amazon

Sony BMG signs onto Amazon's DRM-free music store

It's a full hand of cards for Amazon: the Web's mega-retailer announced Thursday that it will be selling music from Sony BMG Music Entertainment in its Amazon MP3 store. This means that Amazon MP3, which only sells "naked" tracks without any digital rights management (DRM) protection, now has deals with all four major music labels. Because of the lack of copy protection, any song from Amazon MP3 can play on virtually any media-playing device, from PCs to music players to cell phones and PDAs.

The DRM-free songs from Sony BMG will be available for purchase on … Read more

Zmanda offers backup to Amazon S3

Zmanda, a company commercializing the open-source Amanda backup software, announced a partnership by which customers can store their data at Amazon.com's S3--the online Simple Storage Service.

The partnership spotlights the growing influence of Amazon's S3, which provides customers with online storage whose costs are tied to the amount of storage needed. It's one of several online services Amazon offers.

Amanda (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver--a contrived acronym if ever there was one) has been around for years; Zmanda was founded in 2005 as a provider of commercial support. There are several others, too.

A reverse engineer finds Kindle's hidden features

A significant amount of skill with a soldering iron and some custom firmware has revealed a number of interesting features Amazon.com hid within its Kindle e-book reader.

Among the ones that hardware hacker Igor Skochinsky uncovered and described on his blog are a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.

I confess I was as interested in the reverse-engineering … Read more

Why Amazon is the world's best tech retailer

Most of the time here on The Digital Home, I tell you about some of the trends, news stories, companies and products that annoy me. Other times, I'll tell you about something a company is doing right or something I applaud. This time, it's the latter.

Now, before I begin, I should probably mention that I don't own any Amazon stock because at least one cynical knucklehead reading this column for the sole purpose of finding fault in it will ask if I do own Amazon stock. Sadly, I'm not allowed to own any tech stocks because it's a departure from the ethical standards that I agreed to when I became a journalist. Does that satisfy you?

So why is Amazon the world's best tech retailer? Well, I guess I should first say that this title isn't exactly the most prestigious in the world. Who else would sit atop the list? Certainly Best Buy wouldn't with some of the questionable practices it employs and our friends over at Circuit City certainly don't have a clue about how to bring the right kind of experience to consumers.

But unlike all of its competitors, Amazon has been able to bring products to us in a timely manner without the need for frequent call backs and lengthy delays for no reason. Is it perfect? Not a chance -- some products sell out in a matter of seconds, there's no indication that anyone actually wants to buy groceries online and its customer service still leaves much to be desired. But beyond that, I have enjoyed my time using the service.

So what makes Amazon so great? The way I see it, there are three main components.… Read more

DRM deathwatch: Warner on Amazon

Amazon's digital music store, Amazon MP3, is now offering songs administered by Warner Music in the DRM-free MP3 format. This gives the store 2.9 million tracks, and leaves Sony/BMG as the last major label holdout. Not bad, considering Amazon MP3 launched only in September and is technically still in beta.

Amazon also said that 2007 was its best holiday season since it opened in 1994--and it wasn't just a strong economy, as other retailers reported a generally weak season. But I don't know if Amazon's effectively using its traffic to promote its digital offering: … Read more

Why iTunes is in jeopardy

For quite a long time, iTunes has sat atop the music downloading business with nary a competitor to knock it off its pedestal. Because of this, the company has been able to capitalize on the success of its iPod and basically corner the music market.

And while most of us were perfectly fine with that, the music business wasn't. With Warner finding fault in everything Apple does and Universal practically wishing iTunes would explode so it wouldn't need to worry about it anymore, we've run into a situation where the desire for music is there, but record labels are unwilling to provide us with what we want.

And just when things looked like they couldn't get any worse, Amazon stepped in and dropped a bombshell on this industry that we still don't know the full effect of. With the flip of a switch, Amazon offers up 2.9 million DRM-free MP3s and as of today, features songs from four out of the big 5 record labels (Sony has yet to join).

Even better, Amazon's service is slightly cheaper than Apple's, as most songs come in at the $0.89 price point. And in the end, it's not just that Apple loses out or Amazon wins, the real result of Amazon's rise is that iTunes is being pushed into a tenuous situation.

And I'm loving every minute of it.… Read more

Finally -- MacBook tops Amazon's bestselling computer list

Say what you will, but as I've said numerous times on these pages, the MacBook is easily one of the best notebooks in the world. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's probably one of the best I've ever used.

And while I still have numerous issues with Windows and my utter distrust for a company that can't even release an operating system that's final knows no bounds, I truly believe the average consumer should go out and find themselves a Mac.

Luckily for us, it seems like most people tend to agree. As of this writing, theresults of Amazon's bestseller list shows Apple's 13.3-inch MacBook leads the pack of any and all PCs and computer hardware.

Sure, the results may not mean much to some and saying it has sold the best may not necessarily indicate that Windows PCs are on the slide and Macs are slowly making a trek to the top, but can you remember a time in recent history when a Windows machine wasn't sitting atop a list of bestselling computers?Regardless of how you feel about it, Macs are coming on strong and 2008 could be the year of the Mac.… Read more

Amazon reports its best holiday season ever

Online shopping was more prevalent than ever this holiday season and Amazon was right there to cash in. Today, Amazon issued a press release, with some interesting numbers and facts about its "best season ever."

Their busiest day was December 10th, on which they sold 5.4 million items, that's 62.5 items sold per second. Amazon also shipped items out to over 200 countries this season. Here's some more interesting facts and bestsellers that Amazon shares with us.… Read more

The EC2 Firefox Extension is now Open Source

If you are using or experimenting with the Amazon EC2 services this new extension for Firefox is a great addition, providing management features directly from the browser. The news is that it's now open source and readily available. As we have all seen over the last few years open source is key to distributed innovation.

ElasticFox provides basic Amazon EC2 management features within Mozilla Firefox.

List available AMIs List your running instances Launch new instances of an AMI Manage security groups and launch permissions associated with your instances Use the packaged .xpi file to easily install the plugin in … Read more