Results tagged “amazon”

KOMO reports that UW is testing out the use of the Amazon Kindle in their classrooms this fall. The University's Computer Science & Engineering Department will give every CS&E graduate student a Kindle DX, which will replace textbooks and research papers in their first-year courses. Kindle-edition textbooks and other materials will also be given to them free of charge. Amazon's sending Kindle DXs to six other universities throughout the United States. UW will be the first to get the book-killers.

Yes, yes, Seafair is this weekend, but if you are a parent of a gradeschooler, or a nerd, or both, then there is a much more important event. Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince is playing at the Pacific Science Center IMAX.

Amazon buys Zappos, the online shoe store. Amazon already runs high-end shoes and accessories site Endless.com. Zymogenetics stock is up with promising new lupus treatment.

Gizmodo is reporting a really, really bad thing: Amazon has deleted digital books from customers' Kindles after they've already bought them. The kicker? The books were Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. (This irony is delicious! Where did you get it?) Gizmodo says the publisher "changed its mind" about having electronic versions, which we don't actually believe. We don't see Amazon bowing and scraping before publishers much, let alone offering to break into customers' devices for them to erase purchased products. Stay tuned for the full story--just maybe not on a Kindle.

A Frenchman runs Amazon's worldwide customer service; a French-made engine powers Boeing's 737s. In all, some 600,000 Americans owe their jobs to French investment in the U.S., while American investment in France employs 600,000 Frenchies. Despite the economic crunch felt by both countries, there's still a billion dollars of bilateral trade between the U.S. and France every day, says Pierre Vimont, the French ambassador to the U.S.

While Nike and Starbucks get applause for their leadership in sustainability--especially Nike, which joined Johnson & Johnson in publicly scolding the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for its opposition to global warming legislation--Sightline wonders why Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing aren't putting their lobbying efforts where their corporate climate policies are. "Google has," says Sightline's Fahey, twisting the green knife (our italics), and linking to a video of Google's Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, testifying to Congress. Her point is, "Standing on the sidelines of the debate in the state legislatures and in Congress can be as damaging as standing in the way."

• There are some crankypants smokers who have been forced to quit because of the federal tax hike. Watch out as some become even crankier because their non-smoking daily commute has doubled in time, thanks to the I-90 bridge closures.
• All schools that closed due to swine flu will re-open tomorrow. Ha.
• The government says they won't be able to save the newspaper industry, but Amazon says they can help save the newspaper industry with their new e-reader.

Hey, Seattlest doesn't have any bestsellers, gay or straight, banned or otherwise, but "software glitch?" C'mon. Even if it wasn't a deliberate wardrobe malfunction, Amazon's response was just pitiful, akin to the woman in charge of snowplows leaving town during December's storm. Twitter's out there pushing conspiracy theories, and Amazon's all "Nevermind." You'd think the company that pioneered online book sales would do a better job of managing an online crisis. Jeff Bezos, where are you?

Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos, with his cueball head and giraffe neck, appeared on the Daily Show last night to shill for his high-falutin' e-book reader:

David Pogue Hearts Jeff Bezos is the headline for the Seattle Weekly blog post, which asserts, "it's fair to say that [NYT] personal technology writer David Pogue is now officially in love with Jeff Bezos." Except David Pogue doesn't agree that his review of the Kindle 2.0 is such a wet, sloppy kiss and says so in the comments: "Um, no, it's not. Did you read the same article I wrote? I remember writing something far more mixed. Did you skip over these parts?" Pogue isn't Marshall McLuhan, but other than that, it's pure Annie Hall. What Pogue does conclude is "the new Kindle edges even closer to the ideal of an e-book reader." Edges, not leaps.

We take a break from chronicling the collapse of the economy for some happier news. CrunchGear says Kindle 2.0 is finally on the horizon: "We’ve got a seat at another conference on Monday, February 9, and unless they’re announcing a Bezos-themed amusement park in the Ukraine, I’m pretty sure we’re going to see the Kindle 2." Here's a second source, doubters. The design is supposed to be significantly upgraded, but the question everyone has is how much the new candy costs. Will Amazon stick to its $359 guns? And will they make more than 500 of them this time?

A new weekend post from our new fashion correspondent, Cameron Levin. But before we get to the fashion talk, she's also got the lowdown on some time-sensitive designer retailer events for you:
• Polite Society Trunk Show with acclaimed Russian talent, Madina Vadache, featuring her spring/summer couture collection on Thursday, January 29th, 6-8pm. Vadache will be there for personal consultations and custom fittings. RSVP by January 27th to info@shoppolitesociety.com or by calling 206-441-4796.
• Karan Dannenberg 70% off storewide sale, January 25-31
• Butch Blum Winter Sale, 50% storewide sale

• CHS datamined the scoop on the newest new restaurant to hit Odd Fellows Hall, Tin Table: "We believe that food and wine should be an experience for the senses and a festival to spirit."
• Seattle Metblogs realized the hard, concrete fact that we all probably have been trying to avoid stubbing our emotional toe on: a decision on what to do about the Viaduct will never arrive. (In the meantime, Ballard is still holding out for a tunnel.)
• TechFlash reported on Amazon's economy-defying holiday traffic surge--their traffic was up 7 percent compared to December 2007. Though we wonder how much of that was Seattleites checking to see where their snowbound packages were.

The region's...er...inclement weather must have given an extra boost to Amazon.com's sales this season. Or maybe depressed, laid-off people everywhere felt like the malls were too much to handle and decided to shop online, instead. Either way, Amazon had the best Christmas ever! All that money couldn't plow the roads, though, and Seattlest's gifts, guaranteed by Amazon to arrive at our house by Christmas Eve, still haven't landed on our doorstep. We pulled the trusty "print out a picture from the website and put it in a pretty envelope" trick to make up for it.

A new website, Foodista.com, Seattle-based and launched today, promises to do for food what Wikipedia has done for the rest of the universe.

The above clip features the Amazon guru's appearance on last night's episode of The Simpsons, in which Bezos pisses himself at Billionaire Camp. We know, Jeff, we're nervous about the economy too.

Amazon has come out with their Top 10 lists for the year, and check out the hiphop picks:

It wasn't just the Dow Jones setting records today; the NASDAQ index had its 3rd largest one-day decline ever by percentage, losing 9% of its value. Among the tech stocks taking a drubbing were locals Microsoft (-8.7%) and Amazon (-10.4%)--though Redmond might enjoy the schadenfreude of knowing that Apple closed down nearly 18%.

The P-I's John Cook reports that Amazon has bought Shelfari. Shelfari is reporting its purchase, too, so it must be true. Wonder if Amazon gets free shipping when it buys an HQ?

There's talk that Kindle sales have hit a wall recently, so we have a new slogan for Amazon: "RE: Kindle your love of reading." *crickets* Well, we have all sorts of buzz to report, too. First, there's the 8.5" x 11" textbook edition of Kindle. Then there's that $100-off-a-Kindle deal. Finally, there's the Kindle 2.0 rumor-mongering: "[T]he new version is significantly thinner, has a better screen, is more stylish and includes fixes to some of the user interface annoyances with the first version." Now how much would you pay? $249-$299?

We don't have a shred of evidence for that headline; it's a gut thing. We're rollin' Jack Fuckin' Welch-style. But Citigroup research analyst Mark Mahaney does predict this will be a Kindle Christmas; he's doubled his sales estimates to nearly 400,000 units. At $359 per, that's over $136 million from a single product. Mahaney says Amazon's e-reader will bring in $1 billion by 2010. This projection is based on the Kindle selling as many units in its first year as the iPod. No one outside of Amazon knows how many that is--Mahaney is guesstimating, using in part the 4,000+ mostly positive Kindle reviews on Amazon's site, more than half of which give it 5 out of 5 stars. Our favorite contrarian response? Peter Kafka says hold on a sec: "iPod users immediately had access to thousands of songs they already owned the minute they synced their machines to their computers. And they could get anything else they wanted for free (if they chose to steal). Kindle users, however, are pretty much forced to pay $9.99 each time they want a new title."

Sure, you can read this extraordinary site every single day on your internet-connected computer (or iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) for free. But if you've made the investment in a certain electronic reading device, you can now subscribe to Seattlest on your Kindle, and ensure you will have no reason to turn on your computer ever again. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Weirdly, the case of Amazon's disappearing "Buy Now" button does, in fact, have something to do with Harry Potter. But it's more about accounting wizardry than the fun kind.

When we read that the Seattle Times had a large feature on the top paid CEOs in the Pacific Northwest, we wondered what the point was. Everyone knows Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Jeff Bezos—all local CEOs—are richer than God. And it turns out everyone, this Seattlest included, is wrong. According to the Times piece, the best paid local CEO in 2007 was James Voelker, who runs Bellevue's InfoSpace—a company we've never heard of. Despite its public anonymity (outside of technology circles) Voelker was handsomely paid (okay, obscenely paid) for his work. In 2007, he raked in $38,143,383...a salary we would be pleased to have 1/64th of on our greediest days.

If you wanted to buy a few books, a used movie, a car, and a new outfit all in one place—right this very moment—well, you're out of luck. Amazon.com, the internet's purveyor of everything, seems to have crashed. The New York Times is reporting the site failure is an "unplanned event" that had already been happening for an hour when they posted at 10:37 PST. A check-in on Amazon at noon finds the same error message. We've questioned our friends who work at Amazon about the site's troubles, but we figure they are otherwise occupied with figuring this thing out and trying to keep their heads from exploding.

New York recently passed a state budget that requires Amazon.com (and other online retailers) to start collecting NY state sales tax. Amazon doesn't have any brick-and-mortar presence there, but NY argues that because Amazon has affiliates in the state, the company is obligated to start collecting the sales tax on purchases made there.

Economic downturn? Recession? Job losses? Really? Sure, Seattle's housing market finally cooled a bit, but listening to business news this morning you'd be excused for thinking all this talk about a bad economy is a crock of shit, at least here in Seattle.

"I5 looking south" by futileboy We humbly suggest a subtitle for this jigsaw-puzzle shot: The Kingdom of Amazonia. Have you joined the Seattlest Flickr pool yet?