Amazon

Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos. Kindle. AWS. 1-Click.
I bet almost everyone in the United States knows what these words refer to.

Amazon.com was conceived as a bookstore by Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen, a guy who graduated in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It was founded in 1994, right before the dot.com bubble. Despite the first years of losses (its first profit only came in 2001 Q1), Amazon.com had survived. And it is now a prospering multinational e-commerce company based in Seattle, with 65.600 employees across the globe. It is operating in nine countries in America, Europe and Asia, and is planning to expand. Every year it acquires companies that support its business model and contribute to fulfill its mission of being the earth's most customer centric company. Among its acquisitions across the years, it is worth to mention: IMDb, Alexa, Mobipocket, AbeBooks, LoveFilm.  

Today Amazon offers every product that customers might want to legally buy online, from A to Z – and, by the way, this is the logic behind its logo. Books, CDs, DVDs, gardening tools, Halloween costumes, televisions, bottle of wine, laptop desks to attach to cars’ steering wheels (true story), Playmobil security checkpoints (true story), laparoscopic gastric bypass kits (again, true story).[1] Almost everyone could sell its products on Amazon.com, which then keeps a share on each sale. Almost everyone could sell on its own website products redirecting to Amazon, keeping a share on each sale. Each step of the transaction happens within Amazon’s system, allowing building a huge database about customers’ behaviors. Amazon’s patent on the 1-click technology allows users to decrease the time spent to terminate purchases on its website. Amazon Prime allows customers to have unlimited free shipping after the payment of a small yearly amount. Everything is put in place to improve the overall customer experience.

But its operations do not stop to selling retail goods. Amazon also produces electronic devices: Kindle, an e-book reader, and Kindle Fire, a tablet computer. And it sells the digital content to be read on those devices –its sales of e-books outnumbered hardcovers’ sales in July 2010. Before the introduction of Kindle Fire, Amazon was using AZW, a proprietary e-book format, which was not supported by other e-book readers. Now it has introduced KF8, a format that supports HTML5 and CSS3. Hoping to become the market leader for tablets and e-book readers, lock customers in and make huge revenues on selling entertainment content, Amazon is pursuing an aggressive pricing strategy for its Kindle Fire– “the best tablet at any price” – selling it at an amount that is lower than costs for production. Under its publishing unit, it publishes romance novels, thrillers, cults, books that have not yet been translated in English, etc., in physical and Kindle formats.

With Amazon Web Services, it sells to other websites and client-based application remote computing services (such as storage and cloud computing services). Making its invaluable database publicly available, it allows external programmers to tap into it and build APIs so that, on the one hand, it gains favor with the 21th century technology gatekeepers, and, on the other hand, it enhances the chances to increase its revenues in unpredictable ways. 

In Tim O' Reilly words, "Amazon isn't just an e-commerce site". It is THE information hub for many industries. It is one of the leading companies in the Internet era.

In 2012 Q3, Amazon net sales amounted at $13.81 billions. Revenues will keep growing. With its working business model, Amazon will lead the future of e-commerce: everyone is waiting for its next moves.

Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen is the #11 richest person in America.
Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen is Jeff Bezos.

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[1] http://www.cracked.com/article_18939_8-stupid-amazon-products-with-impressively-sarcastic-reviews_p2.html

Instant Messaging

            Instant messaging is a form of communication in which text-based messages are transmitted from one user to another via the Internet. Instant messaging is client-based and isn’t anonymous, which is what differentiates it from online chatting, which can be anonymous and isn’t necessarily client-based. The origins of instant messaging can be traced back to the mid-1960’s, when it was used as a notification system in crude applications such as printing. These rudimentary systems then evolved to allow communication between users that were logged onto the same machine. With the invention of more sophisticated networks and the development of the Internet, instant messaging obviously evolved as well.

The first instant messaging programs were configured so that users could see the characters their peers were typing in real-time, as opposed to the more traditional instant messaging we know, in which a user types a message and then hits enter before the recipient can view the message. A popular example of this in the 1980’s and early 1990’s was Unix’s command line “talk” program. Modern instant messaging didn’t arrive until the mid-1990’s, when clients such as AOL Instant Messaging and PowWow began to take off. These clients were GUI-based and Internet-based, which meant that users could communicate even if they were continents away. Instant messaging continued to evolve and sooner or later included features such as video messaging, VoIP (voice over internet protocol), and desktop sharing. Today, instant messaging has transitioned from clients such as AOL Instant Messenger and PowWow to social networks such as Facebook, Skype, and Twitter. Another instant messenger service that has become extremely popular due to the popularity of the iPhone is iMessage, which is phone-based instant messaging over WiFi and/or 3G networks.

I believe the development of instant messaging started the social media revolution that we are witnessing today. The whole concept of real-time communication via Internet was unknown to the world until instant messaging was developed, and it took over people’s homes by force. I remember when I first installed AOL Instant Messenger in the 7^th grade and I also remember using it on a daily basis for the next 4 to 5 years, along with the rest of my school. Small talk, relationship troubles, large arguments, and deep philosophical conversations all occurred through instant messaging, for better or for worse, and the whole dynamic of communicating with your friends and family was changed because of it. As new technologies such as video chatting and VoIP were developed, there were newer and better ways of communicating with friends and family. Instant messaging then evolved into numerous social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which are obviously huge parts of the World Wide Web and Internet traffic today.  

In terms of the future of instant messaging, I believe the enhancement of voice recognition technologies and the development of technologies that allow users to “think their messages” to someone (though this is a long ways away) will provide a surge to instant messaging. Furthermore, social media networks will continue to evolve, and I believe they’ll always incorporate instant messaging no matter how they progress. Therefore, I do not believe instant messaging is going to die out any time soon.

Publishing on the WWW

BTW, here is the blog from last semester. Blogs are due Tuesday, November 20th.

Gaming

Daniel Stoll                                                

70-643 blog entry                                   

Gaming

           

            There are many have been many different games invented in the past few centuries. Many of these games involved playing a sport or board game and needed multiple people within a small area. The new wave of gaming that has emerged as a result of technology is video games. The history of video games goes as far back as the 1940s, when in 1947 Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a United States patent request for an invention they described as a “cathode ray tube amusement device”. This consisted of a machine in which a person uses knobs and buttons to manipulate a cathode ray tube beam to simulate firing at “air-borne” targets. However, video games did not really become popular until the 1970s and 80s, when arcade games, gaming consoles, and home computer games were released to the general public. The first coin-operated video game, Galaxy Game, was installed at a student union at Stanford University in 1971. Online gaming and computer games then came out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This created a whole new wave of gaming that would evolve even more in the future.

Currently, gaming is at an all time high as video games become more and more realistic and complex. On top of that, online gaming is all the rage. No matter how complex the computer AI programs become, playing games is always more enjoyable when competing against another human being. This is where online gaming has replaced the opponent needing to physically be there. Due to the advancements in technology, it is possible to play with and against other people all over the world. This has led to most of the more popular games being centered on the online capabilities that they possess. While people still enjoy the role-playing games where they play with themselves against a computer AI, the majority of games will also have online capability in order to compete with other human beings. Many of these games are console games, but some online PC games (such as World of Warcraft and League of Legends) have also become immensely popular. The current top gaming companies, making both console and PC games, include Nintendo, Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Sony, and Microsoft.

One of the more recent developments in gaming has been the introduction of games onto the World Wide Web. While these games are often not as in depth as console and PC games, they still play a big role in the field of gaming. A big spike in Web gaming has come as a result of social media websites. By integrating these games with the social media sites, the games can almost instantly become popular due to the social nature of the games. People love being able to compare their scores with scores of their friends because of how relevant it is to them and the competitive nature of most people. On top of that, these games can be offered for free to the public, while making money purely off advertisements. The video gaming spectrum on the World Wide Web continues to expand.            

The video game industry has a bright future. In the future these games will move from 3D screen based games, to household virtual reality games. This leaves a lot of room for innovation and technological advances in the field of gaming. However, how long it will continue to advance is impossible to speculate.