Is Amazon.com just trying to be creepy? It's already headed by a "chuckling maniac" being sued over defective Kindles and swindling newspapers on the e-book reader. Now his company is quietly deleting people's Kindle books. It's Orwellian. Literally.
Simon & Schuster will announce today that it's struck a deal with Scribd.com to make around 5000 digital titles available for sale on the site, a move that sends a clear "screw you" message to Amazon and their little Kindle.
What will Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos do next, after launching his grand Kindle swindle on the newspapers? He's aiming to get inside your offspring's heads!
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle DX, a large-screen e-reader, today at the site of the New York Times's former headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The message: He's the future and newspapers are the past.
Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta is the frontrunner to replace Chris DeWolfe as MySpace CEO. Blog lordling Jason Calacanis has been jokingly nominated for the News Corp. gig. Here's who should get it.
Jeff Bezos turned up on the Daily Show couch to promote Amazon.com's newest Kindle e-book reader. And as this clip shows, he laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Why wouldn't he?
Those who can't do, teach. Second Life, the most overhyped virtual world, has been abandoned even by its most fervent journalistic promoters, like Reuters and Wired. It's now pitching itself as an online schoolhouse.
Radio personalities Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh don't have much in common, but they do share a birthday: Howard is 55 today, while Rush is turning 58. Others celebrating: CNN's Christiane Amanpour is 51. Kirstie Alley is 58. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is 45. Badgley Mischka's Mark Badgley is turning 48. Chef …
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like to talk about their hopes of "changing the world." Yes, of course: Changing the world from one in which they are poor to one in which they are fabulously wealthy. The question in the air is whether the founders of companies do a better job at creating wealth, for themselves and their…
Loic Le Meur! Gabe Rivera! Joi Ito! Don't feel bad if you've never heard of them. BusinessWeek.com's latest 25 Most Influential People on the Web is a mashup of billionaire powerbrokers with a randomized handful of those folks you run into at that same little tech conference that happens under a different name every…
Buy low, sell high, as they say on Wall Street. And right now, there's a flow tide of technical talent from shuttered financial firms flooding the New York Area available at rock-bottom prices. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures says why not take a pay cut and work longer hours at a Web startup? The "quant jocks"…
The founder of Amazon.com is usually pretty tightlipped about his personal investments, which he makes through a vehicle called Bezos Expeditions. Stephen Campbell, Bezos's chief investment officer, has blabbed about two new Jeff Bezos-backed startups via his LinkedIn profile. One, Finsphere, raised eyebrows in June…
Powerset never quite managed to launch with their natural language parsing search product. But they did give everyone a glimpse with a preview of search for Wikipedia. Not quite game-changing enough for Yahoo to buy or Amazon's Jeff Bezos to invest in, but just enough to get Microsoft to pay $100 million. Which is…
The favorite downtime-riddled platform for sharing the lumps life gives you in 140 characters or less, Twitter, has received a hot investment infusion of an undisclosed amount from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital. Spokesperson Biz Stone promises everyone that "Twitter will become a…
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…
The Google Street View car was Spotted in Microsoft Country last week after launching in many smaller markets around the country first. Apparently the drivers, rather than use some fancy, newfangled Internet doohickey, simply burn the data captured by the rooftop camera array onto a CD and mail it back to Mountain…
Attention, Amazon.com shareholders! Your money is not, repeat not in the hands of a sexless technomonk. Jeff Bezos took a moment to share some evidence of this at his annual shareholders meeting in Seattle. He reprised an anecdote about The Joy of Sex and its pivotal role in the early days of Amazon, lifted from his…
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…
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,"…
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…
