Amazon - page 34

The first authorised biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been given a new title after its author, Walter Isaacson, persuaded publishers to go with something a little more “elegant.”

Today’s June 30th. That’s an important day for app developers. It’s the day Apple expects app makers to comply with new guidelines saying you can no longer link directly to a way to buy in-app content out of app. Hulu Plus has already jumped through that hoop, but you know who hasn’t? Amazon with its Kindle app.

Sync versus streaming. Essentially, that is the difference between how Apple, Amazon and Google view the cloud. However, a closer looks finds iCloud could pay off big for the Cupertino, Calif. company looking to cash-in on the falling price of flash memory.

Are iPad component makers too busy fulfilling Apple orders to build any competitors? That’s appears to be the case for Amazon, where at least one parts maker may already be too busy churning out iPad displays to build a tablet version of the Kindle.

Apple’s bid to prevent the rest of the world from using the term “Appstore” may be about to hit a stumbling block, after U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton revealed today that she will “probably” deny the Cupertino company exclusive access to the term.

Apple’s iCloud may be looking to revolutionize the way consumers interact with the cloud, but that doesn’t mean Cupertino’s not drawing on its competitors expertise when it comes to actually hosting their online services.

In fact, Apple’s pushing the iCloud online with more than a little bit of help from both Microsoft and Amazon.

Apple’s iCloud music locker will not require users to laboriously upload all the music in their iTunes libraries, but will instead rely on “scan and match.”

Never one to shy away for “Me-Too”-isms, Amazon has just launched their own analogue to the popular Mac App Store.

It ain’t over until it’s over, Yogi Berra once said. The sports legend could have been talking about Apple’s attempt to lure the music industry onto the cloud. Just as an agreement to make your music accessible everywhere seemed at hand, publishers want more cash.

They say that no one but Apple can make a decent sub-$500 tablet, but Amazon not only thinks they can undercut the iPad in price once… they think they can do it with two tablet at once.

In a recent motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Apple to stop Amazon from using its “App Store” trademark, Amazon argued that the term “App Store” was as generic as “book store” or “music store”…. and quoted several remarks by Steve Jobs referring to his competitors’ offerings as “app stores” as proof.

Now Apple’s filed a rebuttal: NUH UH! App Store isn’t generic at all.

Got an old iPhone laying around collecting dust? You can now trade it in for a discount on anything Amazon.com sells, including a new iPhone or iPad.

Apple’s plans to bring music streaming to the upcoming iCloud service are coming together swiftly this week as the company signs up a third major record label.

More signs that your iPad may be the future of print. Online bookseller Amazon announced Thursday e-books are outselling paper versions. While the announcement focused on the Kindle, the news also gives reason for Apple to celebrate its own e-reading plans, including iBookstore.

As this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference approaches, it seems Apple’s plan to bring us a magical cloud filled with a never-ending collection of music called ‘iCloud’ is getting its final touches. Sources say a licensing deal with music label EMI is now in place, but what about the other labels?

‘Coyote’ and ‘Hollywood’ are the code-names of two tablets rumored to be a part of Amazon’s
upcoming tablet ‘family’. Details obtained from one tipster reveal the Coyote will boast a dual-core processor much like Apple’s iPad 2, whereas the Hollywood has something even more audacious up its sleeve: hardware that Amazon hopes will potentially make the iPad 3 obsolete even before it launches.

The company that helps build the Kindle reportedly is expanding their office in Cupertino, Calif. But Lab126 is unlikely to get a congratulatory fruit basket from their rival neighbor Apple.

Faced with the incredible juggernaut of Apple’s iPad, Amazon may have no choice but to gang-tackle Cupertino with an “entire family” of Android-based Kindle tablets.

Amazon.com has just stopped all sales of MobileMe. It’s almost as if they know something’s coming that could blast their recently unveiled Cloud Locker music streaming service out of the water. There’s an iCloud on the horizon.

Amazon is preparing a tablet of their own to compete with the iPad, and no lesser a higher-up than CEO Jeff Bezos has all but confirmed it.

Illustration student Rachel Walsh was assigned a seemingly impossible design task by her professor: explain the concept of the Amazon Kindle to Charles Dickens. Her solution is ingenious, and applies just as well to iBooks, but just imagine if she’d been asked to explain the iPad to Dickens instead.

Cloud Player, the recently launched online storage service from Amazon, now works on iOS devices through the Safari web browser. When it first went live, the service – which offers 5GB of storage for free – was only accessible from Flash-supported browsers and Android devices.

When you first navigate to Cloud Player on your iOS device, you are greeted by a warning that tells you your browser isn’t supported. You can just ignore that and proceed into your music collection. Once there, you can use Cloud Player flawlessly: it will pause when you receive push notifications and incoming calls, you’ll get the blue “playing” icon in your device’s status bar, and you can control playback from the buttons in the multitasking tray.

After 86 hours of downtime, the man behind Cydia has confirmed that the app is finally back online following an issue with Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service. In a message posted to Twitter on Sunday night, Jay Freeman – better known as Saurik – wrote:

After 86 hours offline, Cydia is finally back! I’m eating some celebratory cake, and am looking forward to a night with >1.5 hours of sleep!

The downtime limited Cydia’s functionality for all users, and meant purchasing packages, using the Theme Centre, and managing Cydia accounts was near impossible.

Though some users may have had some success with accessing these services more recently, there were still intermittent periods of downtime as Amazon’s EC2 service slowly came back online.

All issues seem to have been completely ironed out now and Cydia is fully functioning for all. Hooray!

[via iPhone Download Blog]

This is a guest post by Paul Lamere, an executive at The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company located in Somerville, Mass. It was originally published here.

For the last year we’ve heard rumors of how both Apple and Google were getting close to releasing music locker services that allow music listeners to upload their music collection to the cloud giving them the ability to listen to their music everywhere.

So it was a big surprise when the first major Internet player to launch a music locker service wasn’t Google or Apple, but instead was Amazon.  Last week, with little fanfare, Amazon released its Amazon Cloud Drive, a cloud-based music locker that includes the Amazon Cloud Player allowing people to listen to their music anywhere.

Amazon’s entry into the music locker is a big deal and should be particularly worrisome for Google and Apple.  Amazon brings some special sauce to the music locker world that will make them a formidable competitor:

Late tonight, Amazon took the wraps off of Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, free services for network storage and playback of MP3s and DRM-free iTunes audio files. Just as Ed predicted. Anyone with an Amazon account can sign up for 5 GB of space, and then you just upload your music library for access through any Flash-based browser or a brand-new Android app. From now forward, any Amazon MP3 store purchase will automatically be added to your Cloud Drive and won’t count against your storage quota. Larger capacities are available at $1 per GB per year starting at 20 GB.

In almost every regard, it’s exactly like Lala, the totally amazing cloud music service that Apple bought almost a year and a half ago and then promptly shut down. The only difference is that Lala also offered 10-cent song purchases for cloud-only use (as opposed to downloaded for offline use). This makes it all the more ridiculous that Apple still doesn’t have a cloud music service released. We’ve been hearing for some time that the iTunes Locker will arrive any day to offer something comparable, but Amazon’s move shows just how much Apple has slow-played its move toward streaming.

It would actually be fascinating to see Amazon release an iOS client for Cloud Player to really hold Apple’s feet to the fire. My over-riding concern with what I’ve heard about iTunes Locker is that Apple wouldn’t even match Lala’s old ability to offer songs from your entire music library and would instead offer access only to iTunes purchases. With Amazon offering something this simple and successful, Apple will have to go all out. This is why real competition is a very good thing for Apple users — it forces the company to leap over its own bar, not just hit it. Moreover, it will mean pushing ahead even if terms with record labels aren’t perfectly favorable.

— Sent in by everyone in my Twitter feed.

UPDATE: I’ve just discovered that if you visit your Cloud Drive through Mobile Safari, it is possible to play back audio on an iPhone, but only one track at a time through downloads. Hardly a useable solution, but an interesting trick nonetheless.

Now, far more useful is that you can also play back video loaded into the Cloud Drive on an iPhone, so long as it’s in a format Safari supports (preferably H.264). Amazon isn’t making a big deal out of video yet, but there is definite potential here. Especially if the geniuses at VLC or Plex figure out how to pull down a stream from your Cloud Drive…