amazon.com

Master of the online retailers

Amazon.com was one of the first online retailers in the world. It started out with books and now sells nearly every consumer good, including groceries and over-the-counter medicines. The service is well known as one of the best places to find new or used books at prices below what you'd pay in most retail stores. It also features free shipping on many of its items.

One of the things that makes Amazon.com dynamic as an online retailer is its community of users who write reviews and rate nearly every product on the service. Amazon.com is also … Read more

Amazon EC2 gets a spot market

Amazon on Monday rolled out spot pricing for cloud computing so customers can buy capacity at any price on the open market.

The concept is an interesting one since Amazon Web Services is making computing capacity available on the market just like any other commodity (see Amazon statement, Werner Vogels, and Amazon Web Services blog).

Dubbed Spot Instances, Amazon customers can bid on unused Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) capacity and run those instances as long as their bid exceeds the spot price. The rub is that you can be outbid.

Read more of "Amazon creates cloud computing spot market … Read more

Amazon gets social with Twitter integration

Amazon.com this week rolled out an interesting new feature that allows Amazon Associate members to broadcast links to Amazon products via their Twitter accounts.

Amazon Associates is the partner program the company uses as part of its affiliate advertising programs, allowing customers to make money advertising Amazon products.

Associates can now simply click a link in the toolbar to send a link (replete with sales-y text) to Twitter as part of their shopping and selling experience. Amazon gets a sale, Twitter gets traffic, and the associate gets revenue share. What could possibly go wrong?

Linking to Amazon or other … Read more

Internet Archive's BookServer could 'dominate' Amazon

SAN FRANCISCO--An initiative in the works from the nonprofit Internet Archive to centralize the electronic distribution of commercially viable books could upend the publishing industry and declaw Amazon.com, an industry analyst said.

On Monday, the Internet Archive, which among other things has been working for some time to digitize countless numbers of public domain texts, showed the first public look at its BookServer project, an initiative its dubs, "The future of books."

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told CNET News that BookServer is about creating an open system that allows search engines to index books that are … Read more

Amazon positioned to win state tax battle

This was originally posted at Between the Lines. It was updated at 3:25 p.m. PDT with Amazon adding Hawaii to the list of states where it's pulled its Associates program.

Amazon.com is in a high-profile tax showdown with states over its Associates referral program and is likely to come out a winner either way.

Amazon has pulled its Associates program, which allows Web site operators to drive sales to the e-tailer in exchange for commissions of up to 15 percent, in North Carolina and Rhode Island. And on Tuesday, Amazon also added Hawaii to its hitlist, … Read more

Amazon's top 'health' sellers? Surgical masks

I don't know if the Mexican swine flu, which may or may not have come from Mexico or have anything to do with pigs, will wipe us all out.

But I do know that people are scared.

How do I know? A simple perusal of Amazon.com's health and personal-care store.

Amazon is often an extraordinary barometer for people's feelings. A singer dies, his music is off the charts. Or, more accurately, up the charts. An author dies, and her words suddenly have new meaning for the world at large. Or, more accurately, new sales.

So it … Read more

The 404 329: Where Maggie Reardon punches Wilson in the Facebook

Maggie Reardon joins the show today. We talk about the impending world pandemic of swine flu. "Mean-Jeans Maggie" gives us the inside scoop from a NYU professor who thinks that the virus could be really bad in the fall. From now on, we're wearing face masks in the podcast studio.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com is trying to cash in on the fearmongering by offering a $25 dollar "Pandemic Swine Flu First Aid and Safety Kit." It's a couple of respirator masks, a pair of safety goggles, gloves, hand sanitizer, and booties. Yeah, you can pick up most of this stuff from your corner hardware or drug store for the cheap.

Also, a fan of the show turns Wilson into a "ce-web-rity" by adding him to a list of celebrities you can punch on Facebook. He cries in a corner today. Hopefully, you won't find Wilson on the roof of the CBS building any time soon.

Finally, we get in-depth about the possibility of the iPhone coming to the Verizon network. Neither Wilson nor Maggie thinks this will be a possibility in the near future. We think it's a ploy by Apple to get a better deal with AT&T. There is a chance the iPhone will appear on the Verizon network, when the company switches over to the LTE 4G standard.

Send in your comments to the404 [at] cnet [dot] com. Call us at 1-866-404-CNET (2638). We'll try not to catch the swine flu, but it maybe can't be helped, as Justin loves licking subway poles.

EPISODE 329 Download today's podcast |  Subscribe in iTunes |  Subscribe in RSS… Read more

Week in review: Avast, ye pirates

In a highly watched legal ruling, a court in Sweden on Friday found all four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay case guilty of having made copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing.

The defendants were each sentenced to a year in jail and also ordered to pay a total of 30 million Swedish kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to copyright holders, among them a number of American media giants.

The four men--Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström--were found guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the … Read more

The 404 320: Where we're cleaning up this pigsty

Jason Howell, from Bore Out Loud, keeps us classy in this very special episode of The 404. We make our big videocasting announcement. That's right! The 404, podcast of the future, is going to become a video podcast, so you'll be able to watch as Wilson looks deeply/creeply into the camera every morning. Plus, we get into some studio shenanigans as we prepare to revamp this place. And CNET TV is nominated for a Webby!

On today's show, find out why you should never eat Domino's pizza, especially if you live in New York City. It's all about the Ray'z Pizza, man. Also, Amazon says it had a homophobic "glitch" that caused several LGBT books to be removed from its listings. We think Nazis did it.

On the second half of the show, it's Tuna Tuesday! (Please listen to the show to find out what that means.) Nintendo releases an add-on to the Wiimote that makes it even longer and more precise. TWSS. Also, a 79-year-old Japanese man has the greatest job in the world.

By the by, is Miramax sending the right message to a girl who couldn't find a copy of "Adventureland" on bittorrent by giving her free tickets to see the movie? Or is it all a ploy to get her arrested? Finally, be sure to check out your RSS and iTunes feeds for our little "404 presents."

Keep sending in your best survival stories and character voices to the show at 1-866-404-CNET (2638). Be sure to RSVP for The 404 and Buzz Out Loud Meetup here in New York City. Alison Rosen, Jason Howell, Natali Del Conte, Kenley Bradstreet, and so many more are going to be making their appearance. Maybe you can buy them a drink? (Be warned: Jason is ours though.)

EPISODE 320 Download today's podcast |  Subscribe in iTunes |  Subscribe in RSS… Read more