Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Antitrust official inappropriately lauds Amazon’s “disruptive business model” DOJ antitrust head William J. Baer, speaking at a London antitrust conference: By conspiring with Apple, which was seeking a fail-safe way to enter the market, five major publishers and Apple reached an …Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Amazon AWS: Good enough for the CIA Leena Rao has a fascinating background story at Fortune on Amazon Web Services, built around a profile of its leader, Senior Vice President Andy Jassy. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but this bit was particularly interesting: Netflix’s adoption also …Friday, May 8, 2015
The Amazon Noncompete Clause Here it is, in all its overbroad glory: During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or …Friday, September 19, 2014
My iPhone 5 recently stopped charging, unless I propped the phone upside down against an inclined surface like a lamp stand or a keyboard. I’m not in a position to buy one of those fancy new iPhones, so I shopped around in the internet’s DIY isle. I found a well-reviewed set of iPhone surgery tools …Thursday, March 28, 2013
Amazon acquiring GoodreadsMakes sense.Thursday, January 10, 2013
Law and the Multiverse analyzes ‘The Hobbit’ ContractI love several things about this: This is only the first in an ongoing series, with three other parts as of the moment I published this post. You can buy the contract from Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit on Amazon. James …Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Netflix via AmazonThis is interesting: Netflix delivers its streaming option via one of Amazon’s cloud storage and content distribution networks. I try to avoid summarizing other peoples’ work, but the other interesting bit here is that Amazon’s in-house streaming video service saw no interruption. …Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Amazon outage takes out Reddit, Foursquare, HerokuLee Hutchinson, writing at Ars Technica: These kinds of outages are a jarring reminder of the true nature of “the cloud”—it’s still just servers in data centers. Amazon’s market power in ebooks leads to some questionable behavior, as well as some …Monday, October 22, 2012
Amazon’s “phantom” 20% VAT for UK ebook salesIan Griffiths and Dan Milmo of The Guardian, quoting ” a contract seen by the Guardian,” presumably between Amazon and one of its UK publishing “partners”: If the base price exceeds the base price … provided to a similar service then … …Thursday, September 27, 2012
Kindle Library Bulk DeleteI want to thank Mr. Nathaniel Robertson for pointing people in need of cleaning up their Kindle archive to this bookmarklet that allows you to bulk-delete entire pages of Kindle Library content. Many thanks to the person behind Japanese blog Net Buffalo for solving this …Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Amazon heads off app fragmentation on Kindle Fire, AndroidKevin C. Tofel, writing at GigaOM: This could mean vastly better tablet apps for the higher resolution Kindle Fires similar to the improved iPad apps that iOS developers made instead of scaled-up iPhone software. I think he’s right: …Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Twitter continues to value advertiser utility above user experienceRomain Dillet at TechCrunch explains it like this: Now when you land on a company profile page, you will see a big brand name with a small @username below, a gigantic header photo, a small logo next to every tweet, photos of new …Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Gruber on “Amazon’s Play”John Gruber writes one of the most respected and prolific tech blogs on the web, Daring Fireball. Some people deride him as a blindly-worshipful Apple fanboy who delights in pointing out the failed attempts of other companies to copy Apple’s products and …Thursday, September 6, 2012
Kindle Fire HD 8.9: how the new Kindle tablet compares with the competitionAmazon increased the power and range of its Kindle offerings and achieved impressively-low pricing across the board. Again. I’m 100% certain someone I know will get one of the newly-announced devices, maybe even before the …Friday, June 1, 2012
"Philip," writing at his blog Ocracoke Island Journal about the ebook edition of War and Peace he bought on his Nook (emphasis below is mine): As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern….” … For the sentence above I discovered …