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Amazon.com

mine is bigger

Keeping Bezos, Ellison and Schmidt safe cost $3.4 million last year

Keeping Oracle CEO and cofounder Larry Ellison safe cost the company $1.7 million over the fiscal year ending May 31, 2007. Most of that money went to guards at his homes as well as installing and repairing home security systems, according to Oracle's SEC filings. Part of Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's 2007 compensation included $1.2 milion for personal security. Google CEO Eric Schmidt spent $475,000 on security in 2007. A lot of the money probably goes to security precautions that might seem a lot more like luxuries than necessities. More »

amazon.com

Major Borders shareholder hopes for Amazon.com buyout

Hedge fund manager William Ackerman owns a 30 percent stake in Borders — but he doesn't want to anymore. The founder of Pershing Square Capital Management told reporters he thinks Amazon.com should purchase the bricks-and-mortar bookstore: "Amazon could buy the company for about $400 million to get those locations that would take more than $1.0bn to build." Not going to happen. Amazon just let Borders go as an online Web partner without much of a fight. (Photo by AP/Sancya)

e-commerce

Amazon.com invests in a home shopping network, but not Diller's

Amazon.com's new, new thing is straight from the 1980s: a home-shopping network. Live on your TV! Amazon today announced an investment in the Talk Market, which the flacks call "a user-generated TV Shopping Channel" because businesses can upload and edit commercials on the site. [PR Newswire]

breakdowns

Amazon.com back after over an hour offline

After a considerable outage that started around 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time, Amazon.com's homepage is now back up and still trying to get someone, anyone, to buy a Kindle. Shortly after the outage, the company issued a short statement in the forums for 3rd party sellers titled "Amazon Un-Planned Event" — not such an unusual occurrence, apparently, but rarely of this magnitude: More »

breakdowns

Amazon.com site outage doesn't exactly inspire confidence in world domination plans

It's one thing when Twitter goes limp (again). It's another when e-commerce oligarch Amazon.com can't keep it up for customers. But that's just what readers are reporting, and we've confirmed. I mean, if you're going to rule the Web, it really is best to remain virile atop your throne. Sure it means lost sales for Amazon — and for its network of affiliates — but our question is, are Web startups using the company's "cloud" services such as EC2 also experiencing problems? Update: Even an attempt to access the site via IP address instead of domain name is for naught, ruling out a simple DNS issue.

Amazon.com and Google to rule Web, according to Wall Street's Captain Obvious Yahoo, IAC and eBay are in for rough sailing, but Google and Amazon.com should cruise smoothly and emerge as the big winners in the coming years, according to analyst Jeffrey Lindsay of Wall Street research firm Sanford C. Bernstein in a 310-page report published yesterday titled "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning." Tellingly, there's no mention in the summary article of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a totes awesome IPO. [Reuters]

green with envy

Microsoft kicks Amazon.com's spandex-clad butt in bicycling to work

Microsoft employees have logged 2,605 days of riding their bikes to work, with an average commute of 19 miles in a day, since the start of the year in a contest sponsored by the Cascade Bicycle Education Foundation for organizations in the greater Seattle area. That's more than twice as many days and three times as many miles as Amazon.com employees, ranked eleventh behind even the lazy slackers who work in Seattle's municipal government and the academic wankers at the state university. How are Valley companies doing? More »

poll

Pick your career poison: Google online sales and operations manager vs. Amazon.com support engineer

We picked the ten worst entry-level jobs in tech. Now, in a single-elimination tournament, we're going to let you choose which gig is truly the worst. Round one begins with Amazon.com support engineers versus Google online sales and operations account managers. We'll let your fellow readers advise you before you choose: More »

death of print

Attempt to spark Kindle flame leaves publishers cold at Book Expo

LOS ANGELES, CA — Consumers aren't the only ones not buying the Amazon Kindle pitch. At a presentation by Amazon.com representatives at Book Expo America on Saturday, publishers proved an equally tough sell. The reps held a special session to introduce publishers to Amazon's tools for uploading, publishing, and managing inventory for the Kindle. While the Digital Tools for Publishers system is slick and easy to use, the company wasn't particularly transparent about questions regarding the size and makeup of the market for Kindle e-books. More »

amazon.com

Jeff Bezos pitches the Kindle, BookSurge to skeptical mob at Book Expo America

LOS ANGELES, CA — Jeff Bezos pitched the Kindle to attendees at Book Expo America today in downtown LA, and then sat down with Wired editor and author of The Long Tail Chris Anderson for a little chit-chat. The takeaway? Much like Apple, Bezos uses the euphemism "customer experience" for "vertical integration," especially when it comes to the new Kindle and the requirement that print-on-demand publishers work with Amazon subsidiary BookSurge. After the jump, some choice quotes from before Anderson's questions (presumably from his notes, on regular old paper, pictured here) started to veer into extreme audience irrelevance when he brought up EC2 and Bezos' space ambitions. More »

taxes

Amazon.com exploits corporate welfare in the Keystone State

Texas isn't the only state going after Amazon.com for abusing the Supreme Court decision that requires mail-order retailers to collect sales taxes only on purchases in states where the company has a significant physical presence. In Pennsylvania, which is about to become host to a new Amazon distribution center, a local editorial is questioning the legality of the company avoiding state sales taxes by putting the warehouse titles under the names of subsidiaries. More »

poll

Guess how much tech's 10 worst jobs pay

To come up with the estimated pay for tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs we spoke to former and current employees, HR reps and friends of friends working these jobs. But still, some of our commenters expressed disbelief over the salary estimates. "80 grand for an entry level job? Time to apply and kick those whiney losers out! Let's see how they feel about their new job bagging groceries at the Safeway," wrote mwbeeler. Loakim said:
Boo fucking hoo. I clicked through about 4 of those and if they are representative, then getting paid 60-70K right out of college at an "entry" level job is nothing to complain about, regardless of the "tough" working conditions (ceiling too low? CSR work? no windows? cubicle? oh the torture!!). I spent half my life to get a Ph.D. and will barely be making that as an asst professor at a major research university.
We like our estimates, but we're willing to bow to the wisdom of the crowd, or the madness thereof. Save for IODA's unpaid internship — no point in guessing there — we've created a poll for each job. Take your best guess. More »

e-commerce

Borders can't "out-Amazon Amazon," so why open a store on the Web?

Longtime Amazon.com partner Borders opened an independent storefront on the Web today. Analysts don't hold high expectations for the new Amazon rival and Borders Group Inc. president and CEO George Jones told the AP the company knows what's up its up against. "It's not the intent that we're going to out-Amazon Amazon at what they do," Jones said. So what is the intent behind Borders's store on the Web? Likely, Borders opened shop on the Web to help sell the company. Two months ago, Borders announced it was for sale and only last week, Barnes & Noble confirmed a team of its executives are looking into a deal.

quotable

Jeff Bezos to remind John Doerr he's not a virgin

Speaking to young graduates, including eight new Amazon.com hires, at Carnegie Mellon University's commencement ceremonies on Sunday, Jeff Bezos admitted that he's a nerd who does "a mean interpretation of Captain Picard," but is not a sexless monk. That classification was suggested by Amazon board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. Citing Bezos as an example, Doerr said the perfect founder "is undistracted because he has no sex life." Bezos intends to remind the sex-negative venture capitalist of his many children at Amazon's next board meeting. John, if you need a retort, just exclaim how "resourceful" Mackenzie Bezos is.

10 worst jobs

Tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs

Soon America's most bright-eyed graduates will enter the workforce and make their workaday homes in cubes at Google, MySpace, or Amazon.com. And they will suffer not just the indignity of having to work for a living, but also the dispiriting realization that a job at a cool company isn't always that hot. These employers, and the others hiring for tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs, listed below, will look spiffy on a resume someday, but for now the only good these jobs promise the world is the pleasant feeling you and I can share knowing we're not the ones stuck in them. More »

10 worst jobs

Support engineer, Amazon.com

Support engineer, Washington-Seattle, Amazon.com
Key responsibilities:
Supporting platform infrastructure and systems architecture, including operating systems, hardware/storage configurations, and performance tuning using Linux, system calls, memory management, and program debugging.
Why so bad? More »

great moments in journalism

Portfolio scooped on Jeff Bezos by children's book

"Who knew that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos chose his wife in part because he felt she could, if necessary, get him out of a third-world prison?" Portfolio scribe Kevin Maney asked at the start of a Q&A for the magazine. The answer: Any 13-year-old who's read Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com. Bezos goes on to explain to Maney that his criterion was really a proxy for resourcefulness. More »

taxes

Texas wants to mess with Amazon.com

Thanks to an intrepid Dallas Morning News reporter, Amazon.com shoppers in Texas may soon have to pay sales tax on goods purchased from the site. Maria Halkias asked Robin Corrigan, a sales-tax policy expert in the Texas comptroller's office, why the state doesn't collect sales tax from Amazon. Corrigan said it's because Amazon.com "told me they don't have a distribution center in Texas." That's incorrect. Go ahead and apply to be a senior operations manager at Amazon's Irving, Texas facility. More »