Online retail behemoth Amazon on Monday unveiled the Fire TV Stick, a dongle variant of its Fire TV set-top box that eschews the separate hardware in favor of an all-in-one form factor that plugs into and is powered by a television's HDMI port.
Owners of the popular Amazon Rewards Visa Card, which awards 3 percent back on all Amazon.com purchases, can now add their card to Passbook for the newly launched Apple Pay service.
In addition to a new permanent fixture in Manhattan, Amazon will be dabbling in the retail market with a pair of new temporary locations in San Francisco and Sacramento this holiday season to push sales of its hardware, the company has confirmed.
Amazon's growing competition with Apple will soon expand to the retail space, as the online storefront reportedly plans to go brick-and-mortar this fall with its first-ever physical store, set to be built in across from the Empire State Building in time for the holiday shopping season.
With hours to go before Apple is expected to unveil its next-generation iPhone, Amazon slashed the price on its first foray into the smartphone market, the Fire Phone, to just 99 cents with a new two-year service contract.
Amazon on Monday grew its digital media presence with the purchase of gaming-centric video streaming service Twitch, which agreed to a $970 million buyout that will take effect later this year.
Online retail giant Amazon on Wednesday unveiled Local Register, a new mobile credit card reader and companion app-based payment processing system that allows users to accept plastic payments on their iPhone or iPad.
Nearly 1,000 authors affected by the onging e-book spat between Amazon and Hachette have signed their names to a letter — set to run as a full-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times later this week — imploring the online retailer to settle the dispute and calling on readers to voice their displeasure directly to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
On the same day that Amazon begins to ship its new, widely-panned Fire Phone to consumers, shares of the online retailing giant are trading down nearly 10 percent after the company posted a $126 million loss on nearly $20 billion in sales in its fiscal second quarter.
As e-commerce behemoth Amazon gears up for the release of its first-ever smartphone on Friday, technology journalists have begun to weigh in with their thoughts on the device — and the returns don't look good for Jeff Bezos's brainchild.
iPad is making gains in North American tablet web usage, reaching an 78 percent share in Apple's "first quarter-over-quarter usage share gain since June 2013," notes a new report by Chitika.
While the digital music market has been trending toward monthly subscription services for unlimited access, Amazon is now trying the same approach with its dominance in the ebook market, allowing subscribers to read as much as they want for $10 per month.
Apple continues to dominate as the platform of choice among mobile buyers, with iOS representing 54 percent of all phone orders and 80 percent of tablet transactions as the market approaches $50 billion this year.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Thursday announced that it has filed suit against retail colossus Amazon, alleging that the company allowed children to rack up millions of dollars in unauthorized in-app purchases through the Amazon Appstore — charges similar to those brought against Apple last year.
A report published on Wednesday claims set-top media streamers like the Apple TV will be in one out of every four homes by 2015, but market growth of Apple's device is being outpaced by sector giant Roku, at least in the U.S.
More than a month after interrupting sales of books from major publisher Hachette in a dispute over e-book pricing, Amazon has proposed a temporary arrangement in which it would return sales to normal and funnel 100 percent of the revenue directly to authors until the two parties reach an agreement.
Hachette is not the only imprint to find itself under Amazon's thumb as the online retailing giant has begun turning the heat up on smaller publishers in the U.K., demanding terms that one publishing executive likened to a "form of assisted suicide for the industry."
When Amazon launched its Kindle Fire in 2011, the mini tablet's most compelling feature was its discounted low price. With its latest Fire Phone introduction, Amazon has sought to "reverse the ratchet," attempting to distance itself from Android's cheap identity.
Amazon announced its long awaited entrance into the smartphone market on Wednesday in unveiling the new Fire Phone, a device the retailer plans to pit against Apple's iPhone by integrating advanced head tracking technology for dynamic 3D content viewing, as well as new scanning functions that intelligently interpret data from the physical world.
With publishing house Hachette locked in a battle with Amazon that has seen the imprint's titles pulled from Amazon's virtual shelves, Apple's iBookstore has become the next-best place for readers to shop as a number of Hachette e-books are now discounted to just $9.99.
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Sam Oliver
Neil Hughes
Katie Marsal
AppleInsider Staff
Daniel Eran Dilger
Mikey Campbell
