Some Kindle Owners Upset After Receiving Cryptic Subscription Offer From Amazon

Amazon has issued an apology tonight after upsetting Kindle owners, who learned they were selected to receive a publication they didn’t sign up for — and could be charged for.
Amazon Kindle Fire

Airbnb Hires Former Yahoo Legal Eagle Belinda Johnson as General Counsel

Here’s the lawyer who’s going to write that ironclad lease — that promised espresso maker better be there! — for the lovely apartment in Italy we rented.
Airbnb_Belinda_Ashley Batz-7601

Oracle Grabs RightNow, a Cloud Company in the Big Sky State, for $1.4 Billion

RightNow is based in Bozeman, Mont., which is about as unlikely a place to find a cloud software company as you can imagine. It’s also a pretty nice place.
RiverRunsThroughIt_ellison-feature

News Byte

Salesforce Pays $50M for Assistly Customer Service Platform

Salesforce said today it has acquired the customer service platform Assistly for $50 million in cash. Assistly helps companies manage customer service through various channels like Facebook, Twitter, chat, email and phone, and is a competitor to Zendesk. That marks the third (and biggest) acquisition in one day for Assistly investor True Ventures: WeGame was bought by Tagged and VodPod assets were bought by Lockerz.

Ridiculously Transparent

I had a real struggle preparing to be a public company CEO. And it had little to do with having scalable internal systems or making the quarterly numbers: I just couldn’t keep secrets from my employees.

Parature, Specialist in Cloud-Based Customer Service, Challenges Salesforce.com

Parature is challenging Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 3 with a big update that integrates monitoring of social networks like Twitter and Facebook as part of a customer support application.

Assistly Extends Customer Service to Facebook Walls

Assistly helps small businesses provide Web-based customer service and support with a platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook.

Sprint Now Gaining Subscribers Instead of Losing Them

Good news for long-suffering Sprint Nextel investors: Customer retention has finally improved to the point where the carrier is able to report actual gains in postpaid subscribers, rather than losses.

App Way to Gripe (or Praise) About Service

Katie looks at Tello, a new website and mobile app that encourages users to chime in on their customer-service experiences, good or bad.

Stealthy Start-Up Sponge Builds Community Q&A for Companies

I recently stumbled across a venture-backed start-up that has managed to keep itself out of the news despite doing what appears to be pretty noteworthy stuff. Sponge, which calls itself “the future of Q&A,” powers pages for businesses to share and build community knowledge.

T-Orange?