Amazon announced and released the Amazon Fire TV set top box yesterday. Its technical specs looks impressive, and it’s priced right, but there’s not enough of difference to make me want to switch from our Roku 3 yet. It’s definitely worth a look if you don’t have a streaming box, though.
Tag: Amazon
Categories
The Temptation of eBook Readers
Amazon’s announcement last night’s of the latest and greatest version of the Kindle brings back a bunch of conflicting feelings in me. Part of me is tempted by the promises of a limitless catalog and the ability to carry thousands of books with me, while a larger part of me is perfectly content to hang […]
I don’t know if me being excited about this Amazon announcement is more a statement of me as a person, or this crazy world we live in, and I don’t care. Amazon’s new Frustration-Free Packaging program they just launched is 10 shades of awesome. Everyone – customer, manufacturer, deliverer, and Amazon – wins. So anyway, […]
Categories
The Great DRM Revolt of 2008
Last week, Electronic Arts released one of the most highly anticipated computer games of recent memory – Will Wright’s Spore. The game, which lets you create a new species and control its evolution from single-cell organism to intelligent space explorer, was expected to be the crowning achievement in Wright’s series of computer simulations (including SimCity, […]
Google made a big announcement Monday night that has the web development community talking. They announced and released a preview version of App Engine, a set of tools that lets you quickly build web applications and deploy them to Google’s infrastructure for instant scalability. I want to talk a bit about why it is important […]
Earlier today, the O’reilly Radar blog had an interesting post about an innovative new auto insurance company, of all things. They’re called MileMeter, and the thing that makes them different is that you buy your car insurance from them by the mile, not by the quarter, year, etc. This is obviously going to be a […]
You’ve been hearing about my love of Amazon for years now, including the awesome web services platforms they are making available to developers everywhere. They started off with a cheap and easy to use message queuing service (SQS), later added pay-as-you-go remote file storage (S3), then added on-demand computing capacity (EC2), and most recently, flexible […]
Categories
Amazon’s Customer Culture
The Harvard Business Review has a fascinating interview with Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, who I’ve mentioned before is my favorite CEO. In the interview, Jeff discusses how the company’s culture is completely customer focused, and why it’s not easily reproduced by competitors. Mr. Bezos offers a metric ton of insights and advice about running a […]
Technometria is fast becoming one of my favorite podcasts every week. I like to say it’s “like The Gillmor Gang, but actually good”. This week’s episode is one of the best yet. It’s a conversation with Doug Kaye of IT Conversations/GigaVox Media and Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelism at Amazon. They discuss Amazon’s suite of […]
He survived a helicopter crash back in 2003 and laughs about it now. Instead of ignoring Tim O’Reilly and other critics during the Amazon 1-Click patent controversy in 2000, he joined the conversation and spearheaded the movement for patent reform. He’s a big fan of science fiction. He can talk to you about web services […]