Amazon Surpasses Google: Should you Change your SEO Strategies?

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According to the BrandZ brand value report, Amazon is now considered as the most influential tech company in the world. The company has surpassed both Google and Apple which held the first and second spots, respectively, years prior. This could mean that more and more internet users may prefer using Amazon’s search engines over other existing browsers. Because of this, there had been discussion in some online communities whether this will affect the earnings of existing websites and blogs. Some bloggers are now considering whether or not to change their SEO strategies to match that of Amazon’s algorithms. [Read more…]

Amazon Announces @Author Program, Users Can Now Ask Writers Book Related Questions

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Amazon At Author For Twitter

Have you ever read something in a book or finished a new novel only to be left with a bit of confusion or unanswered questions? With Amazon’s new @Author program for Twitter and Kindle users can now have their questions answered directly from the books author.

Currently sixteen writers are participating in the program which works by allowing readers to ask a question right form their Kindle ebook.

To use the program users place a cursor at the beginning of a passage with their 5-way controller, at which point they press down to anchor the passage, from there users highlight the passage with the controller and then enter their question for the highlighted section, starting with the phrase “@Author.” Finally users choose the “save & share” option from the pages choices and their question is sent to the author. [Read more…]

Amazon Can Now Stream Music To iOS Devices

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Two months after its release, Amazon slipped in a small update to its cloud based music player adding adds iOS compatibility. The update allows users visiting the player from their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to stream music through Safari. However, it’s not without bugs.

Accessing Amazon’s cloud player through an iOS device required the use of a third-party browser but recently gained native Safari support. However, there are some interface issues that you need to be aware of:

[Read more…]

The Amazon Tablet Cometh

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Tablets are the hottest thing right now and very few can stand up to the iPad. While Samsung’s Galaxy tablet and Amazon’s Kindle trail the iPad in popularity, the latter company is working on an iPad rival that could change the tablet landscape.

Amazon working on a tablet has yet to be officially confirmed but has been talked about in tech circles. The tablet is purportedly being built by Samsung, destined for a summer launch and will be running a highly customized version of Android instead of version 3.0 Honeycomb. So what else will the tablet pack? Peter Rojas talked about the tablet’s purported specs:

Let’s start with a critical question about this tablet: What version of Android will it run? I think there’s an assumption that any Amazon tablet will run Android 3.0, Google’s tablet-specific version of the OS. However, given Google’s recent moves to tighten how OEMs can use Honeycomb, this might not be so likely. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Amazon’s tablet, like the NOOK Color, will use Android as a base upon which to build a totally customized experience that tightly integrates Amazon services. That integration would let Amazon charge a lot less for its tablet than it would otherwise. The reason Barnes & Noble has been able to price the NOOK Color so aggressively ($250 versus $350 to $450 for comparably-sized and spec’d Android tablets) is because they’re assuming you’re going to buy a bunch of books from them over the course of owning it.

The question is, does the world need another tablet, especially one that aims to go head to head with the iPad? Amazon may be banking on integration with its music and book services to boost revenue in those departments. Apple took the opposite approach of using digital stores to boost sales of the Hardware but since Amazon has an established media store, tablets that leverage those purchases may give it some ammo against other tablets.