Displaying items by tag: Amazon

It looks like Amazon was pesimistic about the Paperwhite launch as the preorders have exceeded their expectations by quite a lot.  It doesnt make much sense if you consider that it's predcessor the Kindle eReader was the most sold item from the Kindle family and you can only expect better results if you bring a decent upgrade like the Paperwhite. Amazon started to ship the devices yesterday and if you try to buy it now, the Paperwhite could be yours after a 4 to 6 week delay due to high demand. There is also a limit of two devices per customer.

Amazon's new device, the Kindle Paperwhite will soon be shipping out from their warehouses and one of their biggest rivals Barnes & Noble won’t just sit around and wait to see what will happen. So far B&N has been at the top of the illuminated e-reader market and now Amazon wants their share of it too. The step B&N decided to take is to cut the price of their NOOK SimpleTouch with GlowLight device from $139 to $119, the same price that Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite will be selling. Even though it's pretty obvious that this is a reflex reaction to the Paperwhite launch, people at B&N say it has nothing to do with it.

We are not a fan of the push to the cloud as you might have figured out from our articles. The reasons are many including, but not limited to, security, privacy, and a general dishonesty about what the cloud is and what it really means to the many companies that are offering cloud services (predictable revenue stream). All of that aside, there is a side effect to the present cloud push that we actually overlooked that explains more than a few things that are going on in the market as a whole. This is an unexpected impact on the sale of PCs (all PCs) across the consumer and potentially commercial market.

As many analysts are trying to make claims at the number of units the unannounced iPhone and rumored 7-inch, iPad Mini will sell we have something a little more real for the consumer. Amazon has introduced us to the next generation of Kindle Fire Tablets. It was not that long ago that Amazon made quite a splash with their Kindle Fire tablet despite many feeling it would not do that well once the “newness” wore off. Following on the heels of that success Amazon has decided to up their game a little in response to not only Apple, but also Windows RT and even other Android Tablets.

Amazon has joined the club of companies that reserved September for their big events. They sent invitations to newspapers for their press conference that will take place at Santa Monica, California, however no further details were provided. As usual, this created a bunch of rumors, and most believable are those about Amazon launching a new Kindle Fire, or even several different models of it. Beside that, there could be e-book readers based on e-ink with integrated illumination.

Hot on the heels of the rumor that Facebook was going to release a phone we saw another rumor popup that Amazon would be the next contender for a branded smartphone. These rumors were fueled further when Brandon Watson left Microsoft for Amazon in February.  Watson had been in charge of the developer experience for Windows Phone 7 and now is one of the people that help to push the Kindle app out to multiple devices.

Over the weekend there were storms through northern Virginia that left many without power. One of these was an Amazon Cloud Computing node that housed Netflix, Pinterest, Instgram, Heroku and a few others were impacted. Ok Impacted is putting it mildly, due to the loss of power those services were offline for at least 6 hours starting Friday night and moving into early Saturday Morning.

In the last few days we have seen a couple of things that just might break the old business model of the MPAA and RIAA. The indicators are things like the decision that code is not physical property was pushed down by the 2d appeals court only a matter of days ago along with an increase in lobby presence by some media content providers (not the content owners) while the final piece of the puzzle is actually the US DOJ suite against Apple and a handful of book publishers for price fixing.

You know, back a very long time ago (sometime in 2007 or so) I wrote an article on how dangerous the idea of cloud computing was (and is). The article centered around the fact that in almost 99 cases out of 100 the company that is responsible for the security of your information and services are going to spend as little as possible on maintaining them and securing them. They are banking on the hope that no one tries that simple exploit or can even find the servers in question. Or for that matter they put their trust in other companies to manage their security for them. These companies then do the same thing all over again all to make sure they keep the best profit ratio possible.

Although this is not really new information; it appears that there is enough evidence that the major players in the e-book market have been collaborating to keep e-book prices higher than they should be in the US that an investigation has been started into this. The investigation comes just days after a similar announcement from the EU which is focusing on five of the largest publishing companies and Apple.