Internet, Amazon | featured news

State governments across the country are laying off teachers, closing public libraries and parks, and reducing health care services, but there is one place they could get $23 billion if they could only agree how to do it: Internet retailers such as Amazon.com.

Amazon.com issued a detailed account of last week's Web-services outage in which it apologized for the shutdown and offered a service credit to customers.

Companies are expected to reassess backup and recovery after the interruption at Amazon Web Services.

Amazon has just entered the streaming music business with the launch of Cloud Player, a music player that lets anyone upload their music to Amazon's servers and play them via the web or Android.

Amazon.com, apart from being a major online retailer of books, DVDs, music, games, apparel, and other merchandise, also has a small business of providing cloud and other Web services. It offers Web services like cloud computing and cloud storage service offerings, in which it competes with bigger players like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Amazon also owns and operates websites such as Audible.com, IMDB.com, and Shelfari.com.

Amazon just revealed its own specially curated version of the Android Marketplace, but has chosen to label it the "Appstore."

Amazon.com posted quarterly revenue that fell short of analysts' estimates on Thursday and its shares fell almost 10 percent.

Akamai’s real-time ad targeting solution could well be an important growth driver in the future for the company given the growing importance of behavioral targeting technology in the context of web advertisement. Companies such as Amazon and Google currently use similar technologies to identify user behavior and then offer suggestions or products that might interest users.

As hacktivists target Amazon.com, a book has found its way onto the online commerce site that contains the U.S. documents released by WikiLeaks.

Computer hackers who support WikiLeaks plan to attack Amazon.com Thursday, they announced on Twitter.