Amazon Category Archives
men taught to fish
5 September 2011 | Amazon, Google, Software | 2 Comments
и еще о фрагментации:
It’s called simply the “Amazon Kindle”. But it’s not like any Kindle you’ve seen before. It displays content in full color. It has a 7-inch capacitive touch screen. And it runs Android.
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And this is where things get really interesting. As anticipated, Amazon has forked Android to build their own version for the Kindle.
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They are not working with Google on this. At all.
теперь понятно, отчего Google так и не выложил до сих пор исходники Android 3.x, да? у всех свое понятие открытости, натурально.
новые практики
22 June 2011 | Amazon, Lifeform | No Comments
в продолжении темы о самиздате — оказывается, Kindle Store заполонил спам:
Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon’s self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense.
Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book.
а дальше все просто:
After you pay the buck and download it, this is what it looks like when you open it up. Going to the URLs referenced herein — nichebooklets.com or NicheContentKit.com — drives you into a linky, spammy trap.
или даже так:
Some of these books appear to be outright copies of other work. Earlier this year, Shayne Parkinson, a New Zealander who writes historical novels, discovered her debut “Sentence of Marriage” was on sale on Amazon under another author’s name.
впрочем, думают и над решениями — но как-то совершенно безрадостно:
Forrester’s McQuivey said Amazon will have to craft a social-network solution to the problem. If the company can let readers see book recommendations from people they know, or people whose reviews they liked in the past, that would help them track down the content they want and avoid misleading recommendations, he explained.
Daffron of Logical Expressions said Amazon should charge for uploads to the Kindle publishing system because that would remove a lot of the financial incentive for spammers.
“This is why email spam has become such a problem — it costs nothing,” she said. “If people can put out 12 versions of a single book under different titles and authors, and at different prices, even if they sell just one or two books, they can make money. They win and the loser is Amazon.”
не хотите написать еще пару-тройку книг?
via.
смена парадигм
5 May 2011 | Amazon, Copyright, Internet | 1 Comment
ровно то же, кстати, происходит и с другой стороны:
In the States Netflix nearly doubled the number of new subscribers in the first quarter of 2010, from 1.7 to 3.3 million. In total, Netflix now has 22.8 million paid subscribers in the US, which generated a total revenue of $706 million in the first quarter of this year.
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Movie piracy is not quite gone yet, but Netflix shows that people are willing to pay for access to movies online, even when plenty of pirated copies are available. The next step is to offer easy access to movies in the rest of the world, and get rid of the artificial delays in release dates.
иными словами, достаточно сделать механизм оплаты удобным — и, пожалуйста, люди с радостью станут покупать.
еще интереснее, впрочем, другое: вслед за Netflix рано или поздно весь контент переместится в сеть:
In recent weeks companies like Amazon, Sony, Google, Verizon, 24symbols and others have started to roll out “cloud-based” content streaming and on-demand services (or plans) for movies, music and even books. Video on demand is nothing new. Nor is streaming. Roku and Netflix more or less pioneered the mass adoption of the latter concept. The difference now, though, is that companies like Amazon want you to stream your own content.
Ten, 15 years from now, we will look back on this time as a quaint, yet painful transition period: one where consumers learned to give up the physical manifestation of content in favor of constant access to what they own from anywhere they can find Internet access.
натурально, смотрите:
24Symbols, which launches next summer in Europe, takes Amazon’s Kindle ebook concept to new almost dizzying heights. Even though book files are some of the smallest you’ll find (its super easy to compress those files because they’re just letters and you only need one representation for each letter), 24Symbols wants to stream you book access on a subscription basis. You’ll no longer own any books. Instead you’ll be able to stream and read as much as you want.
не за горами и наконец-то счастье:
It’s clear to me, however, that we’re turning a corner. Content ownership—with copyright laws always a fuzzy thing at best—is ready to transform into content access. Consumers want to sample a wide array of content styles and there is no better way than the cloud.
как на дрожжах
25 March 2011 | Amazon, Hardware | 1 Comment
а вот и еще один игрок на рынке планшетов:
It would be foolish not to include Amazon on the list of potentially huge players in the tablet industry.
While the company is still only selling simple Kindle e-readers, Amazon has quietly built all the tools it needs to compete against Apple and the other tablet makers with its own Android-based tablets.
так и есть, сперва покупки:
<...> Amazon has acquired Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specializes in touch-screen technology <...>.
потом тестовые запуски:
I think this is Amazon’s first step towards launching their own Amazon-branded (or perhaps Kindle-branded) Android devices, where the Amazon Appstore will be preinstalled, and the devices will ship from Amazon with your Amazon credentials already set up on the device (as with the Kindle hardware today). They’re launching now, for existing Android devices, to work out the kinks and build the library of available titles.
и постепенно настоящая цель становится видна все отчетливее — что ж, оно и верно, продавать медийный контент Amazon уж точно умеет.
ваши книги вам не принадлежат
15 December 2010 | Amazon, Censorship, Literature | No Comments
долго ждать не пришлось, история с изъятием книг повторилась снова:
The independent writers who publish on Amazon report that erotica books containing incest are being taken down with no explanation by Amazon, and removed from the Kindles of purchasers of the books.
с Софоклом, то есть, разобрались. кто следующий?
shit my book says
17 November 2010 | Amazon, Internet, Technology, Twitter | 5 Comments
смотрите, у нас уже есть устройство для чтения электронных книг с постоянным доступом в интернет, есть возможность пометить текст в читаемой книге и есть социальные сети.
так почему же до сих пор Amazon не приведет в порядок то, что они все-таки попытались запустить?
купля-продажа
20 October 2010 | Amazon, Economics, Facebook, Google, The Great Game, Twitter | No Comments
еще немного — вот очевидное о партнерстве:
Memo to Twitter: with search, do not grow a brain. Partner with the best at Google and Microsoft (see Facebook-Bing), and you’ll get great AdSense, AdWords, display ads, and mobile ads without having to run all the infrastructure—and manage all the people!—to do it. They should be willing to give you 70% of the revenues now that you’re doing a billion searches a day.
или, с другой стороны:
Here’s my simple reasoning for why Google won’t buy Twitter: Twitter won’t sell.
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But there’s another reason Google won’t buy Twitter, and it’s this: Google is learning to be patient. Twitter is a big deal, but if you accept it as part of an emerging landscape, there’s no reason you need to own it. Given Twitter’s natural competitive positioning against Facebook, Google can partner with the emerging service in ways that provide both companies advantage against a shared enemy.
натурально, еще одна Большая игра. а что за игры без денег?
But when I brainstormed the map, I always wanted one feature that was a bit difficult to execute: Acquisition Mode.
ну да, сыграем-ка в Монополию:
So if you think it’s a good idea for Twitter to acquire, say, Foursquare, well, suggest it. And see who might vote for it. If you run a startup, hell, tell us who you want to be acquired by – and if you think you’re the acquirer, so much the better. Tell us that as well.
So far, folks think Amazon should acquire Netflix, Facebook should acquire Zynga, and eBay should acquire Yelp, among many others. Check it out, and suggest your own.
I love the web.
рассказы о приключениях
9 October 2010 | Amazon, Games, Software | No Comments
в былые текстовые аркады снова можно будет играть:
Many people cut their teeth on the imagination fueled text adventures games released by Infocom back in the eighties. Whispernet combined with the handy keyboard and the limiting browser made the Kindle perfect for a text-based adventures. We programmed an interface specifically for the Kindle that lets you play a handful of the Zork-like adventures that we spent many of hours of our youth. Save game is supported so you can come back at a later time without restarting. Let us know what you think and how we can improve it!
ого, какая характеристика:
And it makes a ridiculous amount of sense: text is gorgeous and easily-readable on the e-ink screens, the lack of colour isn’t a problem, and – let’s face it – the sort of people who are likely to buy an e-reader are exactly the sort of people who are likely to love vintage games.
что ж, получается, я знаю этих игроков.
персональные рекоммендации
1 October 2010 | Amazon, Apple, Google, Privacy, Security | No Comments
а вот и откровение:
The results of a study conducted by researchers from Duke University, Penn State University, and Intel Labs have revealed that a significant number of popular Android applications transmit private user data to advertising networks without explicitly asking or informing the user.
половина из случайным образом выбранных 30 приложений отсылали личные данные, включая телефон и координаты, рекламодателям. что ж, становится понятно, зачем Амазон открывает собственный магазин приложений — и я бы на их месте тоже не мешкал.
вещи и люди нас окружают
8 September 2010 | Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Technology | 1 Comment
в общем, как и было предсказано — это лишь вопрос времени:
Music has always been social. It starts both friendships and arguments, and is a huge piece of everyone’s identity. When you think about it this way, Ping seems like something that should have happened years ago. It’s already a “can’t remember life before it” feature.
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I’m already buying more music. I shudder to think what will happen once we have Ping for books and apps[1].
у Амазона, кстати, уже есть зачатки подобной социальности, так что я бы поторопился:
Was there any urgency? Hasn’t iTunes been just fine as-is? Yes, but it had pretty much run out of tricks. I suspect someone at Apple finally realized how lucky they are that Facebook hasn’t started selling music yet. 500 million connected users talking constantly about what they do and don’t like, even “Liking” official band pages and sharing videos. The only missing piece is commerce. Is Ping a threat to Facebook? Not really. But Facebook Music would be a massive threat to iTunes.
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[1] — emphasis mine.