Amazon (AMZN)

[rffrydr]

Wow:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/amazoncom-shares-jump-40-two/story.aspx?guid=%7BBFA22702%2DCF75%2D4FED%2D9405%2DDAC443CC92F1%7D&dist=TNMostRead

A "platform" company before they existed. Clearly not to be handicapped like a traditional industrial company.
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[HenryTo]

Shows that even Amazon isn't immune from traffic spikes. I tried to get into Amazon.com half a dozen times yesterday and all it gave me was an error message:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/06/06/amazon-goes-down-metal-gear-solid-4playstation-3-bundle-to-blame/

[rffrydr]

New York spearheads another foray into online taxation--specifically targeting Amazon. Federalism itself hangs in the balance.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/amazon-plays-dumb-in-internet-sales-tax-debate/index.html?hp
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[diesel]

Nice concept, shame it is so ugly. They should have partnered/licensed with Apple and built something that looks half decent and used Apples new touch interface.

Apple just keeps steam rolling ahead meanwhile everyone else just doesnt get it!

[HenryTo]

A first review of the latest e-book reader (Kindle) from Amazon:
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Review: Amazon Reader Needs More Juice
Wednesday November 21, 1:27 pm ET
By Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer
Review: Amazon Kindle Is Best E-Book Reader Yet, but Plagued by Short Battery Life

NEW YORK (AP) -- Making a successful reader for electronic books is one of the toughest tasks in consumer electronics. Many have tried and all have failed, defeated by something that's thousands of years old -- the book.

This week, Amazon.com Inc. released the Kindle, the best attempt yet at toppling the book. It's in some ways an amazing device, but it's severely undercut by its poor battery life, making it hard to see it as a game-changer.

The genius of the $399 Kindle is the inclusion of a cell-phone modem in the device, which is the size of a trade paperback, but thinner. Through the modem, the Kindle can wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers and blogs -- all for a fee -- anywhere Sprint Nextel Corp.'s network has coverage. You don't need a separate Sprint account or subscription -- Amazon takes care of all that.

Amazon has 90,000 e-books in its store. A full-length best seller like Jessica Seinfeld's "Deceptively Delicious" cookbook costs $9.99 and takes less than a minute to arrive on the device, if you have a good signal.

Eleven newspapers are available, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and San Jose Mercury News. If you subscribe to one, it arrives automatically on the Kindle in the morning, ready to read on your commute. They're devoid of graphics and have very few photos, but I found I was able to read much more of the Times on the Kindle on my morning commute, because it's much easier to handle than a broadsheet paper on a crowded subway.

The Kindle can hold up to 200 books, or more if you expand the memory with inexpensive SD cards. It can play music and audiobooks too, but those will fill up the internal memory quickly.

The text shows up on the Kindle's six-inch screen, which uses "electronic ink" technology. It's a reasonable facsimile of ink on paper, except that the paper is light gray rather than white. It's quite readable, but has some limitations. For one, it's only able to show four shades, from black to gray, meaning that photographs look murky, sort of like they've been photocopied.

Apart from the readability, the main benefit of the e-ink display is that it uses very little power. In fact, it uses no power when showing a page, only when it shows a new page. Sony's Reader, which came out last year and uses the same screen technology, claims a single charge will last for 7,500 pages of reading, or weeks and weeks of use.

The Kindle, by contrast, lasted only 24 hours for me, including about 2 hours of reading, before needing a recharge. Amazon said that result was not typical, and that the device should be able to go two days between charges.

But that's still not good, and I think something's really gone wrong here. Combining a big battery, a display that takes practically no power and a cell phone that doesn't make calls shouldn't result in a device that has less than half the battery life of a cell phone.

The modem can be turned off with an external switch, and Amazon said that should allow the device to run for a week between charges. I didn't have the time to test this claim, but in any case, I don't want to be bothered with remembering to turn the modem on when it's time to download the day's newspaper, then turning it off. I know I'd forget to turn the modem off and end up with an empty battery the next day, when I'm running out the door and want to read the paper.

This is all a big pity, because the Kindle does so much else right.

Sony's Reader was difficult to navigate because the e-ink display is slow to react to the user -- switching between menu options took a second, for instance. The Kindle, however, uses a nifty secondary display to get around this problem. It's a thin strip that runs alongside of the main display. A scroll wheel controls a cluster of silvery squares that run up and down the strip, indicating the user's choices on the main display. It's both strange and attractive, yet is based on lightning-fast liquid-crystal display technology.

The rest of the interface is less convincing. Amazon has strained to make it easy to turn to the next page, and gone overboard: It's hard to grab the device without turning a page, because the buttons are so large, covering most of both sides of the Kindle.

It's also poorly configured for reading while held in just the right hand. If you overshoot, you need to bring up your left hand to press the "Previous Page" button.

But I'm willing to overlook some of those weird design choices, because the Kindle has some really cool features. For instance, the full-alphabet keyboard below the screen allows you to (slowly) type in words to search for in your books. You can annotate what you read. You can wirelessly send questions to a team of editors, who will grab answers for you from the Web and send them back to you for free. There's even a rudimentary Web browser that allows you to surf for free.

You can also bring your own documents along on the Kindle, though this ability is somewhat limited. By connecting it to a computer, you can transfer plain text files. If you want to bring PDFs or Microsoft Word documents, you have to e-mail them to Amazon, which converts them and sends them to the Kindle over the wireless network for 10 cents each. In my test, Portable Document Format files with text in columns were garbled in the conversion.

The real reason I can't recommend the Kindle is the battery issue. It's quite possible that Amazon could apply some simple fix, like a software upgrade, because the battery life is much shorter than its components seem to warrant.

If not, we'll have to wait for the next attempt at making a great e-book reader. Like a great white whale of the electronics world, it seems ever elusive.

[HenryTo]

This big gorilla now getting into the act as well:
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Amazon.com to Launch Digital Music Store
Wednesday May 16, 6:42 pm ET
By Elizabeth M. Gillespie, AP Business Writer
Amazon.com to Launch Digital Music Store Without Copy Protection

SEATTLE (AP) -- Amazon.com plans to open an online music store offering only songs that are free of copy-protection technology and can be played on anything from PCs to portable gadgets such as Apple's iPod or Microsoft's Zune.

The Internet retailer decided to steer clear of digital-rights management technology because consumers want to be able to listen to their music on any device they choose, executives said Wednesday.

The market-leading iPod, for instance, can't play copy-protected music purchased from Napster or RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody store. A Zune can't play tunes bought on iTunes. All players support music in the MP3 format.

Amazon's strategy "is helping to pave the way for a much better, much more customer-centric experience in digital music," said Bill Carr, Amazon's vice president of digital media.

Shares of Amazon rose $2.64, or more than 4 percent, to $63.22 Wednesday, toward the high end of the company's stock price over the past year.

Amazon's music store wasn't unexpected, and the company is tearing a page out of Apple Inc.'s songbook by offering music that's not locked down by digital-rights management technology.

Like Apple's iTunes Store, Amazon will offer DRM-free songs from Britain's EMI Music Group PLC. Amazon also said it will offer millions of tunes from 12,000 unnamed labels. Apple, however, will continue to sell copy-protected tunes.

Amazon said it would announce more labels when the service goes live later this year, but it did not identify a specific date.

Songs will be sold by the track or album, without a subscription option. Amazon didn't provide prices. Apple plans to charge $1.29 for tracks without DRM -- 30 cents more than copy-protected songs. It also said the pricier tunes would feature enhanced sound quality.

Carr said Amazon has always focused on giving customers good bargains and hinted that music will be offered at various prices.

"We have a track record of being very competitive on price and offering very low prices to customers," Carr told The Associated Press. "We also have a track record of offering a wide range of price points on our products, too. There's not one or two or three price points on our CD store today -- there are many, many different price points."

Last month, EMI agreed to let Apple sell tracks without the copy-protection technology on its iTunes Store. Apple has yet to begin selling the EMI tracks, but has said it would make them available on iTunes sometime this month.

Earlier this year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called on the world's four major record companies, including EMI, to start selling songs online without copy protection software.

Asked how Amazon plans to compete with Apple's market-leading iTunes store, Carr said the Web merchant has a huge customer base, with 66 million active accounts. He also touted the success of its CD store, which in the United States alone offers some 1 million titles.

Barney Wragg, head of EMI's global digital division, said the company believes Amazon's entry in the digital music business will make an intensely competitive market even more competitive.

"Amazon has proven it's a really competitive, successful retailer in the CD business and we're very excited about having people who have a proven track record come into the download business," Wragg said.

EMI also announced deals to sell music without copy restrictions in France, through Virgin Stores' VirginMega chain, and with several online music retailers in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Other music labels have released some tracks online without DRM either as part of experiments or sales promotions. Nevertheless, they insist that safeguards are still needed to stave off online piracy and make other digital music business models work.

Warner Music Group, Vivendi's Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG, each declined to comment.

Amazon could push the digital music market forward by pressuring more major music labels to sell DRM-free music, IDC analyst Susan Kevorkian said.

"We think Amazon's position in the market could be influential enough to move some if not all of the remaining majors toward offering MP3-encoded, DRM-free downloads," she said. "The majors need to be looking at new ways and better ways to sell music to consumers because they're suffering substantial declines in their core CD business."

At a gathering of corporate chief executives at Microsoft's headquarters Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos if the online retailer would sell music in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format.

Bezos said it would not, because the format doesn't play on the iPod.

AP Business Writer Alex Veiga in Los Angeles and Business Writer Jessica Mintz in Redmond, Wash., contributed to this story.

[rffrydr]

FT on AMZN earnings:

[rffrydr]

PE at 103. That's the old-fashioned trailing version--which is to say, a timeless standard of comparison.
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[rffrydr]

Manias and.. manias: A long look backwards.

[sonoop]

AMZN is the future platform for the web. Good long term buy

[diesel]

Check out that volume over the last two days, looks like panic buying to me. Would hate to be on the wrong side of that trade!