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Tag: amazon

  • Amazon Appstore Continues Global Expansion, Now Available in Japan

    Amazon continues its strong effort to corner the digital content market with the announcement that they have launched a Japanese version of the Amazon App Store, bringing forth a wealth of content for their line of tablets as well as smart phones and other mobile devices.

    In addition to a diverse library that shares some of the best selling applications and games with an entirely new market, the Amazon App Store also includes some mainstays that have helped the previous incarnations in other countries remain successful, including "Angry Birds," "Where's My Water?" and "Cut the Rope". Japanese customers now have access to the platform's personalized recommendations feature, simple ordering process and detailed order history menus.

    Amazon is also one of the only large digital application stores to feature a free application every day of the week, allowing users free access to content they would otherwise have to pay for simply as a "thank you" for their continued business.

    Amazon's standing as the world's largest retailer have made it a prime target for application developers big and small. Due to the raging success of the Kindle Fire, more and more applications that were once exclusive to other platforms have begun making efforts to get themselves in the fold. The advent of the Japanese App Store also opens the door for Amazon to open a similar feature in other markets, specifically Asian demographics that already have Amazon.com's basic services.

    Company CEO's and software developers alike have taken time to heap the praise on Amazon for the way they run their business and the ease with which people are able to begin marketing their content. Their current business structure is designed to give developers the maximum profits and is a huge reason for their continued success.

    Amazon markets itself as "the most complete end-to-end platform for developers looking to build, market and monetize their apps and games" and it's hard to argue this point based on the recent rapid growth the company has experienced. The addition of the Japanese market can only mean good things as the retail giant expands its customer base.

  • The Top-Rated Vizio M3D470KD HDTV Set

    If you want a high quality HDTV device but can’t see yourself paying more than $1,000, do yourself a favor and check out the 47-inch Vizio M3D470KD. Coming in at a lean $900, this edge-lit LED delivers excellent image quality, intense colors, and fantastic wireless connectivity.

    Vizio’s solid new release centers around the remote control. It’s fitted with a full keyboard, so linking the set with an Apple TV and navigating streaming content is a breeze. It’s not fully without it’s flaws, as the sound from the built-in speakers isn’t fantastic, but you can’t do much better at this price point.

    The M3D470KD features both 2D and 3D viewing, and tests shows it performs well in either setting. And though the image does suffer from some softness depending on the content, it features a wide range of angles of acceptable viewing, which sets it apart from other LED competitors.

    Again, the big drawback is the sound. It distorts without being pushed very far, and the imitation surround sound system is just that. So if you’re looking for the full theatrical experience, it will best be paired with a set of quality speakers.

    It’s also quite green, having earned the Energy Star label. While it uses a fairly average amount of watts when turned on, when turned off it uses close to zero energy. The backlight adjusts to the amount of ambient light as well, so it won’t waste the juice if it’s unnecessary.

    Vizio’s new release isn’t the simplest HDTV to set up, but it comes with a wealth of installed features. You’ll access Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon and Vudu Pay-Per-View services and YouTube right out of the box, as well as direct access to many of the most popular websites in the world. You’ll even find a dedicated set of web video channels, pulled from sites like PBS, Vimeo and Funny or Die. So if you’re willing to pay for a solution to the audio issue, you’ll find yourself more than happy with the purchase.

  • RIM Takeover: Microsoft, Nokia and Amazon Are Interested

    Bosses of Microsoft and Nokia have carried out several discussions in the recent months with the Canadians from RIM (Research in Motion), the manufacturer of BlackBerry phones, in an attempt to build extensive partnerships regarding the future of RIM, company whose shares have reached the minimum value of the last eight years.

    Amazon was also interested in the RIM takeover, but Canadians are determined to reject all the bids, following the idea that they can solve the company problems on their own.

    Discussions status is unknown, but the fact that this kind of discussions took place highlights the severity of the problems faced lately by RIM.

    The company posted results below expectations in Q4, while RIM shares are trading now at a value of more than four times less than 12 months ago.

    Currently, RIM capitalization is 2.83 times the annual income, the figure being the lowest among all players in the telecommunications industry with a value of over $ 1 billion.

    RIM is facing lately with a lot of problems, the company announcing recently that it will delay the launch of its latest BlackBerry handsets.

    In addition, BlackBerry smartphones have steadily lost market share against its competitors, Apple’s iPhone or terminals equipped with Android.

    RIM has failed on the tablets market too. Its 7-inch Playbook tablet launched this year by the Canadian company, recorded sales well below expectations. In order to counter this fail, the device was gradually reduced in pricing from about $ 500 to about $ 200, another fact proving the delicate situation faced by the Canadians at RIM.

  • Amazon Prepares a Smartphone

    It seems that lately, Amazon becomes a synonym for “success”: after the exceptional sales of their e-book reader, Kindle, it foresees a good season for Kindle Fire tablet, but also the launch of a smartphone under the same brand!

    The information comes from the research department of Citigroup, which recently published a note by Mark Mahaney: “Based on our supply chain channel checks in Asia led by Kevin Chang, Citi’s Taipei-based hardware research analyst, we believe an Amazon Smartphone will be launched in 4Q12.”

    Mahaney adds that Amazon would develop the smartphone together with the producer Foxconn. Thus, Foxconn will develop the concept of the smartphone and will receive the NRE fees (non-recurring engineering fees) from Amazon, while the execution part will come to TMS division of Hon Hai Group (the same that produced the e-reader and the tablet for Amazon).

    According to Citigroup’s predictions, the smartphone will be based on a processor powered by Texas Instruments and a 6 Series dual core chip from Qualcomm (traditional supplier to Amazon).

    Mahaney’s estimates led to a production cost of about $150 to $170, the analyst stating that a competitive sale price should be close to this amount. “For a normal brand like HTC, they need to price the product at US$243 to make 30% gross margin. If Amazon is actually willing to lose some money on the device, the price gap could be even bigger,” said Mahaney.

    Although he doesn’t specifies whether the smartphone will use Google’s Android OS, but suggests this stating that Amazon will have to pay royalties to Microsoft for the operating system – given that Microsoft has obtained this fee in justice from the hardware partners that are using Android.

    Speculations about pricing are perfectly real, considering that Amazon decreased the price of their Kindle Fire tablet to only $199 and expects sales of five million units in Q4. According to iSuppli, this price would be lower than production costs, given that components’ price would be only $185.

    The future Kindle Phone would have to be another “sales vehicle”, a mobile extension of the website, additional to Fire tablet. According to the scenario, the phone may integrate an application that will scan the desired product on the website and to buy it through a single touch.

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  • Amazon Opens Android Application Store to Developers

    US-based online retailer Amazon has opened its mobile application store to submissions from developers. The Amazon "Appstore" is due to launch in the US during 2011 and will be available for Android devices that run versions 1.6 of the operating system and above.

    Developers will be able to set a list price for their applications for which they will receive the industry standard 70 per cent share of revenues. Amazon, however, reserves the right to discount applications and will guarantee to give developers at least 20 per cent of the list price.

    Amazon will take a more hands-on role with its store than Google, with a stricter approval process than for the official Android Market; a move which will likely see Amazon’s store focus on high quality premium applications. Unlike the official Android Market, which comes preinstalled on all Google-approved devices, users will have to download the Amazon Appstore.

    According to iSuppli, Amazon’s control over pricing may see developers receive lower revenues per download than from other stores. However, the retailer’s ability to offer scale, its wealth of customer data and track record in online retailing will guarantee developers’ interest.

    "Developers’ major issues with Android Market include the poor opportunity for monetisation due to the plethora of free, low quality applications and consumers’ reluctance to use Google Checkout as a billing platform. The Amazon Appstore offers a solution to both these issues. Amazon has credit card/bank details from all its customers and offers a trusted billing platform. Its stricter approval process will ensure higher quality content and its wealth of customer data and expertise in providing customer recommendations will also improve app discoverability and monetisation," said iSuppli analysts Jack Kent.

    According to him, as a downloadable store, rather than one that arrives preinstalled on the device, Amazon’s store will struggle in the face of competition from the official Android Market and other embedded application stores run by operators and handset manufacturers. At launch, the store’s availability is limited to the US; a rapid international rollout will be vital for the store to attract wide developer interest.

    Amazon already has a considerable presence on mobile platforms; it offers its Kindle e-book app for Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, iOS and Android devices and has a number of mobile apps that enable users to make purchases from Amazon’s online store directly from the app. It will hope to leverage its existing Android mobile audience to boost the adoption of its own mobile application store.

  • Vordel Introduces Cloud Service Broker to Manage Multi-Domain Services

    Vordel, a provider of governance products for Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), released the Vordel Cloud Service Broker that aggregates and manages multi-domain services.

    Organizations who wish to use Cloud services in conjunction with their own SOA and those of their partners face major issues related to reliability and trustworthiness. One significant challenge is aggregating services from multiple domains including Public, Private and Community Clouds – into coherent composite services and applying policies to them.

    The Vordel says its Cloud Service Broker solves this multi-domain problem by registering services from all three domains into a single repository – the multi-domain registry repository – enabling monitoring, management and policy enforcement.

    The Multi-Domain Registry (MDRR) aggregates together services across domains. These domains include not only Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google, but also local on-premises services, and business partner services.

    In this way, all of the services on which a business depends are managed in one place. This becomes a single point at which compliance to Service Level Agreements, compliance to privacy and security mandates, and usage statistics can be viewed.

    Vordel Cloud Service Broker provides audit trail of Cloud service usage – analytics of Cloud Computing usage includes not only raw usage information, but also information about service quality, patterns of usage over time, and identity of users.

    It also allows developers to link together local applications with Cloud-hosted applications. The local applications may be accessed via Web Services interfaces, via database calls, via message schemes such as MQ or JMS or simply via the file system.

    Throttling is the “surge protector” of Cloud Computing. If an application makes a high number of calls to a Cloud service then the Verdel’s new service can deflect a portion of the calls to back-up service, newly provisioned for this purpose.

    Vordel CEO, Vic Morris, speaking about the Cloud Service Broker at VordelWorld in Dublin, said "Trust is a major barrier to Cloud adoption particularly among enterprises. It’s clear that many organizations see the value of incorporating Cloud Services into their IT infrastructure, but they also have concerns about the reliability and performance of these services outside their domain of control.

    “The Vordel Cloud Service Broker addresses these issues by providing a trustworthy and reliable onramp to Cloud services allowing businesses to monitor and manage them in the same fashion as their own internal services. This means that composite applications can be built in a completely seamless fashion offering users full visibility, trust and control," he added.

  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce Public Beta Launched


    Amazon Web Services has announced the public beta launch of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data.

    Amazon Web Services are a collection of remote web services offered by Amazon.com. It is using the Apache Hadoop distributed computing technology (open-source, Java software framework) to make it easier for users to access large amounts of computing power to run data-intensive tasks. This time Amazon used Hadoop, which is already being used by such companies as Yahoo and Facebook, for new cloud computing initiative.

    Amazon Elastic MapReduce utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
    Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, users can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as they like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. It’s important advantage is that users pay only for what they use, with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments.

    How does it work ?
    Amazon Elastic MapReduce automatically spins up a Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce framework on Amazon EC2 instances, sub-dividing the data in a job flow into smaller chunks so that they can be processed (the “map” function) in parallel, and eventually recombining the processed data into the final solution (the “reduce” function). Amazon S3 serves as the source for the data being analyzed, and as the output destination for the end results.

  • Higher sales of HD devices helps TiVo report soaring Q1 profits


    Digital video recorder maker TiVo has reported soaring income for the first quarter of 2008 boosted by higher sales of HD devices and reduced advertising costs.
    The California-based company said it earned $3.6 million, or 4 cents per share, for the three months ending April 30.
    This is up from a profit of $835,000, or 1 cent per share, in the same period a year earlier.
    Revenue totalled $54.9 million, down 5.5 per cent from $58.1 million for the same period last year.
    Tom Rogers, President and CEO of TiVo, said the most significant activity being worked on to boost stand-alone sales of HD devices was relationships with third parties.
    He said tests were begun last quarter with bundling with HDTV set sales.
    This was working either directly with a consumer electronics manufacturer or retailers on the bundling of the TiVo sales and potential content partners who have particular reasons to see TiVo sales driven.
    “Several of the bundling programs we ran during the quarter were promising, increasing sales for both TiVo and the consumer electronic manufacturer, while allowing us to acquire subs at lower costs.
    “For example, we ran a bundle in conjunction with Amazon.com and Mitsubishi that increased not only TiVo sales but Mitsubishi’s as well.”
    Rogers said an expansion of these bundling efforts was planned and he was hopeful that the early successes would translate on a broader scale.

  • Amazon Unbox to upgrade service to include HD content

    Amazon Unbox to upgrade service to include HD content

    TiVo users are to get access to HD content from Amazon.com’s Unbox service, which currently only allows users to rent and buy SD movies.
    The move will bring TiVo’s offerings into line with competitors such as Vudu and Apple TV, which already offer HD downloads.
    Jim Denny, TiVo’s VP of product marketing, said the service would come into effect “in the not too distant future”.