Despite the fact that you've never seen one in person, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney says Amazon.com will sell 378,000 Kindles this year, accounting for $1.1 billion or 4 percent of Amazon's total revenues by 2010. Earlier this year, Mahaney guessed Amazon would sell about half as many copies of the device, which he now calls Amazon's iPod. What changed?
Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay are two different levels of PayPal-like services Amazon.com quietly launched on Tuesday. No press release, no front-door promo. Simple Pay works a lot like PayPal — customers at another e-commerce site can use it as an alternative to entering a credit card number. Checkout by Amazon goes further, letting websites make use of Amazon's 1-Click ordering and allowing shoppers to put Amazon.com purchases in the same virtual cart. Previously, Amazon had required retailers to set up on Amazon.com itself. Now, the company is looking to get a piece of the action any way it can.
Finally realizing the dreams of advertising professionals since the 1950s, Amazon.com and Tivo announced new features to closely integrate shopping with TV watching. Viewers of talk shows — where pitching movies, music, or books vaguely masquerades as entertainment — will now have an opportunity to buy exactly what's being discussed on TV! Fancy the newest obsession of Oprah in her book club or like the CD being flogged by David Letterman's new favorite band? Just buy it with one click of TiVo's remote, and Amazon will deliver. If you like obvious product placements now, you're going to love the future. [NYT]
An unexplained failure briefly knocked out Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service this morning, taking with it parts of Twitter, The Huffington Post, and many other sites. You can track Amazon status yourself — see the red "Service disruption" icons under Status History. Has anyone yet built RescueTime for sites instead of people? We could park a Web 2.0 Failboard on our front page.
eMusic CEO David Pakman estimates that Amazon.com's MP3 store may have sold 27 million tracks since opening 6 months ago — which sounds good until you consider that Apple's iTunes moves 2 billion songs a year. Pakman also estimates that Amazon's store is adding $7 million, after the labels' take and expenses. At least people are looking forward to a new Kindle, right? [Silicon Alley Insider]
If you didn't buy Amazon,com's e-book reader — shown above in a CNET video — you're far, far from alone. A CrunchGear rumor report says Amazon will try again for this year's holiday shopping season. Kindle 2.0, says "an insider," will be bigger, less fussy to use, and thank God Almighty they're going to get rid of the original model's retro 1983 IBM PC sickly off-white plastic case color. Even Zune Brown would be an improvement. The key points from CrunchGear's report:
Keeping Oracle CEO and cofounder Larry Ellison safe cost the company $1.7 million over the fiscal year ending May 31, 2007. Most of that money went to guards at his homes as well as installing and repairing home security systems, according to Oracle's SEC filings. Part of Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's 2007 compensation included $1.2 milion for personal security. Google CEO Eric Schmidt spent $475,000 on security in 2007. A lot of the money probably goes to security precautions that might seem a lot more like luxuries than necessities.
Hedge fund manager William Ackerman owns a 30 percent stake in Borders — but he doesn't want to anymore. The founder of Pershing Square Capital Management told reporters he thinks Amazon.com should purchase the bricks-and-mortar bookstore: "Amazon could buy the company for about $400 million to get those locations that would take more than $1.0bn to build." Not going to happen. Amazon just let Borders go as an online Web partner without much of a fight. (Photo by AP/Sancya)
After a considerable outage that started around 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time, Amazon.com's homepage is now back up and still trying to get someone, anyone, to buy a Kindle. Shortly after the outage, the company issued a short statement in the forums for 3rd party sellers titled "Amazon Un-Planned Event" — not such an unusual occurrence, apparently, but rarely of this magnitude:
It's one thing when Twitter goes limp (again). It's another when e-commerce oligarch Amazon.com can't keep it up for customers. But that's just what readers are reporting, and we've confirmed. I mean, if you're going to rule the Web, it really is best to remain virile atop your throne. Sure it means lost sales for Amazon — and for its network of affiliates — but our question is, are Web startups using the company's "cloud" services such as EC2 also experiencing problems? Update: Even an attempt to access the site via IP address instead of domain name is for naught, ruling out a simple DNS issue.
Yahoo, IAC and eBay are in for rough sailing, but Google and Amazon.com should cruise smoothly and emerge as the big winners in the coming years, according to analyst Jeffrey Lindsay of Wall Street research firm Sanford C. Bernstein in a 310-page report published yesterday titled "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning." Tellingly, there's no mention in the summary article of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a totes awesome IPO. [Reuters]
Microsoft employees have logged 2,605 days of riding their bikes to work, with an average commute of 19 miles in a day, since the start of the year in a contest sponsored by the Cascade Bicycle Education Foundation for organizations in the greater Seattle area. That's more than twice as many days and three times as many miles as Amazon.com employees, ranked eleventh behind even the lazy slackers who work in Seattle's municipal government and the academic wankers at the state university. How are Valley companies doing?
We picked the ten worst entry-level jobs in tech. Now, in a single-elimination tournament, we're going to let you choose which gig is truly the worst. Round one begins with Amazon.com support engineers versus Google online sales and operations account managers. We'll let your fellow readers advise you before you choose:
LOS ANGELES, CA — Consumers aren't the only ones not buying the Amazon Kindle pitch. At a presentation by Amazon.com representatives at Book Expo America on Saturday, publishers proved an equally tough sell. The reps held a special session to introduce publishers to Amazon's tools for uploading, publishing, and managing inventory for the Kindle. While the Digital Tools for Publishers system is slick and easy to use, the company wasn't particularly transparent about questions regarding the size and makeup of the market for Kindle e-books.
LOS ANGELES, CA — Jeff Bezos pitched the Kindle to attendees at Book Expo America today in downtown LA, and then sat down with Wired editor and author of The Long Tail Chris Anderson for a little chit-chat. The takeaway? Much like Apple, Bezos uses the euphemism "customer experience" for "vertical integration," especially when it comes to the new Kindle and the requirement that print-on-demand publishers work with Amazon subsidiary BookSurge. After the jump, some choice quotes from before Anderson's questions (presumably from his notes, on regular old paper, pictured here) started to veer into extreme audience irrelevance when he brought up EC2 and Bezos' space ambitions.
Texas isn't the only state going after Amazon.com for abusing the Supreme Court decision that requires mail-order retailers to collect sales taxes only on purchases in states where the company has a significant physical presence. In Pennsylvania, which is about to become host to a new Amazon distribution center, a local editorial is questioning the legality of the company avoiding state sales taxes by putting the warehouse titles under the names of subsidiaries.
To come up with the estimated pay for tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs we spoke to former and current employees, HR reps and friends of friends working these jobs. But still, some of our commenters expressed disbelief over the salary estimates. "80 grand for an entry level job? Time to apply and kick those whiney losers out! Let's see how they feel about their new job bagging groceries at the Safeway," wrote mwbeeler. Loakim said:
Longtime Amazon.com partner Borders opened an independent storefront on the Web today. Analysts don't hold high expectations for the new Amazon rival and Borders Group Inc. president and CEO George Jones told the AP the company knows what's up its up against. "It's not the intent that we're going to out-Amazon Amazon at what they do," Jones said. So what is the intent behind Borders's store on the Web? Likely, Borders opened shop on the Web to help sell the company. Two months ago, Borders announced it was for sale and only last week, Barnes & Noble confirmed a team of its executives are looking into a deal.
Speaking to young graduates, including eight new Amazon.com hires, at Carnegie Mellon University's commencement ceremonies on Sunday, Jeff Bezos admitted that he's a nerd who does "a mean interpretation of Captain Picard," but is not a sexless monk. That classification was suggested by Amazon board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. Citing Bezos as an example, Doerr said the perfect founder "is undistracted because he has no sex life." Bezos intends to remind the sex-negative venture capitalist of his many children at Amazon's next board meeting. John, if you need a retort, just exclaim how "resourceful" Mackenzie Bezos is.
