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Update at 8 p.m. PDT: Amazon's Service Health Dashboard reported around 5:25 p.m. PDT that U.S. and European service "has been fully restored" and that the company "will provide more detail on this event once we have completed a full investigation."

Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service--a major component of its online computing services--is apparently experiencing problems Sunday.

The e-tailer's "Service Health Dashboard" reports that the S3 service in both the United States and Europe is experiencing "elevated error rates."

The outage is causing CenterNetworks images … Read more

Reporter Caroline McCarthy gives us a rundown of two YouTube partnerships announced Thursday--one with TiVo and one with film studio Lionsgate, which Caroline expects won't be as big a deal as many people hope.

Also in this podcast: Google Apps gets hundreds of new templates for making specific types of content; Gmail and Google Calendar could be available offline as soon as six weeks from now; Amazon tries its hand at movie and TV downloads; and the man going after the tech vote in November. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Today's stories:

Offline access soon for Gmail, Google Calendar?… Read more

You never knew you had so many reasons to love Windows Mobile 7, but you'll find out a few of them today. Also, Amazon offers on-demand movie and TV streaming (on PCs and Macs both!), Microsoft explains the weird Halo no-show at E3...and the explanation is typical, baffling and infuriating. So, good work, Microsoft, as usual. Oh, and that asteroid that was going to kill us and then wasn't going to kill us? It's probably going to kill us, but we won't know for sure because we can't afford a subscription to New Scientist … Read more

It's sometimes lost in all the flavor-of-the-week mix-remix-download-social networking sites, but eMusic has been selling DRM-free MP3s--meaning they can be played on the iPod or any other player--from independent labels and artists for a decade now, and has a reasonable claim to be the No. 2 music store behind iTunes.

A planned redesign is meant to help eMusic retain this position. According to reports in Fortune and Digital Music News, the site's slated for an overhaul beginning next week. Artist pages will be updated with Wikipedia biographies, original editorial content, and embedded YouTube videos. In a nod to … Read more

Corrected at 11:10 p.m.: Amazon customers do not need to purchase the Sony Bravia TV before accessing the new Video on Demand download store.

Fresh from a failed attempt at online video, Amazon is giving it another go.

Amazon is opening a streaming video store, called Amazon Video On Demand, that will offer 40,000 movies and TV shows for download and rental to people's computers, according to a story that appeared Wednesday evening in The New York Times. The service will be made available to a limited number of invited Amazon customers initially and will be … Read more

Two new Kindle models are expected to be available on Amazon.com in time for the holiday shipping season, with the first coming as early as October, an "insider" tells CrunchGear.

The first model will be an update of the current e-book reader, with the same screen size and an improved interface, according to the tipster. The source told CrunchGear that Amazon has "skipped three or four generations" with the update.

The second new model will be considerably larger, shaped like an 8.5-inch by 11-inch piece of paper, and is expected to be available next … Read more

Apple had a serious problem with its iPhone 3G product launch last week, coupled with its limp-along release of its iPhone 2.0 software. Could Amazon.com's cloud have helped? Lee Faus, in his "Popularity Sucks" post, thinks so.

As he notes, the ability to spin up resources for a short-term crush on Apple's servers could have worked wonders (at least, for the 2.0 software upgrade), just as it could have benefited Mozilla during its launch of Firefox 3.0:

Even though the iPhone has been dominating developer headlines recently, it looks as if there's still some air in the social-network gaming space.

The Social Gaming Network, a start-up that develops games for social platforms such as Facebook and OpenSocial, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' personal investment firm, Bezos Expeditions.

This comes just months after the company closed a $15 million Series A round from Greylock Partners, the Founders Fund, and others.

Founded by the creators of Web 1.0 page creator Freewebs (which now calls itself Webs.com), the Social … Read more

The story originally stated that Verizon's over-the-air music service downloaded DRM-free MP3 files directly to the user's handset. It was later learned that Verizon's direct-to-phone music download is not in the MP3 format. The copy delivered to the user's computer, however, is in the MP3 format.

Read the updated story here.