AllThingsD » Amazon.com

Competing Against Amazon's Cloud

Cari Tuna — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:20:36 +0000

As more telecommunications carriers launch rivals to Amazon.com’s popular computing-services business, a Silicon Valley start-up is aiming to help them beat the Web giant’s prices by tackling one layer of the computing “stack”—data-storage software.

The software sold by Nexenta Systems of Mountain View, Calif., builds on a trend the industry calls “virtualization,” a broad term for pooling computing resources across physical hardware to make the gear more efficient. Virtualization is a key technology for companies that sell computing services over the Internet to business customers, a growing market known as “cloud computing.”

Nexenta’s software virtualizes data-storage systems but with a twist: the software can run on basic server systems from any hardware vendor. That makes the start-up a competitor to both storage behemoths such as EMC, which sells hardware-software systems, and providers of on-demand computing resources such as Amazon, Nexenta executives said. Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla in cloud computing, uses storage software it built in house to maximize the capacity of its gear, they said.

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E-Commerce Surge May Hit Tax Revenue

Justin Lahart — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:00:49 +0000

The rapid growth in internet sales is great for online retailers. But it’s not such good news for state and local governments.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that e-commerce retail sales totaled $44 billion in the fourth quarter last year, up from $38 billion a year earlier. E-commerce sales now account for 4.3 percent of total retail sales (which include lots of things that don’t get bought online, like new cars, gasoline and restaurant meals), up from one percent a decade ago. For the year, e-commerce sales totaled $165 billion.

Many of those online purchases didn’t have any sales tax attached to them. Long before the Internet was on anybody’s radar, the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t require that retailers without a physical presence in a state, like mail-order companies, charge sales tax on their behalf. In recent years, states have tried to find ways around that ruling. Last fall, for example, Texas said an Amazon.com distribution center in Dallas counted as a physical presence and sent the retailer a past-due sale tax bill for $269 million. This month, Amazon said it is shutting down the distribution center as a result of Texas’s “unfavorable regulatory climate.”

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Dangdang CEO's Tweets Of Rage

Owen Fletcher — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:26:41 +0000

E-Commerce China Dangdang Chief Executive Guoqing Li lost his temper Sunday on China’s biggest Twitter-like microblogging service, Sina Weibo, accusing Morgan Stanley of undervaluing his company’s initial public offering and exchanging outrageously off-color insults with a user who claimed to work for the financial services firm.

“I am here openly criticizing investment banks, criticizing Morgan Stanley, what, Morgan Stanley can’t be criticized? Not be cursed? You foreigners’ flunky!” he said on microblogging service Sina Weibo to a user going by the name Mishi De Weiyi, whose profile listed Morgan Stanley as her employer.

Dangdang, often likened to Amazon.com, is an online bookseller looking to expand its product range to fuel growth. It sold $272 million of shares in its IPO, including more than $56 million sold by Mr. Li and other existing shareholders, before listing on the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 8. Morgan Stanley was a lead underwriter. Dangdang’s American depositary shares recently traded at $33.86, versus their IPO price of $16.00.

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WikiLeaks Using Amazon Servers After Attack

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:34:01 +0000

WikiLeaks, the website that published a quarter-million sensitive diplomatic cables on Sunday, is using Amazon.com Inc. servers in the U.S. to help deliver its information. It sounds like an odd choice, but it could make sense.

The site cablegate.wikileaks.org, which WikiLeaks is using for the diplomatic documents, is linked to servers run by Amazon Web Services in Seattle, as well as to French company Octopuce. Wikileaks.org, the site’s front page, links back to Amazon servers in the U.S. and in Ireland. Several Internet watchers, including technologist Alex Norcliffe, reported earlier on WikiLeaks’ use of Amazon services.

Amazon and WikiLeaks did not return requests for comment.

The choice of Amazon, a U.S. company, seems strange given the amount of criticism WikiLeaks has received from the U.S. government. Rep. Peter King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Sunday saying he supported charging WikiLeaks activist Julian Assange under the Espionage Act.

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New Nook Brings a Little Color to E-Reading

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:44:47 +0000

Book lovers nowadays fall into one of two camps: They either eschew e-readers altogether, preferring the look and feel of print books; or they dive wholeheartedly into e-books, instantly downloading and racing through more titles by the handfuls. If you count yourself in the latter category, you’re in luck.

[ See post to watch video ]

Starting this week, Barnes & Noble will ship its $249 Nook Color (nookcolor.com), a luxury model in the e-reader world currently dominated by the $139 monochrome Amazon.com Kindle. While the original Nook offered a gray-scale reading screen and a thin, color touch strip for browsing the bookstore, this model is one big color touch screen. It connects to the Web using only Wi-Fi and costs $100 more than last year’s comparable Wi-Fi Nook, but a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman said that preorders online and in stores are far exceeding company expectations, with over twice as many as for last year’s Nook.

I’ve been testing the Nook Color over the past week and I like its book-size build and stylish design. Its user interface is inviting and its digital bookstore is redesigned to make shopping for books enjoyable. Nook Color is aimed at people who are primarily focused on reading but crave the iPad’s color and some of its versatility.

Like the Kindle, the Nook Color has a Web browser and some apps but no dedicated email program or way to access an app store. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble says a full email program and app store are expected early next year.

The Nook Color is unapologetically focused on reading. It accesses Barnes & Noble’s library of two million downloadable books and over 100 magazines and newspapers (fewer were available during my pre-release testing). The reader has a feature called ArticleView that displays magazine articles in a clear, readable format. You can highlight passages from books and then share them with friends through Facebook, Twitter or a limited, in-book email system. A LendMe feature gives users an easy way to digitally lend their books to friends for 14 days. And for kids, there’s a feature where popular stories are read aloud by people rather than a computer voice.

The Nook Color is more than just a bright, color screen: It’s built on the Android 2.1 operating system—the same mobile OS used to run many smartphones. This gives the device access to a full Web browser for tasks like reading favorite sites or checking Facebook, which I did easily. Early next year Nook Color will upgrade to Android 2.2, allowing it to play Flash videos.

The Nook Color

Eight apps found in a section called Extras come loaded on the device including apps for Pandora Internet Radio, chess and Sudoku. I logged into my Pandora account, quickly retrieved my saved list of stations and played a QuickMix of music. I was able to work on a crossword puzzle or read a book or magazine on the Nook Color while still listening to Rihanna on the music app. Quickoffice software for Word, Excel and PowerPoint comes built into the Nook Color so users can view—but not edit—documents in these programs if they’re loaded onto the device with a MicroSD card. Until the Nook Color’s app store launches early next year, there’s no way to download free or paid apps.

Navigating around the Nook Color is a cinch. A tiny “n” just below the screen returns you to the home screen, which can be customized with photos loaded via a MicroSD card. The Daily Shelf is a dedicated horizontal section at the bottom of the home screen that updates whenever possible with new versions of newspapers (daily), magazines (weekly or monthly, if you subscribe) or books lent to you by friends. Anything on the Daily Shelf can be dragged out onto the home screen, placed anywhere and resized by pinching two fingers out or together. A Quick Nav button displays the Nook Color’s six sections: Library, Shop, Search, Extras, Web and Settings. A helpful “Keep Reading” prompt at the top of the home screen shows the last thing you were reading; selecting it sends you to right where you left off.

Nook Color weighs just under a pound, or twice as much as the Kindle but still a half-pound lighter than Apple’s larger iPad. It felt a bit heavy in my hands as I read from it for a long period of time, but I solved that by leaning it against a desk or pillow.

While reading Stacy Schiff’s “Cleopatra: A Life,” I found a particularly interesting tidbit about first-century B.C. marriage contracts requiring wives to vow not to add love potions to their husbands’ food or drink. I highlighted this passage by tapping once on the screen and dragging highlighter handles around it, and then sent it to friends via email with a built-in shortcut for sharing through email, Facebook or Twitter. I selected another passage and posted it on my Facebook wall for friends to read. All these posts had links to buy books from Barnes & Noble.

I really enjoyed reading magazines on the Nook Color because these appeared much as they do in print. Brightly colored pages appeared one at a time when I held the device vertically, or two pages at a time in horizontal view. Magazines can be bought per issue or via subscriptions; a single current issue of House Beautiful was $4.50 or $1.99 with a subscription. The Quick Nav button works in magazines, too, so you can flick a finger right or left to skip ahead to specific sections or articles.

If you love reading and want to share your books with friends or reading updates with social networks, the Nook Color has you covered. It will also give you a taste of tablet computing with functions like browsing the Web, using some apps and eventually, full emailing. Just remember that Nook Color is laser-focused on e-reading.

A correction was made to this column on 11/17/2010 to reflect that Quickoffice is not owned by Microsoft.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Online Shopping Poised for Another Holiday Lift

Geoffrey A. Fowler — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:35:46 +0000

Black Friday may still be crowded down at the mall, but this year more of America’s holiday shopping is going to happen online, says Forrester Research.

In a new report out on Tuesday, analyst Sucharita Mulpuru forecasts online sales in the U.S. in November and December will increase 16 percent over last year, reaching $52 billion. Retail sales as a whole are likely to increase just 2.3 percent, according to the National Retail Federation.

Last month, eMarketer analyst Jeffrey Grau similarly forecast that holiday sales would increase 14 percent.

Why is e-commerce continuing to chip away at old-fashioned retail? Online shopping is still winning a few new converts, but those are few and far between, says Mulpuru. Rather, online retailers like Amazon.com are convincing existing customers to try out buying new things online–so people who might have started out just buying books online 10 years ago today have since also become ok with the idea of buying shoes or diapers online, too. “People become evangelized to the channel when they start shopping in a couple of categories,” says Mulpuru.

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A Service That Says 'Yes, We Have Bananas on Sale'

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:14:05 +0000

If you’ve replaced pen and paper with digital data, you know how important it is to have a single, smart repository for holding and accessing this information

This week, I tested Springpad (SpringpadIt.com), a free service that saves and synchronizes Web content across all major browsers on Macs and PCs. It also works on the iPad, iPhone and Android using their apps. Services like this aren’t new: Evernote, for instance, does a fine job of saving Web content and synchronizing it across multiple devices. But Springpad is unique in that it automatically generates links and alerts you to online offers related to the content a user has already saved.

The free Springpad service works on Macs and PCs, as well as the iPad, iPhone and Verizon Android.

If I saved a recipe for banana bread, Springpad might send me a link from Coupons.com so I can save money on bananas. If I save the Web page for a new iPod I want to buy and its price drops on Amazon.com, I might see a Springpad alert about it. Or if I save a photo of a bottle of wine to my Springpad account, an alert may appear to tell me about an offer on free shipping from Wine.com.

Starting Sept. 22, these Springpad Alerts will work in mobile apps on the iPhone, Android devices and iPad. (Springpad currently works as a website and as a mobile app, but the alerts only appear on the website version.) Spring Partners, which owns Springpad, plans to also release a Google Chrome browser extension Sept. 22.

Springpad doesn’t work as a BlackBerry app and the company has no immediate plans to make such an app. A Springpad spokesman says the company is working on a version for Microsoft Windows tablets.

Springpad uses a handsome interface to display saved content. Users can look at their saved content in list, detail or gallery view, where you see colorful images of products the service pulls from the specific page you saved. A Web clipper tool can be dragged from SpringpadIt.com to a browser’s bookmark toolbar, which creates a quick shortcut that saves a website in a Springpad account.

There’s also a My Tasks section, which let you jot down personal lists like checklists, packing lists, alarms, events and milestones.

I’ve been testing Springpad and its Alerts on a Mac and on a PC with various browsers, as well as on the iPhone, Verizon Droid and iPad. Spring Partners gave me a way to preview mobile alerts, which would be helpful to read if you’re out shopping for an item and a price-saving alert appears.

The mobile alerts will eventually have smarter capabilities such as using GPS to tell you about a discount at a nearby restaurant that you saved in your My Stuff or if a product you saved is on sale in the Best Buy where you’re shopping. Alerts don’t pop up as text messages or immediate emails; rather, you must open the SpringpadIt.com site or a section in the mobile app to look in Alerts for new offers (a weekly email Alerts summary is also sent).

While not everything saved in Springpad will generate an alert, I found myself more motivated to use this service. I liked the service’s way of saving images with almost every item in My Stuff. I also enjoyed searching through publicly shared things people saved in Springpad to see what others thought was worth saving.

But how exactly do the alerts work? For each saved piece of content, Springpad recognizes the content’s metadata (like the ingredients in a saved recipe) and sends an alert based on that metadata.

A spokesman claims Springpad doesn’t pass any personally identifiable information to retailers. So the fact that I saved a Prince tennis racket to my Springpad account isn’t shared with a retailer. Springpad may, however, pass along statistics to retailers, like 500 users saved Prince rackets to their accounts. If someone uses a link they received in Springpad Alerts to buy something, Spring Partners gets a commission from the company or service.

Springpad Alerts come from the partnerships that Spring Partners has with over 250 companies and services. Among the partners are Price Grabber, Best Buy, Wine.com, Groupon and Fandango, and the company continues to add partnerships.

These alerts are product-specific, so I didn’t have to worry about receiving alerts for a Panasonic HDTV if I saved a Sony HDTV in my Springpad account. There’s no way to opt out of alerts, which appear in special sections on the SpringpadIt.com site and in the mobile app.

If you’d like to display your saved content in Springpad with all other Springpad users, you can opt to make that content public. Someone who visits a new restaurant and wants to tell the world about it, or sees a movie that they think deserves high praise, Springpad will let them do that.

Springpad works like Twitter in that people using the service can follow one another. Unlike Twitter, no one can set an account to require permission to follow it, though marking all settings as private hides everything from others.

And accounts like Facebook and Gmail can be linked to the service creating contacts in Springpad and Flickr and Twitter to share images or saved data.

I don’t always say this about the products I review, but I think I’ll continue to use Springpad—especially for saving important shopping items and recipes that I find online. Its built-in Alerts add an element of relevancy to certain saved items, and I like that it gives me the option to share with Springpad friends or with friends in other social networks.

Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Outage at Amazon.com

Beth Callaghan — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:39:22 +0000

Amazon.com has been limping badly for a few hours now, and anecdotal reports of downtime are flying across Twitter. According to an Amazon support staff forum post, “We continue to experience an issue that is impacting customers’ ability to place orders on the Amazon.com website as well as the display of item details within Manage Your Inventory within your seller account. We appreciate your understanding as we work toward resolution.”

Amazon, Dell Founders Help Fund Healthcare Startup

Nick Wingfield — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:00:46 +0000

A Seattle startup that provides primary health care for a flat monthly fee is getting some big-name financial backers from the technology industry: Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell.

Qliance Medical Management Inc. says it has raised $6 million in new funding in a financing round led by Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Amazon.com’s (AMZN) CEO; additional financing came from MSD Capital, Michael Dell’s investment firm. The actor and comedian Drew Carey, Seattle venture capital firm Second Avenue Partners and other investors also joined in the funding of Qliance, which has raised a total of $13.5 million to date.

Qliance operates three clinics in the Seattle area that offer primary care treatment to patients who pay a monthly membership fee ranging between $44 and $84, depending on their age. The company accepts no form of health insurance for its services. Qliance intends to use its financing to expand in Washington State, with plans to open clinics beyond the state as early as next year.

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For the iPad, Apps With Their Own Wow Factor

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:01:46 +0000

In the days since the launch of Apple’s iPad Saturday, there has been an explosion of apps to run on it—3,000 and counting. They are mostly free and incorporate new ways of navigating one of the largest screens on a mobile device that relies solely on touch technology.

On this large canvas, people work differently and apps can behave differently depending on which way the device is turned. Apps can (and must) incorporate creative ways of navigating—in addition to the usual multi-touch gestures like flicking, two-finger swiping and pinching. Thus, although it runs most of the 150,000 apps already available for the much smaller iPhone and iPod touch, the iPad is spawning a new type of tablet-specific app.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I’ve been testing some of these iPad apps that give users novel ways to interact with the device. These are designed to take advantage of a larger touch screen by using things like fly-out menus, multi-panel layouts, 3-D images intermixed with text and newspapers that can be read almost as easily as their paper counterparts.

Since most of us haven’t used apps like these or a device like this before, many apps install with brief tutorials on how to navigate them. It’s obvious that the makers of these iPad apps are still tinkering with what works best for a large touch surface. And ads appear in several digital newspaper and magazine apps. Unless otherwise noted, the apps listed below are free.

News

Multi-tasking isn’t yet possible on the iPad, but the NPR app allows people to do certain things simultaneously. While browsing news stories, a player in the bottom portion of the screen lets you listen to programs, interviews or songs. I played Jakob Dylan’s “Women and Country” song while reading an article about NCAA basketball. Content can be saved to a playlist for future listening.

The Marvel Comics app

The Wall Street Journal app’s home page displays a horizontal row of newspapers representing the past seven days’ editions and a “Now” edition, with late-breaking news, all of which can be read when the iPad isn’t online. These editions are designed to use the full screen to display easy-to-read newspaper layouts and videos that play right within the articles. A finger swiped from the top down skips to a different section of the paper, while pinching any screen with two fingers returns to the home page. And you can save articles and sections. The WSJ iPad app also can access saved data from a WSJ.com account.

The app is free to download but requires a subscription for full access, which costs $4 a week or is free for a limited time to existing online or print subscribers.

The New York Times (NYT) app is called Editors’ Choice and looks like a roomier version of the newspaper’s iPhone app. Five icons at the bottom of the screen instantly jump to different sections of the paper, or you can flick a finger across these screens to page to more articles. It doesn’t require a subscription.

The USA Today app brings the Gannett Co. (GCI) paper’s color-coded blue, green, red and purple sections to the iPad. Its popular charts of information (called “Snapshots”) pop out from the bottom left of the screen and include polls that can be voted on using the device. The USA Today app looks less like the print edition of the paper and more like a list of news points with color photos beside each. This list can be scrolled with a simple finger flick up or down.

Magazines

Digital magazines on the iPad seem to be experimenting with different payment methods. Rodale Inc.’s Men’s Health, for example, is a free app and includes previews of magazine issues, but then it charges $5 to download the actual issue. Bonnier Corp.’s Popular Science app costs $5 up-front and includes an issue that must be downloaded within the app.

Popular Science really uses the iPad’s larger surface in creative ways. Instead of just letting you page ahead with each finger flick as if reading a regular magazine, you can read articles by flicking a finger down or across a screen. In some articles I read, images appeared to be floating in the background behind text. Two fingers flicking up from the bottom of the screen show shortcuts for a table of contents and previous magazine issues.

Music

Pandora’s iPad app makes good use of the device’s screen real estate by showing artist information, now-playing details, album art and a list of personalized radio stations all on the same screen. I found myself more likely to read about artists on the iPad than on my smaller iPod touch. But like many Pandora users, I like playing music in the background as I work on other tasks, and this isn’t possible on the iPad because it doesn’t allow third-party apps like Pandora to multi-task.

Entertainment

Scrabble app

The Marvel Comics app displays stunning, large illustrations and moves you across the screen to see them as if the comic is one continuous strip and there’s no division between one screen and the next. A finger swipe moves you ahead in a guided view that jumps you from one character’s dialog cloud to the next in the correct order. This app is a free download and a handful of free comic books come with it, but each additional book costs around $2.

Scrabble for iPad costs $10 and includes options for playing with friends by passing the iPad back and forth, and an additional free app enables connecting an iPhone or iPod touch to the iPad to use these smaller screens as tile racks. You can play against your Facebook friends or the computer, and things like “Best Word” and an option to shuffle tiles make the game a little easier to play for some. Scrabble will even play your iTunes music in the background while you’re dragging tiles onto the board using your finger.

With Real Racing HD, you see a 3-D view of racetracks and steer a car by leaning the iPad in the direction you need to turn (a built-in accelerometer senses where you’re moving the iPad). I played this $10 game while sitting in the back seat of a moving car and got a bit dizzy since the race is so realistic.

Education

A great example of how the iPad can be used for education can be seen in an app titled “The Elements: A Visual Exploration,” developed by Touch Press. This costs $14 and displays the periodic table of elements stretched across the screen. Selecting one element brings it forward and spins a dazzling image of it so you can see all sides of it. A link to the Web pulls in real-time information about that element.

iPad apps like The Elements: A Visual Exploration, above, make good use of the larger touch screen.

Others

Apple’s (AAPL) iBooks and Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle are two terrific e-reader apps that bring digital books to the iPad. There’s a strong argument for using the Kindle app, since books bought through it can be accessed on a variety of platforms in addition to the iPad, all in sync right where you left off reading, while iBooks are currently limited to the iPad. But the books in iBooks are displayed in an arresting way, with animation that resembles real pages turning.

Pages, Keynote and Numbers are Apple’s versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel and they cost $10 each. When installed, these programs can convert documents from Microsoft’s (MSFT) formats and let you work on them. They present rich, PC-like features controlled by touch. Pages, also lets you convert the documents back to the original Microsoft format.

TruPhone and Skype will make calls over the Internet using the iPad when you’re online, and in one test, this worked relatively well.

The Houzz Inc. app is a digital look book for interior-decorating ideas that’s updated with current images of decorated houses. It displays large images of decorated rooms across the iPad’s screen, allowing you to search and save certain looks for offline access or sharing with others.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

More iPad Coverage »

Highlighting Text in E-Books and IE8 Accelerators on a Mac

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:01:41 +0000

I’m waiting for e-book devices that allow the reader to highlight text. This is essential for students reading textbooks, and for nonfiction readers. Any chance of that happening?

A: Your wait is over. Major e-book readers I’ve tested, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader Daily Edition, already allow highlighting. In other words, you can select any section of text in a book and give it a gray background so it stands out from the rest of the text, persistently. It’s not yellow or any other color, because the screens are grayscale and don’t display colors, but it is highlighting. You can also add notes on e-readers.

I have a Mac laptop that I use at home with Safari and Firefox installed. My office environment uses Windows and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. One of the features of IE8 that I really like and often use are “Accelerators.” I would like to know if there are accelerators available for download for the most up-to-date versions of either Safari or Firefox.

A: Accelerators are a particular feature of IE8 that allows users to perform an action on a highlighted portion of a Web page—like mapping an address or translating a word—even using services provided by companies that compete with Microsoft. Microsoft has put a system in place for companies to write accelerators and users to download them.

Firefox, on both Windows and Mac, has a massive collection of add-ons, some of which work in a manner similar to Accelerators, but it doesn’t have a directly competing feature. Safari on your Mac also can accommodate added features from third-party companies, some of which can work like accelerators, but it also lacks a feature that specifically goes head to head with IE8′s Accelerators.

I am going to law school in the fall, and I was wondering which laptop you would suggest I get for this three- to four-year time period of my life?

A: It really depends on your priorities, resources and environment. If you’re on a tight budget, value lots of choice, and enjoy playing games during breaks from work, you might pick a modestly-priced Windows 7 laptop. However, I’d stay away from netbooks, which can be cramped for writing long documents. If you have more to spend, and value freedom from malware, great built-in software and the convenience of dedicated stores, you might buy an Apple MacBook or MacBook Pro. But I would also recommend asking the school and current students, since it can be advantageous, or even necessary, to be using a laptop that the school prefers or that runs any special software the school requires.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Sony's E-Reader Opens New Chapter in Kindle Rivalry

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:03:18 +0000

Sony, the Japanese electronics giant, was a pioneer in the current wave of electronic book readers, introducing its first Sony Reader model back in 2006. But, it has been overtaken by Amazon.com, whose Kindle e-book reader, introduced in 2007, has become almost synonymous with the category. Now, Sony (SNE) is out with a much-improved model that could make it more competitive.

Unlike the Kindle, Sony’s readers weren’t wireless and their owners couldn’t download books or newspapers directly to the device, instead of via a computer. Now, that problem has finally been solved with Sony’s new Reader Daily Edition, a handsome $400 wireless model that I’ve been testing.

[ See post to watch video ]

The Daily Edition can be bought at Sony’s stores; at its Web site, sonystyle.com; and at Best Buy’s (BBY) site, bestbuy.com. It was sold out for the holidays, but Sony says it expects new stock soon.

The Daily Edition isn’t a mere clone of the Kindle. It has a different design philosophy and is stronger in some areas, weaker in others. In general, I enjoyed using it, once I mastered its user interface, which took several days. I especially liked the fact that it packs a larger screen into a comfortably small device, and mostly uses touch navigation instead of all physical controls. For instance, while the Sony does have a small page-turning button, you can more easily turn pages by just swiping your finger across the screen. It’s also better at navigating digital newspapers, something I’ve never found very satisfying on the Kindle.

(Full disclosure: Sony has struck a special deal with Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal and this Web site. Under the deal, a special late-day edition of the Journal, containing updated news, will be available on the Daily Edition for an extra charge starting later in January.)

On the downside, the Daily Edition has three main flaws when compared with the Kindle. First, it’s much more expensive—$400 versus just $259. Second, it has only about half of the commercial, copyrighted digital books that Amazon (AMZN) does—around 200,000 versus the Kindle’s roughly 400,000. Sony also throws in a million out-of-copyright, old books, for a total of 1.2 million.

But many of these added million titles are obscure and of little interest to mainstream consumers. The Reader also has just eight newspapers, versus 92 for the Kindle, though Sony says 10 more are coming soon.

Third, the technology that makes the screen touch sensitive also dims it a bit, so the Daily Edition’s screen is darker than the Kindle’s. (Both are unlit monochrome screens with gray-scale graphics.) I found the Sony screen adequate, but it’s tougher to read in lower light.

The Daily Edition is a slender device with a black metal body that contrasts sharply with the wider, white plastic body of the Kindle. While both products use the same basic screen technology, and the same screen width, the Daily Edition’s screen is longer; it measures 7 inches versus 6 inches for the Kindle. In my tests, I found this a big advantage, because, when both devices were set for roughly comparable text sizes, the Sony could hold more text on a page, cutting down on the need for page turns, which interrupt reading.

In addition, the Daily Edition is narrower than the Kindle, because the borders around the screen are thinner, since they don’t have to accommodate the Kindle’s various large buttons or physical keyboard. (You can enter text for notes or searches on the Daily Edition using a stylus for handwriting or a virtual onscreen keyboard.) This longer, narrower shape gives the new Sony a nice feel in the hand.

I also preferred the Sony’s method for presenting newspapers, which allowed more headlines to be viewed at once and required fewer steps to navigate through the paper.

Sony’s new Daily Edition Electronic Reader

The Sony also claims more battery life with wireless turned off, comes with a cover included—an extra-cost item on the Kindle—and can handle more book formats, including the free digital books offered by public libraries. Built-in memory is the same, but the Daily Edition’s can be expanded while the Kindle’s can’t.

Like the Kindle, the new Sony also allows you to drag songs, pictures and some personal documents onto the device from your computer. I did this with no problems.

The Daily Edition has companion software for buying, reading and storing books on both PCs and Macs. But it has no app for a smart phone, and doesn’t synchronize your last-read place in your book among the reader and the computer.

Also, I found the Daily Edition required a harder learning process than the Kindle. First, it takes awhile to get the hang of the touch gestures, partly because they require much more pressure than on, say, an iPhone. Second, using touch to bring up features and menus can be a mystery until you consult the manual. For instance, it took days to discover that you could set a bookmark by double-tapping on the upper right corner.

But, all in all, despite its higher price, the Daily Edition is a big leap for Sony and adds another good choice for consumers.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

Google, Amazon Likely to Lead Black Friday's E-Commerce Gains

Andrew LaVallee — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:07:45 +0000

Black Friday is expected to kick off a more upbeat e-commerce season this year, but heavyweights Amazon.com (AMZN), Google (GOOG) and eBay (EBAY) are poised to make the biggest holiday gains, analysts said.

In a research note, Jefferies analyst Youssef Squali said that Google stands to benefit from increased search-ad spending among marketers and an updated product-search feature that lets Web users more easily see pictures and reviews of items.

“The integration of search, user-generated content, comparison shopping, YouTube, location information and mobile shows the impressive span of Google’s product portfolio that the company can leverage to drive traffic for its e-commerce customers and advertisers,” Mr. Squali wrote.

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Justices to Study Patents on Business Methods

Jess Bravin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:00:08 +0000

Microsoft Corp., (MSFT) Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and L.L. Bean Inc. are just some of the companies that have flooded the Supreme Court with advice as it prepares for Monday’s arguments over one of the biggest questions involving intellectual property: When can a business method be patented?

There has been a surge in companies receiving patents for ways of doing business, from Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) one-click checkout to Priceline.com Inc.’s (PCLN) reverse auctions, since a 1998 court decision expanded the scope of processes that could be patented.

The Supreme Court must now determine whether such swaths of modern business activity deserve patent protections, thereby opening the door to infringement lawsuits, or belong in the public domain, depriving their inventors of monopoly profits.

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Will You Remember Your PayPhrase?

Geoffrey A. Fowler — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:22 +0000

We already have a ton of passwords to remember. Now Amazon.com (AMZN) wants us to remember something new–PayPhrase–which has already sparked an online pile on.

The program, which Amazon announced Wednesday, is supposed to replace ordinary login and password combinations with a phrase and PIN combination that are linked to a specific account and shipping address. The distinction is subtle: You have one Amazon login and password (which aren’t going away), but you can have multiple PayPhrases that are linked to specific aspects of your account, like different shipping addresses or credit cards.

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Cult Musician Mojo Nixon Storms the Web

Sarah McBride — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:33:02 +0000

Cult musician Mojo Nixon hasn’t had a hit in years, but he’s moved over a million songs at Amazon.com (AMZN) so far this month.

The artist, who calls his revved-up rockabilly sound “psychobilly,” earlier this year cooked up a scheme to put almost his entire catalog up on Amazon.com, for free. “I’m losing a little bit of money in the short run,” Mr. Nixon says. But “in the long run, there is going to be much bigger Mojo awareness.” He and his online distributor, The Orchard, hope the move will lead to bigger sales and other opportunities, such as licensing more of his songs to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Mr. Nixon, who was hoping to get just 10,000 or so downloads out of the scheme, says he is very happy with the outcome so far.

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Susan Boyle Album Tops Amazon Pre-Orders

Andrew LaVallee — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:30:45 +0000

A month ahead of its release, Susan Boyle’s album has more advance orders on Amazon.com (AMZN) than any CD in the retailer’s history, it said.

The Sony (SNE) album, titled “I Dreamed a Dream,” goes on sale on Nov. 23. Ms. Boyle sang the song by the same name on “Britain’s Got Talent,” and the video of her unexpectedly strong performance made her a world-wide phenomenon after it landed on video-sharing sites like YouTube.

Amazon announced the pre-order milestone Wednesday, noting that her advance sales have exceeded those for such stars as Norah Jones, U2, Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay. It also created a “store” for Ms. Boyle that includes her breakthrough clip in addition to a link to buy the $10 album.

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Palm's Pre Inventory Glut

John Paczkowski — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:34:56 +0000

Discussing Palm’s first-quarter results earlier this month, the company’s leadership claimed that “the vast majority of new sales” for the quarter were generated by the Pre. Palm sold some 823,000 handsets during that period with sell-through of 810,000 units, so that’s an impressive feat. But only if the sales we’re talking about here were made to on-the-street consumers. And, according to Town Hall research analyst David Eller, it’s not entirely clear that they were.

You see, Palm (PALM) defines units sold as products sold to on-the-street customers or to resellers like Best Buy (BBY) and Amazon.com (AMZN). Which means that Palm can report a unit sold while it’s still sitting at inventory at various retail outlets. In other words, a Pre sold is not necessarily a Pre activated. As Eller notes, that’s problematic.

“We have been perplexed by a disconnect between PALM’s device units sold and our estimates of store level sell through,” Eller writes. “According to PALM’s reported sell through, inventory increased by 13k units and since the ‘vast majority’ of both the device units shipped and the device units sold were units of the Pre, there couldn’t be an inventory problem. The gap between the two is only 13k.”

Continuing, Eller adds a cautionary note: “However, since the company recognizes revenue on sell in to the channel and the company defines device units sold as units that have been shipped from Sprint (their primary customer) to either customers or second tier distributors, PALM could offer investors a high number of units shipped but still have a glut of inventory in the channel. We believe that channel inventory is currently about 11 weeks, which we believe will pressure reorder rates and make it more difficult to sell high ASP products going forward.”

An 11-week glut of inventory in the channel? If that’s the case, it’s certainly cause for concern, more so because many investors are evidently unaware that this is even a possibility. “[Palm’s definition of sold] does not appear to be understood by investors,” Eller notes. “We polled several of the investors who attended the Boston road show lunch and each was under the impression that sell through translated into customer activations. How can this be?”

Good question. Palm and Sprint (S) investors both might want to pay a bit more attention to Sprint’s 10-k in the future.

I’ve asked Palm for comment and will update this post when it responds.

UPDATE: This just in from Palm:

“The sell-through data we post reflects carriers’ sales to their customers. For example, Sprint customers include consumers who buy in a Sprint store, and Sprint retail partners such as Best Buy and RadioShack. We rely on our wireless carriers to provide us with sell-through data, and we note this fact in our 10Q.”

[Image credit: Flickr/Spintar]

Palm's Pre Inventory Glut

John Paczkowski — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:34:56 +0000

Good question. Palm and Sprint (S) investors both might want to pay a bit more attention to Sprint’s 10-k in the future.

I’ve asked Palm for comment and will update this post when it responds.

UPDATE: This just in from Palm:

[Image credit: Flickr/Spintar]

A MacBook Surprise

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:38:02 +0000

I am trying to surprise my wife with a laptop for our anniversary. I will probably go with the Apple MacBook Pro. Are there reliable sellers from which to buy the machine online?

There are lots of reliable online sellers of laptops, and online buying is fine, provided you have somehow handled the machine and are familiar enough with it to be sure it’s the one you (or, in this case, your lucky wife) will be happy owning. In the case of Apple, a company whose products are rarely deeply discounted by third-party sellers, it often makes sense for online buyers to use the company’s own online store, at store.apple.com. I have found Apple’s online store to be easy to use, secure and reliable. And you get some minor benefits at the physical Apple stores if you buy directly from Apple.

However, other major online sellers with equally good reputations also carry Macs, and some do shave the prices. One good example I have used happily is amazon.com, which carries the latest MacBook Pros at discounts ranging from $5 to over $100, depending on model.

How can I set parental controls in Firefox?

The Firefox Web browser doesn’t have built-in parental controls. Its maker, Mozilla, notes that version 3.0 or later of the browser does support some of the parental-control features included in Windows Vista. But if you don’t have Vista, or want different controls, there are some add-ons for Firefox that provide these.

Among the ones Mozilla suggests using are Glubble for Families, and ProCon Latte. More information is at: support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Parental+controls.

A Billion-Dollar Question for Zappos and Amazon

Geoffrey Fowler — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:25:05 +0000

When Amazon.com (AMZN) agreed to buy Zappos last week for $847 million in cash and stock, most reports said that the online shoe and clothing store had over $1 billion in sales last year.

But when Amazon filed its official paperwork about the deal with the SEC today, the company reported 2008 net revenues of just $635 million.

Why the more than $300 million discrepancy?

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Netflix Lifted By Takeover Rumors

Eric Savitz — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:38:56 +0000

Netflix (NFLX) shares are getting a boost today from vague takeover rumors.

TheFlyOnTheWall.com notes that the move in the stock today appears due to “renewed takeover speculation.”

About two years ago, there were a round of rumors that the company was going to be acquired by Amazon.com (AMZN), and there is some bulletin board chatter this morning spouting the same theory.

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Japan Alerts Amazon to Life's Two Certainties

John Paczkowski — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:17:39 +0000

Amazon’s days of booking sales from its business in Japan back to the United States may be coming to an end. The Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau has demanded back taxes of $119 million from Amazon’s Japanese affiliates, Amazon Japan and Amazon Japan Logistics.

Typically, U.S. companies that do business in Japan without offices in the country aren’t required to pay taxes to the Japanese government. And Amazon (AMZN) has long counted itself among them, claiming purchases made through Amazon Japan are technically transacted in the states. Yet the company does have some retail infrastructure in the country through which it handles merchandise distribution, logistics and whatnot. And, according to the Bureau, that means Amazon has “permanent establishment” in Japan and should be taxed in the country under the U.S.-Japan tax treaty.

Another nasty tax headache for Amazon.com, which also faces calls for tax payments back in the U.S. and in Britain, France, and Germany as well. From the company’s annual report:

We Could be Subject to Additional Income Tax Liabilities
We are subject to income taxes in the United States and numerous foreign jurisdictions. Significant judgment is required in evaluating our worldwide provision for income taxes. During the ordinary course of business, there are many transactions for which the ultimate tax determination is uncertain. For example, our effective tax rates could be adversely affected by earnings being lower than anticipated in countries where we have lower statutory rates and higher than anticipated in countries where we have higher statutory rates, by changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities, or by changes in the relevant tax, accounting and other laws, regulations, principles and interpretations. We are subject to audit in various jurisdictions, and such jurisdictions may assess additional income tax against us. Although we believe our tax estimates are reasonable, the final determination of tax audits and any related litigation could be materially different from our historical income tax provisions and accruals. The results of an audit or litigation could have a material effect on our operating results or cash flows in the period or periods for which that determination is made.

Japan Alerts Amazon to Life's Two Certainties

John Paczkowski — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:17:39 +0000

Another nasty tax headache for Amazon.com, which also faces calls for tax payments back in the U.S. and in Britain, France, and Germany as well. From the company’s annual report:

We Could be Subject to Additional Income Tax Liabilities
We are subject to income taxes in the United States and numerous foreign jurisdictions. Significant judgment is required in evaluating our worldwide provision for income taxes. During the ordinary course of business, there are many transactions for which the ultimate tax determination is uncertain. For example, our effective tax rates could be adversely affected by earnings being lower than anticipated in countries where we have lower statutory rates and higher than anticipated in countries where we have higher statutory rates, by changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities, or by changes in the relevant tax, accounting and other laws, regulations, principles and interpretations. We are subject to audit in various jurisdictions, and such jurisdictions may assess additional income tax against us. Although we believe our tax estimates are reasonable, the final determination of tax audits and any related litigation could be materially different from our historical income tax provisions and accruals. The results of an audit or litigation could have a material effect on our operating results or cash flows in the period or periods for which that determination is made.

Organizing Your Online Shopping

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:20:03 +0000

Last winter, I spent a good hour shopping online for the perfect black leather boots. I used tabbed browsing to open at least 25 Web pages, comparing each pair’s cost, heel height, zipper, leather and toe style. I emailed a friend with links to a few sites so I could get her opinion. And when I finally decided on the right pair, I dug through my email inbox to find a coupon code for 20% off.

This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

The Snipi Toolbar collects and displays the user’s online research.

To do all this, you use the Snipi Toolbar, a horizontal window that pops up within your browser so you never have to navigate away from the site where you’re shopping. If you see an item you like, simply drag and drop an image of it into the toolbar, where details about the item — including its title, price and image — are automatically filled in. If the item was previously snipped by another Snipi user, a description box will be filled with whatever that person wrote or pasted in from the product page; you can fill in the box yourself, too.

Snipi has a partnership with Shopzilla Inc., so the Snipi Toolbar also has comparison shopping built in: It displays links to Web sites where your snipped product, or products like it, can be found at lower prices.

One of the big drawbacks to Snipi is that it currently works only as a browser plug-in with Mozilla’s Firefox, not Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer or Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Snipi says it plans to introduce versions of its toolbar — though less functional ones — for IE and Safari by early to mid-June. Even so, downloading and installing a browser plug-in isn’t yet a routine thing for most people. And often, people who use plug-ins forget to keep them up-to-date.

Another downside to Snipi is that its comparison-pricing feature failed with apparel. The feature only really worked when used with “hard goods” like electronics, which are sold at retailers that participate in price-comparison networks. Yet Snipi still makes pricing suggestions for clothing and shoes, however irrelevant. For example, when I snipped a $150 Banana Republic dress, a link to $16 eye shadow sold at Sephora.com appeared in the Price Compare column. To reduce confusion, Snipi shouldn’t make such suggestions for apparel.

A handy feature built into the Snipi Toolbar lets you immediately share items via email or post them on Facebook, Twitter or WordPress blogs. This would have been useful while I was shopping online for boots because I could have more quickly shared my finds with friends, rather than copying and pasting URLs into emails.

While browsing on BestBuy.com (BBY), I found a Sony (SNE) Cybershot DSC-W220 with 12 megapixels and a 4x zoom lens for $199. Selecting a small icon in the Firefox browser’s bottom right corner, I opened the Snipi Toolbar and created a “Digicams” list, including the Sony. Snipi suggested alternative prices for this camera, including $159 for the same thing on Amazon.com (AMZN).

I got an early start on bathing-suit shopping by browsing Web sites for J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s. As expected, the price-comparison suggestions didn’t make sense. For one $58 Victoria’s Secret bathing suit, Snipi suggested a list of alternatives, including a $170 Kohler shower door, $203 Giorgio Armani glasses and an $82 corded telephone. I assure you that the bathing suit looked nothing like any of those items.

Confusing alternatives aside, I liked using the Snipi Toolbar as a place to gather my online research. It displayed images of items neatly lined up in a row, and when I selected an item, the description appeared. Someone like my sister, who is planning a wedding, might enjoy using the Snipi Toolbar for saving photos of various locations in a list she could call “Wedding Venues.” She could then share the entire list with me in one step. Or she could go visit some of the places and bring an iPhone with the Snipi app to see her list.

I tried the iPhone app, and it was a cinch to tap My Lists to see the online research I’d gathered. Here, as on the browser toolbar, visuals make it easy to glance through many products.

The toolbar can save various lists that you name and categorize into Shop, Photos or Videos, and these can be kept private, shared with friends or made public. Public lists are seen by all other users on Snipi.com, which is also a social-networking site. I wouldn’t use it as such, because I already rely on other social-networking outlets, but some people might.

Snipi, which uses a guessing algorithm to fill in details like a product’s price, says its toolbar will improve as more people use it. If you do a lot of research or online shopping or you simply want an online tool for saving images and videos from the Web, Snipi will work well for you. Its price-comparison suggestions need some improvement, but I felt more organized after using the Snipi Toolbar for a week’s worth of browsing.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com