The Unsung Amazon.com Story
From what I understand, the point of the article is this:

Amazon is really efficient at selling and distributing stuff. They have a high operating margin, which is a ratio of operating income to revenue, and is a sort of measure of efficiency. In fact, they are close to that distribution behemoth known as WalMart in operating margin.

However, they had a great deal of debt from borrowing money. The interest on this debt really cuts down on income, and this makes them less profitable than the brick&mortar stores. At this point, they are beginning to pay back some of that debt.

The author argues that Amazon is doing an excellent job of managing their debt. They chose the right time to borrow money (to spur growth), and right now is the best time to start paying it back.

ll in all, Amazon seems to have borrowed at an opportune time. With many investors anticipating higher interest rates, it seems the debt-reduction program is similarly well timed.

Many of the things Amazon does are subject to vigorous debate. But it looks increasingly hard to deny that at least in the area of financing, it seems to have hit the bull's eye.

Read the full article if you want all the numbers: The Unsung Amazon.com Story

Why can't more e-Books be distributed in this manner? Recently, I bought a computer game online using a service called Direct2Drive. As part of the service, you can download the game and game manual. The game manual was protected by DRM! A game manual, for God's sake! Yeah, I'm sure THAT gets pirated a lot… The worst thing is, that I can't "activate" the manual more than once, so after I accidentally deleted it, I wasn't allowed to re-download it and access it again.

At least most of these eBooks have easily breakable encryption. Thanks for using 40 bit keys, Adobe.

Anyway, back on subject: if there was a decent e-book reader that was unencumbered by DRM (that is, NOT something like the Sony Libre) , along with the ability to download books in plain text (or even better, with LaTeX markup!), I would be extremely happy.

Political Group Denies Hacking Amazon.com

On April 1, Amazon sent a message to possibly hundreds of thousands of its customers calling attention to a controversial book, "Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict," and offering free copies. The message, ostensibly an advertisement, was worded to irritate the readers.

Hackers tricked Amazon into sending the message using the scarcely protected Invite feature, intended for communication between Amazon customers. Within hours, annoyed customers flooded Amazon's page, selling the book with negative reviews. Amazon promptly restricted the Invite functionality.

Ignoring the political motivation behind this, it was an obvious mistake to leave such a feature open to unrestricted use.

I believe that the usage of Amazon.com for spamming has happened before, except using "Amazon Connect." This is a service which allows authors to make blog posts which appear on the pages of users who have purchased their books. At the time, Amazon didn't do a great job of authenticating users to make sure they were really the authors… with undesirable consequences.

Alexa Web Search Platform Beta

It seems that users will be able to create any type of search engine, indexing particular types of data or a single or set of particular sites. This service seems to be very powerfull and ambitious, how well it works has not yet been determined. There is a form on the site to register for the beta, but we know that there are only a very small number of users at the moment so your chances of getting in soon are small.

You can get more information from the official page: http://websearch.alexa.com/static.html?show=webtour/start

It looks pretty cool. You define a subset of the web that you want to search (so you could bulid a search engine for audio, video, regular HTML, whatever). Then, you write a program in C or Java which filters the results (basically defining highly customized search constraints). Alexa takes this program and runs it on their cluster of computers, and returns your results.

This seems like a pretty interesting concept. I can't think of any great uses for it at the moment. The example that Alexa provides is kind of pointless: a search engine that lets you search for pictures based on camera model.

Since you are using Amazon's computing resources to run your program, I imagine they will end up charging something for this service. Offering a service like this makes sense: if you can't compete with Google on general web search, try to get customers to use something unique and specific like this.

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Amazon S3 Functionality

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
• Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
• Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent (TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Pricing

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

I noticed that Amazon allows users to use the BitTorrent protocol to lower distribution costs. Of course, this only works in the case where files are going to be downloaded by many users at the same time. However, this just reinforces the legitimacy of p2p protocols for uses other than piracy…

I’m not sure how economical this service is, or even if there is anything comparable in terms of scalability and stability for enterprise applications. For personal storage, there are companies like rsync.net, which provide storage at $2 per gigabyte per month, but with unlimited transfer. If you were to use something like this as a backup service, it seems pretty economical. Of course, using this solely as a backup service ignores its powerful functionality.

Some people have voiced concerns about security. This seems silly to me. If you want security, you should be encrypting your data.

This seems like a useful feature to allow consumers to discuss a product and ask questions without using the review system. Currently, the discussion boards on most of the books that I was looking at are inactive. But, individual discussion boards have been used to good effect on other sites like the Internet Movie DataBase, and I believe that this feature has potential.

However, the current implementation of these boards is lacking. Amazon makes most of its money off of books and other products which, individually, are not very popular – the “Long Tail”. Therefore, most of these discussion boards will remain unused, and even if a useful discussion is started on some page, very few people will ever notice it. Amazon should unify book-specific discussion boards across categories. For instance, I could view a sort of meta-forum for the Fantasy category, and see which books are generating the most active and interesting discussions. This would be a good way for people to find new books that they might like, complementing Amazon’s already excellent recommendation engine.

The mini-forum interface could also be improved. It makes good use of AJAX when you want to start a new discussion topic, or view individual posts. However, viewing a thread causes a redirect to a separate page. Also, you can’t directly reply to a thread from the main interface, only create a new thread. To reply to a thread, you have to click on it, and then click reply on somebody else’s post. The little “view-box” that pops up when you want to view posts from the main page is really annoying. It would make more sense to just expand the text area, rather than popping up a separate box.

Finally, I feel that Amazon’s product pages are getting way too cluttered. Did you notice how much stuff you had to scroll past to get to the discussion board section? There are about a hundred (OK, slight exaggeration) sections to the product page, and most of them are useless. For instance: the “Customers who tagged this item” section. I don’t know who “Inzdingo” is, and I don’t care that he tagged this item. I haven’t seen a “Product Wiki” on any page that contains useful information. People put useful information in their reviews. We don’t need a “Product Wiki” too. Right now, it just takes up space on every page that I view.

Amazon needs a way for me to customize my product page, similar to what they have done with the A9 search engine. Then, if I don’t want to look at a particular section, I can close it. Or, I can drag the sections that are important to me (such as user reviews) to the top of the product page, so I don’t have to scroll past 10 pages of uselessness to get to them.

Seattle Times story

Under its 10-year contract signed in August 2000, Toysrus.com agreed to select, buy and manage inventory, while Amazon agreed to develop the site, fulfill orders and handle customer service.

In the lawsuit, Toysrus.com charged Amazon with violating its exclusivity agreement by allowing other retailers to sell toys.

Amazon denied the claim and countersued, citing what it called its partner’s “chronic failure” to meet toy demand during the 2003 holiday season.

In the countersuit, Amazon claimed that more than 20 percent of the toy store’s best-selling items were unavailable on the site during the peak of the season.

Amazon plans music service to rival iTunes

A couple of key ways Amazon hopes to set itself apart would involve a subscription service, in which users pay a flat monthly fee for access to an unlimited amount of music…

Amazon has discussed offering subscribers digital-music players that come preloaded with tunes suggested by the online retailer, based on factors such as the subscriber’s personal CD-buying history on the site. The preloaded music could be kept on the player as long as the customer pays the monthly fee, but could also be swapped out for other songs during the course of the subscription.

Another likely feature: the portable players would be free or very cheap with a long-term subscription — say, a year — similar to the way cellphone providers subsidize the cost of new handsets when customers commit to service agreements. It’s possible Amazon would price the subscriptions close to what competitors typically charge — about $15 a month — and has said it may offer discounted CDs to subscribers.

So, Amazon is entering the world of digital media. They recognize that they won’t be able to sell physical media forever, and right now, physical books, CDs, and DVDs make up 70% of their sales. This move to digital started with Amazon’s mainstay, books. Back in November of last year, Amazon announced an initiative to allow customers to purchase books or portions of books online. They already offer the ability to search inside books, so being able to purchase digital portions is the logical next step.

But, back on subject. Will this music subscription venture be successful? I think so, if only because Amazon has a huge number of users. Offering a free player with subscription helps, and the ability to have pre-loaded music based on your purchase history could get some customers. (Actually, I just realized that the “pre-loaded music” feature is basically irrelevant: if the service is subscription-based anyway, you aren’t paying per download.) If the Amazon.com music player could be as well designed and stylish as the iPod, they might be a serious competitor.

Denver company says Amazon ripped off idea

Registrar Systems claims in its lawsuit that two inventors, John Klug and Thad Peterson, came up with technology in 1995 that stores online customers’ personal data and automatically provides the information to other Web sites, “recognizing that users would likely have to fill out countless similar forms.”

But Amazon.com is using the concept, the lawsuit contends. Basically it means that Amazon.com users who go to Target.com or other Web sites only need to punch in billing details once, according to the patent infringement lawsuit, which also names Target.

Registrar Systems is just trying to get some money… even they admit that they have no plans of using this “technology”. As far as I can tell, they don’t even have a website.

I searched the US Patent office for the inventor names, and I think I found the patents which this article refers to: patents #6,823,327 and #5,790,785, both for a “World Wide Web registration information processing system”. I got lost in the legalese, but it seems like these are simply patents for a user profile which is valid across different web sites.

I really don’t know enough about the patent system to determine if Registar has a case. However, it seems to me that Registar is just patent trolling, and I hope they lose. Many systems other than Amazon.com have a similar profile system, including, for instance, Microsoft Passport. The Passport Network has been around since at least 2000. I bet that Amazon will be able to find an example of prior art. If not, they could attempt a defense of laches, because Registrar sat on the patent for so long.

Quantum cryptography wasn’t doing it for me, so I changed over to amazon.com.

“yet another”, because I don’t want to be accused of being a sheep.

I’ll have some real content soon. Maybe after this round of CS:Source.