A spokesman for Amazon.com Inc. said Sunday the online retail giant won’t launch a smartphone this year, and that if it did launch one in the future, it “would not be free.”
The statement by Amazon came 48 hours after we reported that the company was considering introducing a smartphone for free to consumers, according to people with knowledge of its smartphone development efforts.
The company previously declined to comment to us.
During the third day of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit against Apple, a high ranking Amazon executive said the agency model used by Apple and five major book publishers was meant to slow down the success of online retailer's popular e-book reader.
According to in-court reports from Reuters, Amazon's vice president of Kindle content Russell Grandinetti testified that his company told publishers it may have to modify business relationships as a result of adopting the agency model.
Amazon dominates in a way other companies don’t. It’s a technology company with a physical presence. Over the past year, Amazon has added about 25,000 employees. It’s planning to build a new 3.3-million–square-foot headquarters near downtown Seattle, complete with biospheres. It’s expanding its square footage by additional millions as it builds new warehouses across the U.S. and around the world.
It’s been a busy week for technology companies explaining their tax situations.
Amazon's Cloud Drive was unveiled two years ago for the primary purpose of letting customers store music files purchased from Amazon. Although you could upload other files to Cloud Drive, it wasn't a replacement for cloud storage services like Dropbox because it didn't automatically sync files from one computer to another.
FCW, a federal IT blog, reported yesterday that its sources confirmed that the CIA has inked a deal with Amazon, agreeing to a cloud computing contract “worth up to $600 million over 10 years.” These sources suggested to FCW that Amazon Web Services will help the intelligence agency build a private cloud network so that it can “keep up with emerging technologies like big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under the CIA's previous cloud efforts.”
Salk Institute for Biological Studies researchers have shared a how-to secret for biologists: code for Amazon Cloud that significantly reduces the time necessary to process data-intensive microscopic images.
The method promises to speed research into the underlying causes of disease by making single-molecule microscopy of practical use for more laboratories.
Amazon is inexplicably down for us. When we navigate to amazon.com we’re getting a series of errors. Initially the page only read “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable”, but we’ve been getting the failure page above, as well as straight-up browser fails.
Update: Amazon is back. But why did it go down in the first place?
A federal judge in California has ordered Apple and Amazon.com to sit down and attempt to settle a lawsuit between them over Amazon's use of the "Appstore" name for its online application marketplace.
U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Laporte told both parties on Tuesday that they must attempt to reach a settlement ahead of their next scheduled appearance in court on March 21.
A hacker named Gef has rigged up his Raspberry Pi to use a Kindle e-reader as its monitor.
