Amazon has been pretty busy this Thanksgiving break, not only are they dealing with the hoards of online shoppers they’re also quietly shutting down one of their web services… Alexa Web Search.
Amazon Offers Holiday Customer Review Team
Amazon.com has unveiled a "Holiday Customer Review Team" that consists of half a dozen of its most active reviewers.Amazon says the goal of the review team is to "provide fellow Amazon customers with top gift picks for the season as well as helpful tips on cutting costs over the holidays."The reviewers have been given access to some of Amazon’s most popular Black Friday deals so they can offer up their opinions on the items with other shoppers.
Amazon To Reduce Packaging Materials
Amazon.com announced Monday an initiative to reduce the amount of packaging materials some of its products are shipped in with the idea to make them easier for customers to open and to be better for the environment.
Rackspace Enters Amazon’s Space
Hosting company Rackspace made an aggressive move into cloud computing this week by acquiring Jungle Disk and Slicehost, and by securing relationships with Limelight Networks and Sonian Networks. The move puts Rackspace square into Amazon territory, sparking hopes that increased competition will lower costs.
Amazon’s Newest Foray Into Gaming
Amazon has purchased Reflexive Entertainment, a computer game developer based in Lake Forest, California, founded 11 years ago. Apart from actually developing games for PCs, Macs, and even the XBox 360, they own the popular site Reflexive Arcade, which offers downloads of PC games and Mac games, as well as online web games.
Amazon to Change the Content Delivery Network Industry?
Amazon announced today that it will be launching a Content Delivery Network service before the end of the year. This could mean bad news for other networks.
What’s Amazon Up To?
Amazon has stolen away Microsoft senior ad exec Lisa Ultzschneider leaving us all to wonder just what kind of advertising aspirations the company has. Amazon has not commented on what kind of plans it has for Ultzschneider. Rick Aristotle Muarriz at Fool.com speculates that it won’t much involve Amazon.com, but likely the company’s other properties:
Amazon Looks for Bigger Piece of Online Video Pie
Online video competition has just gotten a little more heated. Amazon Video On Demand is making over 40,000 movie and television show titles available for streaming. Before, customers could only download titles and watch them on a PC via Amazon’s Unbox or on their TiVo box. Now you can do that or stream the titles to watch them instantly.
Amazon About to Get More Social
Amazon has acquired Shelfari, a social network focused on books it has been involved with for a while already. A year and a half ago, Amazon invested $1 million in the site.
Amazon Looking to Rekindle its Kindle Strategy
Word on the street is that Amazon is working on some new versions of the Kindle. At least one of them will be aimed at college students, a market that probably should’ve been targeted more closely the first time around.