The Inquisitr » amazon

Amazon Black Friday Ad 2009 – Early Bird Special. Nintendo Wii And Wii Fit For $290 With Free $50 Giftcard

James Allen Johnson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:55:35 +0000

It’s the battle of Early Black Friday Ads and the newest Amazon offer in my opinion takes the top prize in terms of the best early deal. Amazon users can pick up the Nintendo WII, Wii Fit Plus and Balance Board all for $290 with a free $50 Amazon gift card.

Amazon is also going to throw in free shipping on the entire package, as long as you don’t mind the standard ground shipping option.

Simply add both products to your Amazon cart and the $50 gift card will be yours. Basically you’re getting the system combo for a very cheap $240, that’s like throwing in the Balance Board with Wii Fit Plus for only$40.

This offer is already under way so hurry up and get yours while supplies last.

Amazon to help you be a spammer while painting a bullseye for the FTC

Steven Hodson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:22:46 +0000

One of the big topics today that I have picked up from my morning reading is the news that Amazon is going to help you become a Twitter spammer.

Yup now you will be able to populate your Twitter stream with links to items in the Amazon stores that you can sell as an affiliate and make money. Now to be sure there are probably a great number of people who will be totally ethical and above board when it comes to posting this type of stuff to their Twitter stream.

However I am willing to go out on a limb here and say that this kind of transparency will be extremely rare.

This idea is ripe for misuse and will do nothing more than provide a mechanism for affiliate marketers to start flooding Twitter with seemingly legitimate offers disguised as friendly recommendations. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the week that this takes off to the point that previous hijacking of accounts will start happening again with links to Amazon products being the end game for supplied links.

The other big problem, which services like Magpie and SponsoredTweets have addressed is the matter of disclosure – especially with the upcoming changes as proposed by the FTC. In what I have read so far nothing is mentioned about the requirement of some sort of disclosure being a requirement of posting Amazon affiliate links to Twitter. In fact by all appearances you are totally left to your own ethics as to how you write up the Twitter message in your affiliate link message.

As Sarah Parez quite rightly pointed out in her post about this on ReadWriteWeb this is becoming nothing more that Twitter product placement or as she puts it – a hidden advertisement

The problem with this sort of “hidden” advertising, though, is exactly that: it’s hidden. This is the internet’s version of “product placement” – subtle advertising in plain sight yet never clearly identified as such. Was your favorite TV star using a Macbook? Was he drinking a Coke? Already commonplace in Hollywood, these almost subliminal advertising messages permeate our consciousness every time we turn on the TV. Now that same sort of hidden ad will soon show up in the Twitter streams of your favorite tweeters.

Sorry but with no guidance regarding disclosure, or even making it a requirement, this new idea for Amazon is exactly the reason why the FTC is getting involved. So much for self-regulation.

Book publishers, book sellers face being WalMarted to death

Steven Hodson — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:35:03 +0000

If there is one thing you can say about the Web it is that it is responsible for the disruption of more businesses than just about any recession. We hear daily about the newspaper industry facing annihilation, the music industry trying to suck out the last dollar it can, and the movie industry trying to constantly stuff the genie back in the bottle.

What we don’t necessarily hear a lot about is the book industry whether it be from the point of view of the authors, or book sellers, or book publishers. Every once in awhile stuff will bubble to the surface but on the whole much of the discussion around books get quickly overshadowed by its more loud mouth industry cousins.

That doesn’t change the fact thought that the book industry is facing a full frontal assault that will have as much an impact on the industry as the ones facing our other entertainment related industries.

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, gives a great overview of this assault in a post yesterday. In the post he outlines how companies like Amazon, WalMart, and Target are cutting the prices of books well below that of the publisher price, to the tune of 40-50%, in an effort to shore up their book sales. This is creating a multitude of problems for everyone in the business as this kind of subsidizing isn’t sustainable.

At some point something has to give. Publishers will be forced by retailers right across the board to cut their prices.

Publishers. For right now, publishers are getting paid an amount equal to the customary discount for hardcover books. But no one in the industry I have spoken with expects this to last for long. Amazon, Walmart, and Target are systematically conditioning consumers to expect these lower prices. Eventually, these retailers will be in the position to force publishers to lower their retail prices.

Book retailers, especially the small mom and pop shops, might be willing to discount some of the bestsellers but that is used to bring in consumers who the hope will buy additional books while there. By putting them in a position where they have to cut already slim margins in order to keep those customers hopefully returning this cheapening of their stock will make keeping the doors open even harder.

When it comes to authors Michael Hyatt has this to say

Authors. If retail prices collapse, it will mean that royalties and advances will also fall. You don’t have to be a mathematician to figure out that 10–15% of $9.00 is dramatically less than the same percentage of $25–35. Most authors have a difficult enough time making a living now. This will lower the income of all authors and force many to get out of the business altogether.

Now of course the freetards out there will suggest that this is actually beneficial for the authors in that it could allow them to deal directly with the consumer given the ease of creating ebooks and the availability of self-publishing services. There are also those that suggest that like bloggers, musicians, and newspapers book authors need to find different ways to market their books and provide auxiliary tangible goods to make up for what they might lose by giving away their books.

I don’t profess to know all the ins and outs of the book publishing business and I am sure that someone like Michael Hyatt would be able to provide more accurate numbers but the fact is that the large portion of authors out there aren’t making the big bucks. Not all authors are Steven King or Dan Brown and as much as we might think that all authors are racking in the cash nothing could be farther from the truth.

So when companies like Amazon and WalMart turn around and start slashing book prices to the bone because they are big enough to absorb the losses – for now – in the end this house of cards is going to come crashing down. While we might like to think that this will only affect the already rich book publishers the fact is that the ripple effect is going to me much larger and much deeper than we might think.

Free isn’t the answer for everything regardless of what the self professed experts might have us believe. Sometime paying for something tangible at a fair market price with actual real money is the right thing to do as that money spent often has a far wider effect that just clicking on a purchase button.

Amazon Begins “International Kindle” Hype Machine, Ready To Square Off Against Barnes And Noble “Nook” Ereader

James Allen Johnson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:11:04 +0000

The folks at Amazon could be getting a little nervous with the new found realization that Barnes and Noble will release their “Nook” E-reader in November. Currently the company is featuring the Kindle with International Wireless smack dab in the middle of their homepage.

The International version of the Kindle was released in the past week and features access to downloadable 3G speeds in over 100 countries including the U.S. with no additional fees or contracts to worry about. The International unit also comes in at a respectable 1/3 inches in thickness (approx.) and holds up to 1,500 books at one time.

Users can pick up the readers in two sizes, 6″ diagonal E Ink® display which offers International Wireless capabilities for $259.00 and a 9″ diagonal E Ink® screens with the later increasing book storage size to 3,500 books but only currently offered for U.S. downloads and priced significantly higher at $489.00

While both options are featured on the product page, it’s the international wireless option that’s prominently mentioned on the home page.

Barnes and Noble in the meantime will release the “Nook” E-reader in November while offering large discounts on Barnes and Noble published books that are downloaded directly to their device. Much like the Kindle the Nook will also feature” e-ink” type technology and will come equipped with a secondary screen in color which is housed on what I personally consider a much better looking overall design than the Kindle. The Nook also runs Google Android OS which has been largely hyped up over the last year.

This should be an interesting battle to witness…stay tuned.

Amazon “Kindle For PC” Software Debuting In November As Free Download

James Allen Johnson — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:50:49 +0000

Amazon has announced their soon to be released Amazon Kindle PC software, an offering they’ve deemed “Kindle For PC” and which will debut this November free of charge for Windows-based PCs.

The program doesn’t require that users own a Kindle, although your footnotes will be displayed on your PC if you have created notes or highlights on your Kindle handheld unit.

The program will even remember where you stopped reading on your PC or Kindle and allow you to continue from that spot on either device the next time you open your ebook.

Windows 7 touchscreen users will also be able to take advantage of gesture controls, including zooming in and out on pages and page turning.

The announcement comes just as Barnes and Noble announced the “Nook” e-reader which will go on sale around the sale time as the Kindle for PC software. The program debut also comes right after Amazon dropped the price of their Kindle units as increased competition continues to flood the market.

The E-Reader’s Future

Kyle Brady — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:24:33 +0000

The latest Internet tech pundits’ obsession has not been related to the ADD-laced “real time web” proclamations that some are so annoyingly fond of, but of a much older format…

Books.

News has been slowly leaking out regarding Barnes & Noble’s “Nook” e-reader device, and the more that surfaces, the more it sounds like a surprising and wonderful device that could prove to be the harbinger of the e-reader’s/e-book’s watershed moment. It’s based on the Android platform, has a substantially better feature set than any of its predecessors, holds comparatively extreme battery life, and implements what appears to be a slick user interface.

And it’s being produced and sold by a book retailer chain.

Until now, e-readers have been something of a pipedream, since Sony’s Reader has been a nonstarter and the Amazon Kindle is inherently flawed – but all of this may quickly change. It’s intriguing that Barnes & Noble managed to understand the market’s needs so well, such as supporting a litany of formats and replicating real world book features like “sharing”, when this is something that Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) loves to claim as his own. Amazon may have cornered the market in numerous areas by using their leverage to lower prices and make deals, but they failed in the areas of digital reader rights and the all-important digital discount.

If the statistics on wholesale book sales from the International Digital Publishing Forum, which are typically half those of retail, are to be believed, e-book sales have approximately tripled within the last twelve months – the data coincides with Amazon’s entrance into the market, as expected. But with the debut of Barnes & Noble, one of two monolithic North American book retailers, as both a hardware and e-book retailer, these numbers will likely grow at an even faster rate.

Borders, Barnes & Noble’s only true competitor, has been weakly promoting the Sony Reader for years to very little effect – so what happens when one of the book giants has a product that it has invested substantial R&D in, and wants desperately to succeed? It’s highly probable that the Nook will be prominently featured in all of B&N’s locations, with slick salesmen/promoters attached, and will remain a central focus of their website for all of the foreseeable future.

When a brick-and-mortar company puts their substantial sales/promotion weight behind a product, including their $4.5 billion from in-store sales (2008), they almost always have a noticeable effect on the targeted market. Amazon is the king of product sales, but the sad fact is that a modern online powerhouse doesn’t have the marketing clout needed to push an unfamiliar item into the mainstream. However, if B&N’s power is combined with the apparent greatness of the device, a breakthrough to the masses becomes possible.

If they play their cards right, Barnes & Noble may be remembered as the company that produced the first “next generation” e-reader that was close enough to perfect for it to be popular with mainstream consumers – Amazon, Sony, and a few others will have their place as innovators, but there will be a distinction between the two. This innovation/breakthrough dichotomy is not uncommon, and can be easily found in the history of the Internet itself: the companies that were innovators (and faded/failed/went bankrupt) versus those who were able to make mainstream breakthroughs.

All of this, of course, depends on the device being more-or-less as described, not to mention functional and without any major hardware or software bugs – their success is contingent upon getting this right the first time. If they fail, they probably won’t have time for a second chance.

But I have my fingers crossed… And I already want one.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction. He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook to incinerate Kindle?

Kim LaCapria — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:15:04 +0000

A leaked WSJ ad, scheduled for Oct. 25th, has gadget bloggers buzzing about Barnes & Noble’s new e-reader, the Nook.

Running on Android, the Nook is said to be priced at Kindle’s $259 pricepoint. Many people have likened the device to a Kindle/iPhone hybrid, as unlike Kindle with a physical keyboard, the Nook has a touchscreen interface like the iPhone and iPod touch for navigating and browsing. The Nook also is rumored to support color, another advantage over Kindle. Coupled with a rumored deal for the device with Best Buy, Amazon might see their market share seriously sliding in the coming months. But the most intriguing of the rumors, in this era of gadget porn, is not even hardware related.

The first big tidbit is that books will be “heavily discounted”- without a qualifier, it’s difficult to say how impactful this aspect is. I’ve been very pleased with my iPhone Kindle app- the 6.39 pricepoint of most of the trashy vampire romances I favor is decent, but feels a bit like a jack at about a buck fifty less than the ink and paper counterparts Amazon would have to find, handle, wrap, pack, ship and of course, print on dead trees. But the even more intriguing aspect is that the Nook may allow for lending of titles between friends. One of the biggest hurdles the eBook format has in catching on is the inability to share books- the crunchy granola intellectual types that read books tend to like to pass them around between friends so they have something to discuss over soy lattes and cruelty-free hemp granola bars.

While Kindle’s got a tight grip on the e-reader market right now, the Nook sounds like it will be a powerful adversary as consumers make the leap away from analog books. Being perfectly honest, I’ve read more books in the past six weeks than I have in the past six years since downloading the Kindle app. And by December, the number of consumers using an e-reader is expected to double to 3.8 million from 1.6 million in August. Confirmation and more details are expected from B&N at 4pm EST during an event at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan.

Update: B&N.com now lists the Nook, and does a specs rundown vs. Kindle.

[Image: Gizmodo]

Barnes & Noble Nook E-Reader On Sale Tuesday For $259

Duncan Riley — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:06:19 +0000

Barnes & Noble looks set to one up Amazon with the release of the Nook E-Reader now confirmed for this coming Tuesday.

Details of the Nook first leaked last week, but the release date has now been confirmed by an ad booked in the New York Times (so reports the New York Times..so much for client confidentiality.)

Despite the awkward name, the Nook is more than going to give Amazon’s Kindle a serious run for its money. As well as coming in at the same price as the Kindle, the Nook sports a full color touch screen for navigation (ala iPhone) with a standard black and white e-ink screen for reading.

Better still, according to the ad Barnes & Noble has placed, the Nook will offer consumers “access over one million e-books, newspapers and magazines” but of that one million, around 500,000 of the books available will be offered for free through Google’s database of public domain works.

Details on where it the Nook will be sold are still unconfirmed, although naturally it will be available from Barnes & Noble itself. One report suggests that the Nook will also be available to buy from Best Buy. There are no details yet as to whether the Nook will be available outside the United States, or whether it offers mobile access over a phone network for purchases on the go.

Unconfirmed but possible is rumors that the Nook runs on Google Android, which may well mean that as well as books that the Nook will also offer proper web browsing, widgets and more.

Google To Open Online Bookstore To Rival Amazon’s

AHN — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:59:23 +0000

Miami, FL (AHN) – Internet technology powerhouse, Google has announced plans to open an online bookstore in 2010. Google Editions will host 500,000 e-books on their platform and customers will be able to buy books from a Google directory or from online stores.

A Google executive told journalists at the Franfurt Book Fair that the company plans on selling electronic books to any device that has a Web browser. The move seems to be an attempt to hone in on Amazon’s current market domination with its Kindle e-reader.

According to published reports Google will host and offer the e-books through deals with publishers. Google will keep 55 percent of the profits with an untold majority going to retailers and the balance going to the publisher.

Google says its foray into this arena will allow retail partners another avenue to sell their books. It should be especially attractive to those who haven’t invested in a digital platform.

Amazon introduces same-day delivery in some cities, adds shipping options

Kim LaCapria — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:27:34 +0000

Every year, I end up renewing my Amazon Prime membership when I realize that it’s cheaper than shipping all of Santa’s presents in a timely fashion without it.

Until today, the biggest drawback (besides the $80 price tag) was that the service was really only “prime” for half the week. Needing items sooner rather than later from Thursday through Monday kind of felt like a jack. Sunday was understandable, but the omission of Saturday delivery made the service far less convenient. Now Amazon has revamped the shipping options it offers, including Saturdays on the Amazon Prime shipping options and introducing an innovative new same-day shipping options in some major cities. This is a huge value add for Prime members, and I can imagine this Christmas I’ll be marginally less reluctant to pay the fee.

NYC, Philly, Boston, DC, Vegas, Baltimore and Seattle have the option, which costs $5.99 per item for Amazon Prime members. It’s not immediately clear what costs will be for those without Prime membership. Delivery cutoff times range between 10am-11am, but waking up before noon beats the hell out of leaving the house.

Here’s the relevant portion of Amazon’s press release:

Oct. 15, 2009– Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of “Local Express Delivery,” a new shipping option giving customers same-day delivery in seven major cities including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Seattle andWashington D.C. The service will be extended to Chicago, Indianapolis and Phoenix in the coming months.

Thousands of items are now available for Local Express Delivery. Amazon Prime* members pay just$5.99 per item for the service. Full details, including the rate card for all other customers, are available at www.amazon.com/help/shipping.

Items ordered before the following local cut-off times will be delivered the same day:

New York City – Order as late as 10 a.m.

Philadelphia – Order as late as 10 a.m.

Boston – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.

Washington D.C. – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.

Baltimore – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.

Las Vegas – Order as late as 11 a.m.

Seattle – Order as late as 1 p.m.

Customers will find delivery cut-off times on each product’s detail page.

“We want to make online shopping as convenient as possible,” said Girish Lakshman, vice president of Transportation at Amazon. “We’re continuously working to speed up delivery times and customers receiving items on the same day as ordered is an exciting step. Now, if a customer needs a last-minute present for a birthday or wants a copy of their book club book before the weekend starts, they can order from Amazon instead of the hassle of a last-minute trip to the mall.”

Amazon has also expanded Saturday Delivery options. Now, items ordered before the cut-off time on Thursday using Two-Day Shipping will be delivered on Saturday instead of Monday. For Prime members, Thursday-to-Saturday delivery is free using Two-Day Shipping. For all other customers, the service is offered at the current Two-Day Shipping rates. Saturday Delivery is also available for orders placed before the cut-off on Fridays for $6.99 per item for Prime members and an additional charge for all other customers. Full details can be found at www.amazon.com/help/shipping.

Zhu Zhu Pet Hamsters are apparently the “it” toy for Christmas

Duncan Riley — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:06:46 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Zhu Zhu pet hamsters yet, you soon will, because the cuddly toys are being pitched as the “it” toy for Christmas 2009.

The Zhu Zhu Pet Hamsters are interactive toy pets with a basic level of artificial intelligence. They squeak and move like real hamsters, offering a “real” hamster experience without needed food or leaving deposits around the house.

But because an artificial hamster is never enough, Zhu Zhu pet hamsters also come with accessories, such as a hamster fun house, a skateboard with a ramp, a hamster wheel and tunnel, and a hamster car with a garage. Yes, nothing says real like a Hamster in a car.

Zhu Zhu pet hamsters sell for between $20-$30 on Amazon, with accessories starting at $8. You can buy a Zhu Zhu pet hamster via the Amazon embed as follows:

Amazon Cloudfront CDN with a WordPress Blog

Duncan Riley — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 05:47:49 +0000

Regular readers will know that for the last month and a bit, we’ve been in a never ending battle of wills against servers and load times.

Our first major change was implementing Amazon’s S3 service to serve static files from the site. It helped, but in the end we ended up moving to Rackspace Cloud Sites to finally get a grip on the server issues we were having.

Since moving last Monday, the site has mostly purred, and since I’ve been looking for ways to improve load time again. One thing that did surprise me that as much as the files served from Amazon S3 were being served well, there was some latency there, and it wasn’t as quick as I’d hoped for, even if it did help decrease the load on our core hosting setup.

If you know about CDN’s and how to set them up, you should probably stop reading from this point, because the following isn’t going to be a detailed, or perhaps completely accurate technical description.

What is a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of server locations that deliver your content in multiple locations. Traditionally, if someone visited your site, they’d pull all your locally hosted static files (images, js, css) off your server directly. With a CDN setup, they pull those static files from their closest CDN, so for example if you were in Europe, the static files would be served from a local node of the CDN network. What this means is that your static files are quicker to load because they are served from a closer location, and although you’re still serving some files (php etc) from your original server, the end user gets the page quicker.

Each node in the CDN takes a copy and cache’s that for local traffic. The bigger the CDN network, the quicker load times are for most because there are more closer nodes to serve the static files.

Amazon Cloudfront

The reason we’ve implemented Amazon Cloudfront was one of ease of use: we already had Amazon S3 set up, so it was simply a matter of 5 minutes and bingo: CDN. A number of people have pointed out to me that given the site is on Rackspace, we have access to Rackspace Files, which uses the Limelight CDN network. The Limelight CDN network is superior as a CDN, not only because they have an Australian presence where as Amazon doesn’t, but sheer global presence.

However, the WordPress tools to set up Rackspace Files aren’t as easy to use as those available for Amazon, and we already have files on S3, which cut out the need to transfer a ton of image files across as well. Ultimately Rackspace Files (with Limelight) will offer a better solution, but for now we implement what we can with the tools at hand.

Setup

To setup Amazon Cloudfront with WordPress, you need S3 to begin with: read Using Amazon S3 for image hosting with a WordPress blog. The cool thing about Cloudfront is that it pulls data from pre-existing S3 files, so there’s no transfers required, it’s just a matter of setting things up.

Paul Stamatiou has the best guide for setup here, and I won’t attempt to replicate it all (he has pictures as well). The key points though:

- Go into Amazon Web Services and enable Cloudfront
- Using S3Fox, select the bucket (folder) on S3 you want to add to the CDN, right click, and pick manage distributions
- Add a name for the distro (Amazon Cloudfront), tick the “enable the distribution” box, pick a CName (in our case, turbo.inquisitr.com) and click create distribution
- you then get a resource URL. Using the instructions in our S3 guide (or via your host on how to setup a CName), using the details given, setup a Cname for your URL (turbo.yourname.com) pointing at the Cloudfront URL.

This is where I did it differently. Presuming you’re on S3 and you’ve got something like images.yourname.com for your S3 content, download the CDN Rewrites plugin here and install it. Once that’s setup, you simply need to tell it to redirect any URL from images.yourname.com to turbo.yourname.com (and this presumes you’ve got your files on S3 to start with, if you haven’t, this won’t work.) Select the options as fit, for example images, css, js etc…

Besides some little bugs with a thumbnail plugin we’re using (not related at all to Cloudfront), our page load times have been cut by between 40% and 80% (the former, only when we’re loading a full image to then make the thumbnail.) On one test, Pingomatic went from 8.7 seconds before to 2.9 seconds after…and that’s staggering. I don’t get the full effect in Australia because there’s no local CDN, but even I can see the difference here.

If you’re under load stress, and what to make you site load quicker, a CDN might be right for you.

International Kindle Begins Shipping October 19th, U.S. Version Gets Price Drop

James Allen Johnson — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:59:02 +0000

The “Kindle U.S And International” version will begin shipping on October 19th and will feature download capabilities for more than 100 countries. The release of the International device will also result in a U.S. Wireless version price drop to $259.

The International version will retail for $279, only $20 more than the U.S. version, which sees its price drop from the current $299 level.

With that being said, why wouldn’t someone just pony up the extra $20 and have travel friendly capabilities?

Pre-orders are available now, if you want the U.S. Kindle it’s now called the “Kindle U.S. Wireless.”

Amazon extends 1-click to developers and merchants

Kim LaCapria — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:41:01 +0000

Today, Amazon announced expanded access to its popular mobile payments service, making the list of stuff you can buy from your phone with one tap way longer.

I kind of love this service, but it’s a bit too easy to go buying stuff in bed from my phone at 2am because I ran out of vampire book. Now Amazon’s providing a set of APIs to allow merchants to use the Amazon Mobile Payments Service on other websites, and breaks the whole thing down on a FAQ page on their site. The FAQ states that the billing can be simple or more complex based on user needs, as well as adjusted to charge a customer after the order is placed or after the order is fulfilled, based on merchant preference.

PayPal and Google Checkout have offered mobile payment support for a while, but this is the first service that can be built into an app, which is compelling. Read the full text of Amazon’s press release, below:

Amazon Payments LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN – News), today announced the availability of the Amazon Mobile Payments Service (Amazon MPS), providing developers, merchants and distributors of mobile applications an easy way to process payments from mobile devices and extend Amazon’s 1-Click checkout experience to their customers. Amazon MPS enables tens of millions of Amazon customers to use the existing payment and shipping information in their Amazon.com accounts to make purchases from their mobile devices. To get started using the Amazon Mobile Payments Service, visit http://amazonpayments.com/mps.

“We’re pleased to make it easier for our Amazon Payments developers and merchants to extend mobile payment options and the ease of 1-Click checkout to their customers,” said Howard Gefen, Director of Amazon Mobile Payments. “Amazon customers can now also make purchases on third party sites without needing to set up separate payment accounts—they simply use the payment information in their existing Amazon accounts.”

Amazon Mobile Payments Service provides developers and merchants with a payment option for their customers that is as easy and familiar as the checkout experience on Amazon.com – including the convenience of Amazon’s 1-Click checkout. After signing in from an Amazon MPS enabled device or mobile application, customers are automatically able to make future purchases from their mobile devices using 1-Click functionality. Through a simple set of API’s and an optimized mobile browser experience, developers and merchants can easily extend single or multi-use payment options to their customers. Developers and merchants who already offer Amazon Payments on their website can easily add the new mobile payment option for their customers without any additional backend technology development.

“A seamless purchasing process is one of the most important aspects to a great mobile shopping experience,” said Paul Reddick, CEO of Handmark, a leading creator and distributor of mobile applications and services, and an initial user of the Amazon Mobile Payments Service. “The Amazon Mobile Payments Service delivers a fast, easy and familiar mobile payment option millions of people trust and we are pleased to be one of the first to extend it broadly to our customers and partners.”

Amazon MPS is built on the same flexible, reliable, and secure Amazon Payments infrastructure that many developers and businesses are using today for their PC based checkout experience. The Amazon Mobile Payments Service optimizes the check out experience for mobile devices and provides tens of millions of Amazon.com customers the peace of mind and convenience of shopping on mobile third party sites using information from their Amazon.com account.

[Via Mashable]

Comicbook Publishers’ Untapped Market

Kyle Brady — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:59:36 +0000

Imagine, for a moment, that Amazon has announced the next release of their Kindle product: the Kindle DX II (pronounced “dee-ex two”), and while it includes a long list of upgrades and improvements, the single most important development is its ability to display full-color, when necessary, via a dual-mode rendering process.

Continue the imagination process for a moment to understand what new opportunities this would bring: digitized issues of National Geographic, full-color covers for all Kindle edition books, and comicbooks. Wait, what? Comicbooks!?!?

The two largest comicbook enterprises, Marvel (now owned by Disney) and DC, have been experimenting with the digital revolution for their core business, to varied levels of success – Marvel has a “digital comic” subscription, are experimenting with “motion comics”, and even provides some online for free; DC has freely available origin stories for most (all?) of its characters, and provides previews of its upcoming comics (like Blackest Night: Superman #2).

The unsaid assumption throughout all of this, however, is that printed comicbooks will never actually leave this world, because the experience is too unique, and “motion comics” are likely just a supplement or even a novelty. Cue the digital book revolution, stage left.

As e-readers continue to evolve, their core technology will undoubtedly reach a point where they are both feature-rich and cheap enough that it is no longer possible to ignore them – much like the iPod’s entrance a decade ago. Color display options will undoubtedly be a feature of a future release, if only for the added market possibilities and display of illustration, since color eats away at battery life, to to mention unnecessary in black-and-white printed word display.

When e-readers have a color display option, comicbooks will likely become a market that explodes with growth and helps bring the devices to a more visible position in public life – who wouldn’t want their comicbook collection available on the train commute to work, or at school during boring classes? The Kindle’s size and design would lend itself, almost uniquely, to comicbook usage and the actions of comicbook publishers suggest they would embrace the new, untapped market with open arms.

So, Amazon, if you really want to make the Kindle the reading device of the future, you need to target those who will gladly pay to make your dreams happen: nerds.

And nerds love comicbooks.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction. He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Watch out Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Basics launches

Kim LaCapria — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:29:32 +0000

Saturday, Amazon took on a small segment of the third-party market with a new line of electronics called “Amazon Basics.”

Gadget fans don’t need to get all a-twitter yet- the line is mostly cables, blank CDs and blank DVDs, but they’re offered at a cost lower than most competition on Amazon. Some of the items, like USB cables, are “available for pre-order,” which I found perplexing. I thought a cable was something you ordered in frustration when you stepped on the end of it with your motorcycle boots rendering it unusable, not something you acquired in the vague notion of receiving it someday.

Looked at as a harbinger of things to come, though, the line certainly has promise. Amazon has indicated they don’t plan to branch off into the more exciting stuff- this appears to be more of a True Value Hardware for your computer and other electronics. Even though the pricing isn’t always necessarily the lowest- this 100 pack of blank CDs scoops the new Amazon ones by 49 cents and is Prime Eligible- Amazon’s status as a trusted brand for online shopping means buyers may flock to the new offerings. As someone who ends up renewing my Prime membership grudgingly every Christmas to avoid the high shipping costs and the toy store crush, I’ll certainly look there before I go to a seller with whom I have no experience.

[Amazon Basics]

Susan Boyle sings on America’s Got Talent [VIDEO]

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:14:31 +0000

As previously reported Susan Boyle sang last night on America’s Got Talent. The Scottish singer performed a cover of Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” and “I Dreamed a Dream” (the song that made her famous).

As you can see in the video she was accompanied by a full orchestra and backing singers. She is definitely in the big league now. It looks like she has received a small make-over too with brown hair and whiter teeth, but she has kept her charm.

It’s good to see her back in form and good health. Last night’s performance boosted the pre-order for her upcoming album, “I Dreamed A Dream” and she is now #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list.

Amazon: People who shopped for baseball bats also bought…

Kim LaCapria — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:30:35 +0000

You could see where this was going, couldn’t you?

Maybe you should consider stocking your next carjacking from the Walmart across town.

[TheNextWeb via Snopes]

Book publishers myopic as they claim e-books will destroy books

Steven Hodson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:05:00 +0000

We’ve seen the same thing repeated over an over with the music industry, television industry, news industry, and many more just like them. Crying doom and gloom about how their individual wealth creators are being driven into the ground by the Web. Granted the Web might be changing the playing field in favor of the actual content creator and consumers but it isn’t to blame for these businesses failing.

It is their own myopia and unwillingness to find ways to make their business work in the new media world instead of trying to constantly bend it to meet their current business models.

The latest of these is the book publishing world and people Araud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre. It is his opinion that the monsters out to destroy the book publishing industry are the usual suspects – Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble along with other e-book retailers.

His point of contention with these evil people is the aggressive pricing of e-books in the case of the major retailers and the availability of out-of-copyright books courtesy of Google.

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

There was a real and “muscular” debate in the US, he added. Retailers were paying publishers more than $9.99 for each e-book, so were selling them at a loss: “That cannot last . . . Amazon is not in the business of losing money. So, one day, they are going to come to the publishers and say: ‘we are cutting the price we pay’. If that happens, after paying the authors, there will be nothing left for the publishers.”

Source: The Globe and Mail – E-books ‘could spell the end for hardbacks’

Once again we see some-one who doesn’t seem to understand how the economics of the web works. The fact is that beyond the book author actually getting what their book is worth based on real sales the cost of delivering those e-books is next to zero. In contrast for book publishers the costs incurred to create all those individual copies of the original are far from zero. Why should retailers, and the author, have to sell a copy of a book that costs nothing to create for the same price as what book publishers deem it to be worth.

As with the business behind the other entertainment industries book publishers are finding that because of the Web the middle man isn’t the profit center that it once was.

Amazon may be planning to expand into Australia with GSM version of the Kindle

Duncan Riley — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:00:52 +0000

Giant US etailer Amazon may be finally looking to open an Australian outpost after years (and years) of speculation that they were planning to head across the pacific.

The evidence comes from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), who reported August 17 that Australia’s second largest newspaper publisher Fairfax had rejected an offer from Amazon to put its papers (including the SMH) on Amazon’s Kindle ereader. The same report also noted that News Ltd (the Australian arm of News Corp, and Australia’s biggest newspaper publisher) was “looking beyond Amazon at other devices,” suggesting that they to had been approached by Amazon.

What’s missed in the article is the details on the distribution side. Amazon doesn’t have a presence locally, and doesn’t ship electronic goods to Australia, citing “export restrictions” as the reason why. It’s not clear whether these restrictions were legal, or imposed by manufacturers; certainly it’s not hard to get items listed on Amazon shipped to Australia from the United States via eBay sellers for example.

Even if there wasn’t any legal restrictions, Amazon then hits import rules in Australia, including customs issues and GST; items under AU$1000 in value can be imported without duty, but this is applied to individuals. Then there’s the issue of wireless internet access: Amazon would require a local partner, and even then they’d need a new version of the Kindle because the current version runs on CDMA, while all mobile networks in Australia are 2G/3G GSM.

The SMH claims that the rejection by the newspaper publishers might stop Amazon selling The Kindle locally, completely ignoring the key fact that newspapers aren’t the main driver of Kindle sales (it is after all an ereader, not a newspaper reader alone.) Indeed, the SMH article borders on outright stupidity, like this quote

The decision by Fairfax paves the way for a two-way contest between Sony and possibly Apple as the dominant reader for the digital generation.

Whether Amazon will balk without newspaper deals in Australia is yet to be seen, but likewise if they’ve already had discussions, their plans to enter the Australian market in one form or another would already be well advanced.

It’s unlikely they’d sell the item from the United States in US dollars to Australia, which leaves three possibilities: they offer the Kindle and other items in Australian dollars from the United States, they set up shop in Australia and sell it locally online, or they sell the Kindle through a third party. The last option is unlikely, but not impossible, the first option isn’t out of the question, but the second option makes the most sense.

As a long suffering Australian who has longed for Amazon to set up shop here for the better part of 15 years, they can’t come quickly enough.