SAO PAULO (AP) – Sportswear giant Nike Inc. announced Wednesday that it will stop using leather from cattle raised in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, saying the move is part of the company’s commitment to curbing the region’s deforestation.
In a …
Posts Tagged ‘Amazon’
Amazon.com CEO apologizes for Orwell incident
July 24th, 2009 |
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos has apologized to Kindle customers for deleting pirated copies of George Orwell novels “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from their e-reader devices.
Kindle users were surprised last week to find that Orwell works they had purchased were removed from their readers and their money refunded.
Amazon said last [...]
Plastic Logic Reader, Competitor to Amazon Kindle, Will Use ATandT 3G
July 23rd, 2009 |
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Plastic Logic Reader, an eReader scheduled to be released in early 2010 with a larger screen than Amazons Kindle DX, will feature a wireless broadband connection via the AT T 3G network. Plastic Logics device is being specifically aimed at the mobile business professionals segment, with the company playing up its ability to download and display Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and PDF documents. As the eReader market becomes more lucrative, players such as Google and Sony are also moving into the space.
–
An upcoming eReader from Plastic Logic, aimed firmly at the
SMB (small and midsized business) and
enterprise market, will utilize AT amp;T’s 3G network to wirelessly download
material onto the device. The July 22 announcement followed on the heels of news
that Barnes amp; Noble would manage P…
Amazon Buys Zappos for $928 Million
July 23rd, 2009 |
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Amazon is paying about $928 million for online shoe retailer Zappos.com. This move is expected to help Amazon expand into the apparel arena with a well-known name after trying unsuccessfully to go it alone.
– SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com will pay about $928 million for
booming online shoe retailer Zappos.com, expanding aggressively into
the apparel arena with a well-known name after trying unsuccessfully to
go it alone.
Amazon said on Wednesday it struck a deal to buy Zappos, for 927.9
milli…
Amazon deal to reprint rare books
July 22nd, 2009 |
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Online retailer Amazon is teaming up with the University of Michigan to provide reprints of 400,000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books.
The books from the university’s library are in more than 200 languages from Acoli to Zulu and include a 1898 book on nursing by Florence Nightingale.
Amazon’s Book Surge unit will print the books in soft-cover editions at prices from $10(£6) to $45.
It comes as the Ann Arbor college seeks to digitise its book collection.
Financial details of the tie-up arrangement have not been revealed.
‘Rich collections’
The books, such as Nightingale’s "Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not", will be printed on demand.
An 1860 first edition of the book, which aims "to give hints for thought to women who have personal charge of the health of others", can currently sell for up to £1,000.
"This agreement means that titles that have been generally unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time," said Paul Courant, the university’s librarian.
"The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitised," Mr Courant said.
"We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library."
Some of the reprints being offered for sale are of books that have been scanned by Google, while others were processed by the university itself.
‘Economic’
The University of Michigan-Google partnership started in 2004 as part of a wider programme that also includes Harvard and Stanford universities and the University of California system.
Authors and publishers filed a lawsuit claiming copyright violation, but Google and the publishing industry settled the suit last year.
Amazon’s Book Surge print-on-demand service was launched in 2007 with books from the collections of Emory University, the University of Maine and the Toronto and Cincinnati public libraries.
"Public and university libraries are seeing the benefits of print-on-demand as an economic and environmentally-conscious way to support their missions of preserving and making rare or out-of-copyright material broadly available to the public," said Book Surge’s Amanda Wilson. </p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Marc Hershon: My Kindle Ate My Homework
July 18th, 2009 |
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Amazon slapped my sense of ownership and control across the face yesterday when I learned they reached right into the Kindles of anumber of customers and deleted — irony of ironies — copies of George Orwell’s 1984.
Lawsuit Charges Amazon Kindle Has Design Flaw
July 16th, 2009 |
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On the heels of a price reduction for the Amazon Kindle 2, one user files a lawsuit claiming a design flaw in the device’s cover causes the screen to crack.
–
The much publicized, much scrutinized e-reader from online
retail giant Amazon.com, the Kindle, is now under fire from one of its users,
who claimed the device is liable to break due to a design flaw in a lawsuit
filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washing…
King.com joins the migration to iPhone
July 16th, 2009 |
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King.com, which focuses on skill-based games for prizes, is migrating its web-based casual games into iPhone version. Its Amazon Survival game, which is also developed into iPhone version, is a puzzle game where you should save the Amazon jungle.
Launched in August 2003, King.com website has more than 150 games which are played by 17.5 million [...]
Microsoft Azure Could Curb Enterprise Fears About the Cloud
July 15th, 2009 |
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Microsoft is making an aggressive push for Azure, its cloud-based developer platform, to be adopted by the enterprise. While companies have expressed reservations about moving applications and development to the cloud, the standardization and functionality offered by Azure could convince them to take the jump, even if they eventually end up on a rival platform offered by Amazon.com, Google or Salesforce.com.
– Microsoft’s
new cloud-based platform, Azure, could offer the enterprise a way to overcome
its reservations about porting IT infrastructure online, even if companies
ultimately choose to utilize another cloud platform.
Azure, which Microsoft originally announced on Oct. 27, 2008, at the Professi…
Windows 7 flies off virtual shelf
July 15th, 2009 |
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The latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system, Windows 7, is available for pre-order in the UK.
Amazon said that sales of Windows 7 in the first eight hours it was available outstripped those of Windows Vista’s entire 17 week pre-order period.
The home version of the operating system costs around £50, while the professional version costs around £100.
The limited number of pre-ordered copies will be shipped on 22 October, the same day it goes on sale in stores.
Pre-orders are available from a number of retailers, with the period ending on 9 August.
Analysts IDC predict that some 177 million copies of the operating system will be in place by the end of 2010, 50 million of which will be in Europe. The firm estimates that products and services surrounding Windows 7 will generate $320bn (£195bn).
Discount
The software requires a "clean install", meaning that prior versions of Windows cannot be upgraded to Windows 7 and will have to be removed before its installation.
Because of a recent European Commission anti-trust ruling, Windows 7′s European version will not be integrated with Windows’ Internet Explorer, meaning that a browser will have to be installed separately.
"Both Windows 7 upgrade packages shot to the top of the Amazon.com software bestsellers chart over in the US as soon as they were made available for pre-order at the end of June," said Chris Poad, software director at Amazon UK.
"With the significant discount currently on offer, a similar level of high demand was expected in the UK for what is undoubtedly the biggest software release for many years."</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Rackspace Releases New Public API for Cloud Development
July 14th, 2009 |
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Users of the Cloud Servers API will have control panel and programmatic access to Rackspace’s cloud infrastructure services, which are Cloud Servers, Cloud Files and Slicehost. The API for standards-based cloud servers is designed to give IT managers and software developers better control over their cloud infrastructures.
– Cloud services provider Rackspace on July 14 released the public beta of a
new API for software developers interested
in better and more direct control over their own hosted computing structures.
The Cloud Servers API immediately becomes an
alternative to Amazon EC2, an online platform used f…
Microsoft Azure Is Free Until November
July 14th, 2009 |
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Microsoft announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference that Azure, its public cloud platform, will be free until Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in November. Intended to go head-to-head against similar cloud-platform offerings from Amazon.com and Google, Azure is just one of the flagship programs that Microsoft has been demonstrating at the conference, along with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010.
–
Microsoft will make Azure, its public-cloud platform, available for free until its
Professional Developers Conference in November. Availability will begin on July
14.
Citing a Gartner study that showed the cloud service business
as a potential quot;$150 billion business opportunity for the…
Microsoft Azure Is Free Until November
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Microsoft announces at its Worldwide Partner Conference that Azure, its public cloud platform, will be free until the Professional Developers Conference in November. Intended to go head-to-head against similar cloud platform offerings from Amazon.com and Google, Azure is just one of the flagship programs that Microsoft has been demonstrating at the conference, along with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010.
– Microsoft
will make Azure, its public cloud platform, available for free until its
Professional Developers Conference in November. Azure will be available beginning
July 14.
Citing a Gartner study that showed cloud services as a potential quot;$150
billion business opportunity for the marketp…
10 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Cloud Storage and Computing
July 13th, 2009 |
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Cloud computing serves up computing power, data storage or applications from one data center location over a grid to thousands or millions of users on a subscription basis. This general kind of cloud for example, services provided online by Amazon EC2, Google Apps and Salesforce.com is known as a public cloud because any business or individual can subscribe. Private cloud computing is a different take on the mainstream version, in that smaller cloudlike IT systems within a firewall offer similar services, but to a closed internal network. This network may include corporate or division offices, other companies that are also business partners, raw-material suppliers, resellers, production-chain entities, and other organizations intimately connected with a corporate mother ship. Public or private, cloud computing is getting the IT industry excited. Gartner analysts in March 2009 said global cloud services revenue could move beyond $56.3 billion this year from $46.4 billion in 2008 and grow to $150.1 billion in 2013. IBM Vice President of Cloud Services Ric Telford offers eWEEK readers his take in the following slide show.
– …