due to low overheads. Big box stores have tried to do too much, both with size and variety of merchandise, according to some.

    Hopefully, this announcement from Amazon signals a boost in reading in general, as opposed to some seismic shift in the book-buying landscape. Kindle and print can both survive and be vital to the growth of the book-reading population and both play a key part in the world staying smart and in turn not sucking.

  • Amazon Talks Preventing Future Outages, Says It’s Sorry

    Amazon has finally released a big statement regarding the recent server disruptions it experienced, which led to some sites having massive losses in service, and people to question the reliability of the cloud.

    When I say that the statement is “big” I mean it. I will post a few choice snippets here. First, a quick summary at the beginning:

    The issues affecting EC2 customers last week primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) volumes in a single Availability Zone within the US East Region that became unable to service read and write operations. In this document, we will refer to these as “stuck” volumes. This caused instances trying to use these affected volumes to also get “stuck” when they attempted to read or write to them. In order to restore these volumes and stabilize the EBS cluster in that Availability Zone, we disabled all control APIs (e.g. Create Volume, Attach Volume, Detach Volume, and Create Snapshot) for EBS in the affected Availability Zone for much of the duration of the event. For two periods during the first day of the issue, the degraded EBS cluster affected the EBS APIs and caused high error rates and latencies for EBS calls to these APIs across the entire US East Region. As with any complicated operational issue, this one was caused by several root causes interacting with one another and therefore gives us many opportunities to protect the service against any similar event reoccurring.

    It then gets into an overview of the EBS system, and technical details of the outage and recovery, as well as the impact on the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Then it talks about prevention, which is probably the most important takeaway, considering businesses rely on Amazon to stay up and running:

    The trigger for this event was a network configuration change. We will audit our change process and increase the automation to prevent this mistake from happening in the future. However, we focus on building software and services to survive failures. Much of the work that will come out of this event will be to further protect the EBS service in the face of a similar failure in the future.

    We will be making a number of changes to prevent a cluster from getting into a re-mirroring storm in the future. With additional excess capacity, the degraded EBS cluster would have more quickly absorbed the large number of re-mirroring requests and avoided the re-mirroring storm. We now understand the amount of capacity needed for large recovery events and will be modifying our capacity planning and alarming so that we carry the additional safety capacity that is needed for large scale failures. We have already increased our capacity buffer significantly, and expect to have the requisite new capacity in place in a few weeks. We will also modify our retry logic in the EBS server nodes to prevent a cluster from getting into a re-mirroring storm. When a large interruption occurs, our retry logic will back off more aggressively and focus on re-establishing connectivity with previous replicas rather than futilely searching for new nodes with which to re-mirror. We have begun working through these changes and are confident we can address the root cause of the re-mirroring storm by modifying this logic. Finally, we have identified the source of the race condition that led to EBS node failure. We have a fix and will be testing it and deploying it to our clusters in the next couple of weeks. These changes provide us with three separate protections against having a repeat of this event.

    Then, there’s plenty more about the impact to multiple availability zones and recovery, before Amazon addresses another big element of this story, which has come under significant fire from the media: the company’s lack of communication on the whole matter (something that seems to be a trend in the tech world these days):

    In addition to the technical insights and improvements that will result from this event, we also identified improvements that need to be made in our customer communications. We would like our communications to be more frequent and contain more information. We understand that during an outage, customers want to know as many details as possible about what’s going on, how long it will take to fix, and what we are doing so that it doesn’t happen again. Most of the AWS team, including the entire senior leadership team, was directly involved in helping to coordinate, troubleshoot and resolve the event. Initially, our primary focus was on thinking through how to solve the operational problems for customers rather than on identifying root causes. We felt that that focusing our efforts on a solution and not the problem was the right thing to do for our customers, and that it helped us to return the services and our customers back to health more quickly. We updated customers when we had new information that we felt confident was accurate and refrained from speculating, knowing that once we had returned the services back to health that we would quickly transition to the data collection and analysis stage that would drive this post mortem.

    That said, we think we can improve in this area. We switched to more regular updates part of the way through this event and plan to continue with similar frequency of updates in the future. In addition, we are already working on how we can staff our developer support team more expansively in an event such as this, and organize to provide early and meaningful information, while still avoiding speculation.

    We also can do a better job of making it easier for customers to tell if their resources have been impacted, and we are developing tools to allow you to see via the APIs if your instances are impaired.

    Finally, the apology:

    Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize. We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services. As with any significant operational issue, we will spend many hours over the coming days and weeks improving our understanding of the details of the various parts of this event and determining how to make changes to improve our services and processes.

    The company was good enough to give affected customers a 10-day credit (equal to 100% of usage of EBS volumes, EC2 instances and RDS database instances that were running in the affected availability zone).

  • Amazon Outage Casts Shadow Over Cloud Perception

    Amazon recently suffered some problems with some of its servers, which left some sites with large hiccups in their services. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service had some issues, primarily in Virginia. Among the sites affected were Foursquare, Quora, Reddit, and Hootsuite.

    Amazon has said that .07% of the data not able to be fully recovered, according to several reports. “We have completed our remaining recovery efforts and though we’ve recovered nearly all of the stuck volumes, we’ve determined that a small number of volumes (0.07% of the volumes in our US-East Region) will not be fully recoverable,” Amazon is quoted as saying.

    The company has been letting the companies affected know. It’s unclear what all companies are actually affected.

    The whole incident hasn’t been good for the perception of cloud computing in general. After all, if something like this could happen, what’s to stop all kinds of similar incidents from happening in the past. Reliance on others for important data is a liability.

    Look at Twitter’s inability to stay operational for all users at all times. What if Twitter was hosting a great deal of your company’s information. Business have come to rely on Twitter for various purposes, yet the site is often plagued with downtime. It’s just another example of reliance on third-parties for business-critical functions.

    The whole Playstation Network debacle hasn’t done anything to help the perception of cloud computing either.

    Amazon recently launched its cloud storage service for consumers. Amazon will have a lot more information on its servers than just businesses, as people store their music collections and other files.

    As far as business, it might be wise to have a backup plan in case you can’t rely 100% on a third party. InformationWeek has an interesting piece about the need for failover planning.

    Bizo, a company that depended on Amazon, “resorted to a practice that many observers were left wondering why Amazon itself hadn’t adopted,” writes InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock. “- the ability of a system in one data center to be shifted to another in a separate, geographic location.

    Everything on Amazon’s status dashboard is currently listed as “operating normally”.

  • Why Hootsuite Understands Loyalty

    Last week, several web services like Hootsuite, Livefyre, Quora, Foursquare and more crashed as Amazon Web Hosting’s EC2 servers took a nosedive off the diving board and into an empty swimming pool.

    The technical issues that Amazon experienced meant you couldn’t access the services hosted by Amazon Web (or, if you could, with very limited features). Because of the amount of services using Amazon Web, the outage was a big one and affected users by almost a day.

    As one of the services affected, social media management platform Hootsuite was out of action for around 15 hours. Not their fault, and not something that could have been foreseen.

    However, Hootsuite felt they’d let customers down (they offer premium services, which we use at Bonsai, as well as the free platform). To that end, Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes sent this email out:

    Hootsuite email about Amazaon outage

    Now, like I say, the outage and downtime wasn’t Hootsuite’s – but they treated it as if it was, and made good with their customers.

    At Bonsai, we’re always looking at ways for our clients to build loyalty into everything they do – with customers, employees, stakeholders and more. Service and cost doesn’t quite hack it any more – everyone has great service and costs.

    But loyalty and the user experience with you? That’s the gold right there – something Hoostuite gets in abundance.

    Nice work, guys – you just made me an even bigger fan.

    Originally published at The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing

  • Kindle For Android Upgraded for Honeycomb Tablets

    Amazon announced a new update to its Kindle for Android app to bring new features specifically designed for Honeycomb and the tablet experience (like the Motorola Xoom).

    “We’ve taken all the features customers love about Kindle for Android, and created a beautiful new user interface and a seamless shopping experience tailored to the look and feel of Honeycomb tablets,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle. “As always, Kindle customers ‘Buy Once, Read Everywhere,’ so Kindle for Android is the perfect companion for the millions of customers who own a Kindle and a way for customers around the world to download and enjoy books on their Android phone or tablet even if they don’t yet own a Kindle.”

    Kindle Store Search on Honeycomb

    New features, as listed by Amazon, include:

    • Seamless integrated shopping experience tailored for tablets gives you quick access to personalized recommendations, customer reviews, and more
    • Refined newspaper and magazine layout including full color images
    • Ability to pause, resume download at any time
    • Enhanced word look-up capability (for Android-based phones and tablets) with built-in dictionary with over 250,000 entries and definitions.

    Kindle Book Page on Honeycomb

    While the iPad is expected to lead the tablet market through the next several years, Amazon has certainly taken a shining to Android lately. In fact, last month, the company went so far as to launch its own Android app store, competing directly with the Android Market itself.

    Of course there is a Kindle app for Apple’s iPad and iPhone as well, not to mention BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Mac/PC experiences.

    Earlier this week, Amazon announced that over 11,000 libraries in the U.S. will be participating in a Kindle book lending program.

  • Amazon EC2 Server Issues Cause Web Havoc

    Amazon EC2 Server Issues Cause Web Havoc

    Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service has caused a bit of disarray around the web as servers have failed.

    Among the sites/services affected are Foursquare, Quora, Reddit, and Hootsuite (ht: The Next Web).

    The issues appear to be coming out of Virginia. Amazon is providing updates on its Amazon Webservices Service Health Dashboard. All of the issues come from that location. One sequence of udpates attached to Amazon Cloudwatch reads:

    2:26 AM PDT We are working on restoring connectivity to a small number of EC2, EBS, and RDS resources in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. While we restore connectivity, CloudWatch metrics for those resources will be delayed.

    3:04 AM PDT We are continuing to see connectivity issues impacting EC2, EBS, and RDS resources in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. While we restore connectivity, CloudWatch metrics for those resources will be delayed. We continue to work towards resolution.

    4:47 AM PDT CloudWatch metrics are delayed for some EBS and RDS resources in the US-EAST-1 region. The delays began at 12:55AM PDT. We have isolated the impact to a single availability zone, and are working towards a full resolution.

    Another on Amazon Relational Database Service says:

    1:48 AM PDT We are currently investigating connectivity and latency issues with RDS database instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

    2:16 AM PDT We can confirm connectivity issues impacting RDS database instances across multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region.

    3:05 AM PDT We are continuing to see connectivity issues impacting some RDS database instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Some Multi AZ failovers are taking longer than expected. We continue to work towards resolution.

    4:03 AM PDT We are making progress on failovers for Multi AZ instances and restore access to them. This event is also impacting RDS instance creation times in a single Availability Zone. We continue to work towards the resolution.

    5:06 AM PDT IO latency issues have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We continue to make progress on restoring access and resolving IO latency issues for remaining affected RDS database instances.

    On AWS CloudFormation, it says:

    3:29 AM PDT We are experiencing delays in creating and deleting stacks that include EBS, EC2 and RDS resources in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Existing stacks are not impacted.

    5:10 AM PDT CloudFormation stack creation and deletion is delayed for stacks containing EC2, EBS and RDS resources in the US-EAST-1 region. The delays began at 12:55AM PDT. We have isolated the impact to a single availability zone, and are working towards a resolution.

    Finally, on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, it says:

    3:16 AM PDT We can confirm increased error rates impacting Elastic Beanstalk APIs and console, and we continue to work towards resolution.

    4:18 AM PDT We continue to see increased error rates impacting Elastic Beanstalk APIs and console, and we are working towards resolution.

    The rest of the list comes with the “service is operating normally” status.

    Foursquare and Reddit seem to be back on track, but Quora and Hootsuite are still down at the time of this writing.

    I wonder how much money is being lost based on Amazon’s server issues.

  • Kindle Library Book Lending Coming Soon from Amazon

    Amazon announced today that it will be launching a Kindle initiative later this year that will let users borrow Kindle books from libraries – 11,000 of them in the U.S.

    The project will even let users check out Kindle books, and save annotations and bookmarks, which will be preserved if the book is checked out again in the future. Pretty cool.

    The company has partnered with OverDrive, a library digital content solutions provider on the initiative. “We hear librarians and patrons rave about Kindle, so we are thrilled that we can be part of bringing library books to the unparalleled experience of reading on Kindle,” said OverDrive CEO Steve Potash.

    “We’re excited that millions of Kindle customers will be able to borrow Kindle books from their local libraries,” said Jay Marine, Director, Amazon Kindle. “Customers tell us they love Kindle for its Pearl e-ink display that is easy to read even in bright sunlight, up to a month of battery life, and Whispersync technology that synchronizes notes, highlights and last page read between their Kindle and free Kindle apps.”

    “We’re doing a little something extra here,” Marine continued. “Normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you can highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books you check out from your local library. Your notes will not show up when the next patron checks out the book. But if you check out the book again, or subsequently buy it, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.”

    It will be interesting to see how this move affects Kindle book sales. You could always make the case that libraries and book sales have always co-existed nicely, but many book lovers love their hard copies.

    Last month, Amazon shut down API access to Lendle, a program that lets Kindle users lend books from their libraries to friends. Shortly after, Amazon restored the access.

    Amazon’s new library lending program will be available for all Kindle versions, including all the mobile apps.

  • Kindle with Ads: $114 and Coming Your Way

    What would you say if I told you that Amazon is lowering the price of the Kindle by $25?  What if that meant you had to deal with ads?  Bummer, right?  What if I then told you that the ads wouldn’t appear while you were reading, just on the home page and screensavers?  Okay, enough with the questions.

    Amazon has announced that starting May 3rd, they will begin shipping their new “Kindle with Special Offers.”  The new version of the popular e-reader will be $114, 18% less than the current cost of the original Kindle ($139).

    The ‘”special offers” that readers see will apparently not interrupt reading at all.  Amazon has listed some of the initial offerings that will be available to users when the product first rolls out:

    • $10 for $20 Amazon.com Gift Card
    • $6 for 6 Audible Books (normally $68)
    • $1 for an album in the Amazon MP3 Store (choose from over 1 million albums)
    • $10 for $30 of products in the Amazon Denim Shop or Amazon Swim Shop
    • Free $100 Amazon.com Gift Card when you get an Amazon Rewards Visa Card (normally $30)
    • Buy one of 30 Kindle bestsellers with your Visa card and get $10 Amazon.com credit
    • 50% off Roku Streaming Player (normally $99)

    The screensavers will be sponsored by Amazon partners Visa, Olay, Buick and Chase when the product launches, and they will look like this on your Kindle:

    Users will be able to have some control over what type of screensavers they see, as Amazon is introducing “AdMash,” a free app that presents two screensaver options to readers and asks them to select the one that they like the most (or can tolerate the most, or despise the least).  Those votes are tracked, and the most preferred sponsored screensavers are the ones that stick around.

    On an options screen, users will also be able to select which type of screensavers they would like to see most, such as nature instead of architecture or modern images instead of country scenes.

    In a statement on the amazon.com home page, CEO Jeff Bezos says that they are “working hard to makes sure that anyone who wants a Kindle can afford one.”  $114 is a low price point for a Kindle, and the way they have structured the ads seems to be as minimal of an annoyance as possible.  As someone who loves to read and has never bought the ads-free version of Words with Friends, this offer interests me.  I am a little surprised the price wasn’t set lower, however.  How often is someone able to afford $114 in discretionary spending but not $139?

    However the sales shake out, this writer is thrilled whenever reading gets cheaper.  Seriously, read books. Lots of ’em.

  • Amazon Job Listings Point To Big Interest In Advertising

    Amazon’s been able to sell books, CDs, Kindles, and groceries.  Its cloud services have proven popular, too.  And soon, for the sake of making even more money, one analyst thinks Amazon will branch into online display advertising.

    Ryan Kim obtained a research note written by Ben Schachter of Macquerie Research, and it seems Schachter’s noticed some interesting things.  Kim wrote, “Looking at recent job listings, Schachter concludes that Amazon is likely planning to use its consumer data and new ad targeting experience to raise eCPMs for online display ads both on its own site and on third-party sites.”

    Then Kim continued, “The retail giant is likely to create a sophisticated system delivering targeted performance-based display ads that incorporate affiliate advertising and real-time bidding, Schachter said.  He thinks there’s no reason why Amazon can’t emerge as a competitor to existing players such as Google and Yahoo.”

    On the “pro” side: Amazon’s a household name.  The company boasts impressive technical capabilities.  Plus, it’s got a market cap of about $83 billion, meaning it has the money to hire or buy just about anything it wants.

    Of course, on the “con” side, we can effectively start and finish the list just by naming Google.  The search giant’s built its empire on advertising (its current market cap is close to $186 billion, by the way), most marketers are satisfied with the way things work, and no company’s been able to pose much of a threat for years.

    It should be interesting to see what happens.

  • Amazon Earns Top Spot In Reputation Study

    Amazon Earns Top Spot In Reputation Study

    In an objective sense, Amazon’s an impressive company, and its stock’s performance (up 41 percent in the last year) means investors who value money should respect it.  But Amazon seems to have done a great job balancing financial acumen with people smarts, earning the top spot on a “reputable companies” list today.

    Forbes Media and a consulting firm known as the Reputation Institute awarded Amazon that spot after surveying almost 33,000 consumers in January and February.  Amazon earned the highest score out of the 150 largest U.S. companies included in the study, which is quite an accomplishment.

    Anthony Johndrow, a managing partner at the Reputation Institute, observed in a statement, “The reputation economy of 2011 is characterized by a heightened focus on three things: trust in companies and leaders rather than product brands, multiple stakeholders and their interactions, and building a connection between a company’s reputation strategy and its business strategy.”

    Anyway, second and third place went to Kraft Foods and Johnson & Johnson, if you’re curious, and moving onto companies we cover on a regular basis, Google managed to place ninth.

    Then Apple and Microsoft finished side by side much farther down the list in 46th and 47th places, while eBay came in 81st, not far behind Best Buy (at 78th).

    Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the entire Amazon team.  Congrats to Amazon’s shareholders, too, for that matter, considering the company’s stock rose 1.28 percent today.

    Google’s stock fell 3.16 percent as shareholders still appear to be nervous due to Larry Page taking over as CEO.

  • mSpot Prepared to Battle with Amazon, Google, and Apple in Streaming Music

    Amazon made huge waves when it unveiled its new Cloud Drive and Cloud Player offerings, which give users 5GB of free storage for their music. One of the companies immediately impacted by this, would be mSpot, which offers a very similar service.

    In fact, soon after Amazon’s announcement hit the airwaves, the company also announced that it would be giving users 5GB of free space.

    “We are breaking down the barriers to mainstream adoption of cloud music, so that it makes sense for anyone with a music collection to store it in the cloud, where it will be easily accessible on all kinds of connected devices,” mSpot CEO Daren Tsui tells WebProNews.

    “Why?” continues Tsui. “Music collections are personal. People have already invested a lot in their existing collections and want to continue to build them – if its easy for them to listen on both mobile and their computers, their music collections will become more valuable and enjoyable.”

    The immediate expansion of mSpot storage is nice, but how can mSpot expect to continue to contend with major players in this space, such as Amazon, Google, and Apple? They’re getting that question a lot, no doubt, which is why they’ve prepared a lengthy statement to answer it. Here it is in its entirety:

    How does mSpot plan to compete against Amazon Cloud Drive and then Apple and Google?

    Firstly, Amazon is offering a music in the cloud storage locker and player – and this is just one component of mSpot. We’ve had this feature out for almost a year, and in this time, we’ve learned a lot about our customers and what they really want. We’re gearing up to roll out our second phase very soon – including a new music discovery that will be completely unique to the market.

    We’re in a multi-device world. While Amazon has done a decent job of their Web player – this is obviously the easiest half of the offering. We don’t think they can compete with us on mobile for the following reasons:

    – We’re on both iPhone and Android; when people store their collections online, they don’t want to feel they’re locking down their choice of phone as well.

    – Leading mobile carriers like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint have been offering our mobile entertainment services to millions of their subscribers for years, under ourwhite label.

    – Why? Our technology is truly optimized for the mobile, which has different requirements than the Web. We offer music playback that feels local to the handset, (which is very hard to do); faster syncing and streaming; continuous connectivity to your music, even when you don’t have a connection; choice in how much music to store on your phone – all are not just nice to have, they’re essential. We also offer unique features like lyrics, album art and artists bios right on the handset.

    – We believe our proven industry experience on the mobile gives us a big edge over Amazon, or even Google or Apple.

    On that note: We would welcome an opportunity to challenge Amazon’s service on mobile usability – any time.

    We’ve been out for almost a year on Android, and since December for iPhone. We have a significant lead with over 1 million downloads on Android alone. People have already taken the time to upload their collections into our service, and they love it.

    mSpot’s position related to Amazon’s pricing model in comparison to our own.

    We think we have a better service and in order to remove any price barriers we’re going to offer 5 GB free storage. Going forward, we expect that the market for storage will be very commoditized and price-driven; but unique music services like mSpot will appeal more to music listeners looking for a complete experience on both Web and mobile.

    Amazon gives you 5GB for free, then offers yearly plans at a dollar per GB at 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, and 1,000. Google Music is expected very soon.