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April 06 2012
home
Living in Seattle, you tend to find yourself in the company of tech people all the time. With Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Google, and a dozen other major companies established in the area, it's never a surprise when you find out the guy next to you at the bar is working on Windows Phone 8 or Half-Life 3. This week, I was lucky enough to get a chance to see what Amazon has cooking for its next generation of e-readers. Their new offices and the mysterious Lab 126 are just down the street, after all, so I'm actually surprised it hasn't happened before now. Back in November, I speculated that the new Kindles and Nooks and what have yous might have glowing screens, the likes of which we've seen occasionally but were never fully implemented. It turns out Amazon was thinking the same thing, and actually bought a company that was, I am told, the world leader in light-guide technology. They've finally gotten it to the point where it's ready to be released, and a new generation of glowing Kindles will be coming our way sometime this year.
April 04 2012
images-screenshots-captures-amazon-appstore-logo-21032011_00B4000000001978
The most interesting part of Amazon's move to provide an in-app payments flow is that they're ceding pricing control to mobile developers. Amazon has been testing a new in-app payments system with several top-tier mobile developers for several months. It's a big deal because there has been a huge shift over the last 18 months toward giving away apps for free instead of selling them for a dollar or more. This move would bring Amazon's Android appstore closer to parity with Google and Apple's stores for developers. But the part worth noting isn't that Amazon will offer an in-app purchases flow. It's obvious that they would do that, given their experience in online payments and commerce and need to compete with Google's app store. The part worth pointing out is that Amazon is letting developers set their own prices for virtual currency and digital content. That's a departure from the strategy the e-commerce giant tried to pursue last year with mobile developers.
March 13 2012
Garmin rules GPS & Navigation Equipment category on Amazon

We just checked out the best sellers for GPS & Navigation Equipment category on Amazon and saw that Garmin has 18 spots in the top 20. Number one spot belongs to Garmin nüvi 1450LMT
which is going for about $130 currently.
Not much changes when you look at top 40. Garmin has 34 products in the best selling GPS & Navigation category.
This really proves Garmin is the best name in U.S. when it comes to GPS navigation. This field has taken a big hit from smartphones these days but Garmin is really on top of their games since they also rule when it comes to GPS products in sports including running, swimming, cycling, golfing, and more, aviation products such as the aera line up or their flightdecks, marine GPS category with their GPSMAP
lineup, and of course hiking, and outdoors with the eTrex
and many more models.
We would love to call them a successful “U.S.” enterprise but their place of incorporation is Switzerland since 2010. Before that they were incorporated in Cayman Islands.
Brought to you by your GPS navigation site NaviGadget.
Garmin rules GPS & Navigation Equipment category on Amazon
February 29 2012
dude-wtf
Apple may be a big dog in music and movie sales and rentals, but it's definitely not a big dog in ebooks. That's what makes this note from Seth Godin particularly galling. In a post on PaidContent, Godin writes that Apple has refused to sell his new book Stop Stealing Dreams because it contains links to Amazon in the bibliography. The reason cited is that there were “Multiple links to Amazon store.” This could be an overzealous Apple gatekeeper messing up, but they definitely messed up with the wrong guy.
February 23 2012
rock-em-sock-em
Carlos Bueno wrote a book called Lauren Ipsum. It's a book about understanding computers for kids. He priced it at about $14 and offered it as a print-on-demand title and ebook. All was going well, books were selling, when suddenly he noticed a few copies were being offered for $55 or more. But there were no copies to be sold at that price and presumably someone selling a used copy would reduce the price, not increase it. What was happening was that a bot had found the book and priced it at some ridiculous level - $45 at last count. Bueno was bemused, at best, and realized that bots had found the book and were essentially running a price war amongst themselves in order to offer the same print-on-demand book Bueno was offering at a massively inflated price. They were, in short, going to buy the $14 book and resell it for forty dollars more.
firevsipad
Another day, another take on Amazon and Apple duking it out in the tablet market. The data comes from NPD’s DisplaySearch wing, and the results don't come as much of a shock. By their count, Apple is still sitting at the top of the heap, accounting for 59.1% of the tablets shipped in Q4 2011 while Amazon is sitting pretty in second place with 16.7% of tablet shipments under their belt. At first glance, the results seem very similar to those announced by iSuppli this time last week — the only major shift is that iSuppli has book retailer Barnes & Noble slightly ahead of Asus.
February 10 2012
biglittle
Rumors of a 7- to 7.85-inch iPad have been swirling around for a long while now. We've seen reports get killed moments after they initially break, only to be sneakily resurrected weeks or months later. The rumor simply won't die. The problem, however, is that this one in particular is a tough nut to crack. When you take all the evidence both for and against a little iPad, you're still left with no real conclusion. So conclusion aside, here are some of the reasons Apple may, or may not, introduce the little iPad:
February 06 2012
holygrail066
According to GoodEReader, Amazon is planning to open a retail store in Seattle this year where they will sell Amazon-exclusive books and, more importantly, Kindles of all kinds. While this looks to be more of a pop-up retail presence than a fully-fledged store, if I were in publishing I'd be circling the wagons right now. To be fair, Amazon's own publishing offerings are pretty wonky so far. There haven't been many runaway successes coming out of the house although Clay Shirkey and Tim Ferris will soon be bringing their own brand of publishing success and there are some interesting cross-cultural titles coming out. But that's not why publishing has to worry.
February 02 2012
mixednutl
When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in 1998, he did something unusual. For the first time in any presentation he had ever given, he ended with a slide reading, "Oh, and one more thing..." This phrase would of course enter the Apple lexicon in the subsequent years. But what was it that was hidden behind this first "one more thing"? "Think Profit." You see, Jobs had just been named interim CEO in September 1997 after successfully pushing out the man who brought him (back) in, Gil Amelio. And he had good reason to do that: under Amelio, Apple had lost $1.04 billion in the prior year and was less than ninety days from being completely broke. Just a few months later, as he announced on stage, Jobs had the company back in black: a $45 million profit — the first profit the company had seen in more than two years.
January 29 2012
Amazon
Personal recommendations have always been a part of ecommerce, but there has been little innovation since Amazon introduced retail and product personalization 10 years ago. But with the increasing mountains of data at digital retailers' fingertips, ecommerce is about to get even more personal. The fact is that right now there is little iteration from personalized ecommerce beyond what is taking place on Amazon. So you'll see suggestions of what other shoppers who bought a certain item also purchased, or recommendations to similar items to what you have purchased, but there is a whole world of social data, and even more-in-depth purchase data that can be mined by retailers to help increase sales.
January 27 2012
flurry
Wuh oh, Samsung — better watch your tail. While Apple might not be seeing any impact (be it positive or negative) on iPad sales from the launch of the Kindle Fire, Samsung's Galaxy Tab ought to be feeling the heat. Tapping into the data provided by their app analytics platform (which they estimate has found its way onto around 90% of the Android devices out there), Flurry highlights a few surprising numbers.
January 19 2012
Maxwell_Perkins
While we're on the subject of publishing, Sarah Lacy found a great monologue on the current state of publishing and how, in short, Amazon is tearing old publishing houses a new one. Publishers, like music producers, don't make money piddling around with 50 mid-list books. They make money buying (for millions) and selling (a few) books by human black holes like Snooki and the Kardashians. They make money selling Stephen King novels and Newt Gingrich screeds. They make money, to mix industries, by betting on big budget dramas and reality TV. Sometimes a gem sneaks through, but it's rare.
January 12 2012
kdpselect
Amazon is releasing new data on its Kindle Lending Library, which the e-commerce site says now has over 75,000 books. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a collection of books that Amazon Prime members who own a kindle can borrow once a month, with no due dates. Amazon recently launched KDP Select, a fund that lets indie authors and publishers make money off of lending. Basically, if a KDP author or publisher chooses to make any of their books exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days, those books are eligible to be included in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and can earn a share of the KDP Select fund.
Amazon Mobile
Customer experience analytics company ForeSee recently released data on which e-commerce companies had the most customer satisfaction in 2011. Amazon and Amazon proved to be among the winners, with Netflix falling last year in terms of sentiment. Foresee has done a similar study on satisfaction for retailer mobile commerce sites, and it looks like once again Apple and Amazon are head and shoulders above the competition in terms of customer satisfaction for mobile commerce, via both apps and the mobile web. As we've noticed over the past year, mobile commerce has taken off and continues to grow exponentially as more and more consumers use their smartphones for research, shopping decisions and purchases. Because of this trend, ForeSee compiled data from consumers to produce statistically reliable mobile satisfaction scores for 16 of the largest e-retailers in the United States. Apple and Amazon, which scored 85 and 84, respectively, on the study’s 100-point scale, topped the list by a wide margin.
December 30 2011
Kindle Fire -1
In November, Mobile ad network Millennial Media reported that Amazon’s new tablet devices Kindle Fire, was seeing ad impressions grow at an average daily rate of 19% since its launch to the public in the middle of the month. Millennial says it’s not just seeing millions of impressions and the device is on a monthly run rate of hundreds of millions of impressions. But that data was gathered from a few weeks of usage from consumers in November, and as Amazon reported yesterday, December's holiday season brought record sales for the Kindle Fire, with over 4 million Kindle devices sold in December. The Kindle Fire was the most gifted and wished for product on Amazon this season. Today, Millennial is releasing data from its ad network showing impressive growth numbers from the Kindle Fire over the holiday weekend. In November, impressions on the Kindle Fire grew an average rate of 19 percent every day. Over this past weekend, Millennial says that as consumers opened and used their new Kindle Fires, ad impressions increased even more. As millions of consumers unwrapped new Kindle Fires, Millennial saw an average daily growth rate of 113 percent.
December 28 2011
M-Edge
M-Edge, a small Maryland-based company responsible for many popular Kindle cases, last week filed suit against Amazon. According to the Wall Street Journal, M-Edge claims that Amazon has repeatedly tried to change the terms of a contract put into place all the way back in 2009, and has bullied the accessory maker each time it fights back. In the original contract, Amazon was to receive a 15 percent commission on all sales that go through Amazon's Kindle store front. Apparently this wasn't enough for Amazon, who later requested an increase in commission to 32 percent and threatened to remove M-Edge cases from the store if the Maryland-based company didn't concede.
November 25 2011
amazondeals
It's Black Friday in the United States, but Amazon this morning revealed a couple of deals that it will be running from Cyber Monday and/or the next few days (specifically, starting at midnight on Sunday, November 27, through the end of next week). The company will be selling a $79 Kindle, a $99 Kindle Touch, a $149 Kindle Touch 3G and a $199 Kindle Fire - it reiterates that the latter device is "currently the best-selling item across all of Amazon". Good thing they're prepared for the rush.
November 18 2011
what
Amazon's Kindle Fire is arriving at many a home this week, and as expected with a launch of this magnitude, there are a few bugs yet to be squashed. Some users are reporting issues with wifi reception, and others say that the device shuts off its wireless when you turn the display off. There's no word from Amazon and homebrew remedies aren't working for everyone. Are you having trouble with your Fire?
October 11 2011
amazon-picture
Amazon is launching its seventh publishing imprint today—a science fiction, horror and fantasy-focused vertical called 47North. This joins Amazon’s other imprints, including Amazon Encore, AmazonCrossing, The Domino Project, Montlake Romance, Thomas & Mercer, and the New York imprint in the Amazon Publishing family. 47North, whose name is based on the latitude coordinates of Seattle (where Amazon is based), launches with a whopping 15 books, including "The Mongoliad: Book One," the first in the ambitious, five-book, collaborative Foreworld series led by Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear, science fiction and fantasy writer Dave Duncan's "Against the Light", and a new edition of the first book in Evan Currie's military space opera Odyssey series entitled "Into the Black: Odyssey One."
September 27 2011
header2
The news that Amazon's tablet was real was a great scoop, but not quite a shock to the industry. Bezos all but confirmed it months ago, and supply-line leaks had it coming in late summer, which was optimistic but not far off; the Fire will be arriving on Wednesday. One question I always had, though, was how Amazon would justify putting out this device when they've spent so long slagging the iPad as an e-reading platform? Simple: the Fire isn't an e-reader. Sure, you can read books on it, but its main function is acting as a wedge for all those sadly-overlooked Amazon services. Apple sells you on one platform then keeps on nudging you until you accept the rest. iTunes, iPhone, iPad, OS X, it doesn't matter which you do first, the point of the ecosystem is to make you use all of them. Amazon is trying for a similarly lateral play.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
