New Kindle Fire, 7-Inch Fire HD Now Shipping from Amazon

The iPhone 5 isn't the only gadget ready to face anxious consumers this morning, as Amazon's new seven-inch Kindle Fire HD is in stock and ready to ship along with the refreshed Kindle Fire and the basic $69 model.

The Verge is reporting that Amazon is now shipping the 16GB model of its new seven-inch Kindle Fire HD for $199. The tablet currently shows as in stock and ready to ship, while the 32GB model for $249 is delayed until October 25.

Along with the latest HD model, the refreshed original Kindle Fire with twice the RAM, longer battery life and a faster processor is also shipping today at the newly-discounted price of only $159.

Last but not least, the basic Kindle is ready to ship for a mere $69, but if you don't fancy having to view ads, you can pony up another $20 to get the ad-free version, which is still a nice discount from its original $109 price.

If you missed out on getting an iPhone 5 preorder in before the shipping dates slipped to two weeks, maybe you can console yourself with a new Kindle -- and Amazon Prime members can have it as early as Saturday if they want to pay the extra $3.99 for one-day delivery.

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter

 

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Amazon Now Selling More E-Books Than Print Books In U.K.

E-tailer Amazon has been leading the charge for electronic books almost as long as anyone with their Kindle lineup, so it should be a surprise to no one that the company is now selling more e-books than print books -- at least across the pond.

Amazon has announced a milestone for e-books, with the online retailer confirming that Kindle books are now outselling print books in the United Kingdom. The more surprising aspect of this announcement is that this milestone falls on the second anniversary of the Kindle's arrival there.

In 2012, Amazon.co.uk has sold 114 Kindle books for every 100 print books -- numbers that include sales of hardcover and paperback books sold by the e-tailer where to Kindle edition currently exists. Free Kindle books were excluded from the data, but obviously, e-books would have outsold print by even higher numbers if those had been included.



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Tuesday Recap: Amazon Cloud Player Upgrades, The Daily Scales Back

It seems as if Amazon has waved the white flag of surrender against Apple's iTunes Match today, beefing up its Cloud Player service with a few features that sound awfully familiar to iTunes users. But hey, the more the merrier, and we're quite happy to have all of our Amazon MP3 purchases available for redownload just the same. While you wait for Cloud Player to scan and match your own music library, why not take in today's recap for this terrific Tuesday, July 31, 2012?

Amazon Cloud Player Adds Past Purchases, Scan & Match

E-tailer Amazon is stepping up its MP3 music game today, announcing upgrades to its Cloud Player service. Thanks to agreements with all of the key music labels (as well as 150 indie music publishers), Amazon is introducing the same type of "scan and match" technology used in Apple's iTunes Match (goodbye, uploads!), and those matched tracks will also receive a free high-quality bump to 256Kbps MP3. The new deal also allows previous and future Amazon MP3 purchases to be automatically saved to Cloud Player, which doesn't count against any storage you might be paying for. Tracks can be streamed to any web browser, Kindle Fire or iPhone and Android apps, with the Roku and Sonos players soon joining this elite club. Amazon Cloud Player pricing has also gotten a tweak, with free users allowed to import up to 250 songs, while Cloud Player Premium users can fork over $24.99 per year to import up to 250,000 songs.

The Daily Regroups, Cuts 29 Percent of Staff

We never like to report on folks losing their jobs, and today AllThingsD has brought us the unfortunate news that tablet news publication The Daily is putting 50 full-time employees on the chopping block. That amounts to 29 percent of the organization's staff, but the changes don't stop there. The onetime iPad exclusive is reorganizing its Sports and Opinion sections, which it claims saw the lightest traffic; partners like Fox Sports will now provide this content, while the standalone Opinion section has been given the axe. The tablet app is also ditching the extra work it's taken to be viewed in landscape, and will feature content in portrait-only mode from now on.

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Amazon Smartphone Inches Closer, Expected to Leverage Mobile Commerce with Payment Platform

MobilityTechzone Headlines Symantec Announces New Android Security Apps New U.S. Cellular Survey Shows Growing Discontent Among Mobile Customers If Service Providers Want to Use New and Better Technology, is that a Problem? WAC, Big GSM 'Applications' Effort, Disbands Polycom Enhances RealPresence Mobile Software View all » --

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Report: Amazon Planning to Follow Kindle Fire with Its Own Smartphone

It's been awhile since we've heard this one, but a report this week is dragging out new details about Amazon's ambitions to release a smartphone of its own to follow up the company's Kindle Fire success.

Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon is developing its own smartphone with Chinese manufacturer Foxconn International Holdings Ltd., the company who assembles Apple's iconic iPhone, among others.

"Amazon is seeking to complement the smartphone strategy by acquiring patents that cover wireless technology and would help it defend against allegations of infringement," said the usual people familiar with the situation who decline to be named.

The report isn't clear if Amazon plans to follow up its initial success with the Kindle Fire, which ran a forked version of Android largely indistinguishable from anything released by Google and its OEM partners. Given the company's investment in its own Android-based Appstore, however, it would make sense.

Amazon recently attempted to purchase wireless patents owned by InterDigital Inc. of Pennsylvania, a sale that instead fetched the tidy sum of $375 million from Intel. Sources claim Amazon continues to have discussions from other patent holders.

"Adding patents would help Amazon protect itself against lawsuits alleging illegal use of technology," Bloomberg notes. "Amazon has been involved in five patent-related cases this year, and 20 cases last year," according to the news outlet's own data.

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter

 

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Amazon Unveils Portal for International Mobile App Distribution

SideTap™ Memory Card
Tyfone's technology and services address the mobile commerce opportunity through a neutral secure element implemented through its SideTap™ MicroSD memory card. This enables addition of NFC and true multi-factor authentication security using a neutral secure element rather than the current industry approach of using a SIM card or a handset-installed chip. Learn More ›

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Amazon Outage Underscores Importance of Cloud Testing

Rackspace, said, “We wish our friends at AWS and all of their customers the best. Everyone suffers down-time and never at a good time.’”

In April of 2011, AWS suffered an outage in the same Northern Virginia data center that crippled a number of major websites, including Foursquare (News - Alert), Reddit, Quora, Hootsuite and Moby, TechZone reported.

In a nearly 6,000-word document, Amazon detailed the widely scrutinized outage that began just after midnight on April 21. The overly technical explanation boils down to the fact that a human error began a chain of events that is sure to cost Amazon dearly.

The outage initially occurred in the Virginia data center when an erroneous network configuration change was performed during an upgrade to the primary network. Instead of shifting traffic to the other router on the primary network, the traffic was moved onto the lower capacity redundant EBS network. This caused many of the servers to get “stuck,” as Amazon put it.

Edited by Rachel Ramsey
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Amazon to Open Customer Service Center in Winchester, KY, Employ More than 550

Tech Support is Customer Service
What typically comes to mind when somebody mentions "customer service"? We tend to associate customer service with conventional service industries. We think about airlines, pizzas, lattes, haircuts, clothes, gadgets, etc. Although there is substantial evidence that customers report dissatisfaction over their IT experience, it's not something that is complained about loudly: it's not something people write songs about to post on YouTube. People don't like to complain about bad customer service fo…

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Wednesday Recap: Target Kills Kindle, Amazon Cloud Drive, Steve Jobs as FDR

We all know Ashton Kutcher will soon be playing Steve Jobs, but did you know the enigmatic Apple co-founder also has a rare acting cameo to his name? Thanks to a long-lost in-house short film called

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Apple to DOJ: We Didn’t Start the E-Book Monopoly, Amazon Did

Although the U.S. Department of Justice is mostly aiming its scope at e-book monopolies as a whole, Apple also appears to be in the government’s sights -- but Cupertino is fighting back with a statement pointing the finger right back in Amazon’s direction.

AllThingsD is reporting that Apple has broken their silence on the U.S. Department of Justice’s move earlier this week to include the iPad maker in its antitrust lawsuit against e-book publishers.



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Amazon Launches App Store, Offers Rev Share to Developers

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Tuesday Recap: Instagram on Android, Amazon on PS3, Faster Tagging on Shazam

The heavens parted for Android users today, and Instagram was delivered unto them. The news seems to have stirred up hateful emotions for some of the Google faithful who shun fraternizing with the more than 30 million iOS users already sharing photos with the service, but you can’t please everyone, right? Meanwhile, there are plenty of other tech-related stories for this fine day, so let’s launch right into all the news for Tuesday, April 3, 2012.

Instagram Makes the Leap to Android

That loud cheering you heard earlier today was probably Android users whooping it up over the news that Instagram has finally arrived on Google’s mobile platform. While the company is touting more than 30 million users from the iOS side of things, they’re sure to have quite a few more now that the Play Store has it on their virtual shelves. Personally we’ve always preferred Path to Instagram, but most everyone we know swears by the latter, so what do we know? If you haven’t downloaded it yet, hit the link to grab it from the Google Play Store right now.

Amazon Instant Video Now Available on PS3 -- But Where’s the iPad App?

On any given weekend evening while taking a break from writing the very news recap you’re reading each weekday, we can be found sprawled out on the couch enjoying streaming movie rentals from Amazon Instant Video. The e-tailer offers a different recent feature film for only 99 cents each Monday through Thursday, and a trio of $1.99 offerings for the weekend, so it’s a great way to get caught up for cheap. While we already have a Roku box and LG Blu-ray player both capable of doing this, what’s not to like about one more home theatre device being blessed with it? Today, Amazon Instant Video is finally available on the Sony PlayStation 3, where it joins the ranks of Netflix, Hulu Plus and Vudu for your hard-earned dollars, complete with more than 17,000 free movies and TV shows available with your Amazon Prime membership and another 120,000 paid titles available. While it might help us get a few more hours of use out of our PS3, what we’d really like is an Amazon Instant Video app for the iPad -- what do they expect us to do, own a Kindle Fire, too? (Oh yeah

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Amazon Looks to Bring 550 Jobs to Lexington with New Call Center

By Steve Anderson , Contributing TechZone360 Writer
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A development for the state of Kentucky has emerged as a subsidiary arm of Amazon, and is looking to bring a new customer service outlet to the city of Winchester – about 20 miles to the east of Lexington.

The state of Kentucky – along with the rest of Clark County – is looking to offer up to $10.25 million in tax incentives, should they go ahead with plans to bring the customer service center in, and a $250,000 economic development bond to help offset the costs of the expansion. Costs are expected to reach $20 million.

Tax incentives and bonds won't come without costs to Amazon, however, which must create 550 jobs within its first three years of operation. Jobs in question must average an hourly pay of at least $15. But Kentucky's Economic Development Finance Authority projects that once the cost of benefits is factored in, the jobs will pay an average of $20 an hour.

This will no doubt come as welcome news to residents of the area, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics' preliminary numbers put the Lexington-Fayette area of Kentucky at a 7.9 percent unemployment rate.

This is, of course, before the underemployment rate and the rate of those who dropped out of the labor force entirely are considered, which will make the picture necessarily worse and the news of potential new jobs to come all the better.

Amazon has been seen recently as a substantial threat to big-box retailers like Best Buy, and thus jobs with Amazon should bear a note of extra security as Amazon is improving its position as a retailer overall, even in a weak economy with consumer confidence only starting to make a comeback from its lows.

It's not a done deal yet, though, but for the short term Kentucky residents should polish their resumes and get ready for a new arrival, a representative of the new way of shopping.

Edited by Braden Becker



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