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Without so much as a whisper from the retailer itself, Amazon’s Android tablet is heading our way. Rumoured to launch at the end of the third quarter in time for the holiday season, Amazon is hoping it can steal a little of Apple’s thunder and steal a little of its market share.

Amazon’s decision to launch an Appstore was a surprising one, especially because there was no shortage of alternative Android marketplaces at the time. Incorporating its patented recommendation system and its “Free App A Day”, the third-party application store won many fans in the US primarly because it has been providing customers with downloads of some of the most popular Android apps and games.

Amazon is one of, if not the world’s number one Cloud storage and service provider and is seen by many to have led the march towards the Cloud, with affordable and reliable online services that even the most bootstrapped startups could afford. Asserting itself in the hosting market has helped the company make the best of its other web-based services, namely online music downloads and its new Android Appstore.

Damage control: Internet discussion about the service outage that struck Amazon Web Services in April spiked as soon as problems began (April 21st) and again when Amazon explained the cause (April 29th). The data is based on selected mentions on Twitter, blogs, and in online media. Alterian

Just ask Jeff Malek, cofounder of BigDoor, a Seattle company whose game software is hosted on the public servers of Amazon. Last April, problems in a Northern Virginia data center crippled Amazon's northeast operations, affecting many cloud-based businesses. Spotty service over four days left BigDoor scrambling to find technical solutions and issuing a steady stream of apologies to its 250 clients. Since then, BigDoor has joined a growing number of companies that are seeking new ways of building outage-resistant systems in the cloud, often at additional expense and inconvenience.

Even though outages put businesses at immense risk, public cloud providers still don't offer ironclad guarantees. In its so-called "service-level agreement," Amazon says that if its services are unavailable for more than 0.05 percent of a year (around four hours) it will give the clients a credit "equal to 10% of their bill." Some in the industry believe public clouds like Amazon should aim for 99.999 percent availability, or downtime of only around five minutes a year.

4. Offers, Offers and More Offers With the daily deals craze dying down post-Groupon IPO, mobile offers are springing up. Google Offers, Google's response to Groupon's daily deals, continues to expand and personalize its deals. It recently stepped into the mobile commerce space with an Android app. Amazon entered the daily deals space with Amazon Local. Mobile commerce isn't a part of the story, but with Amazon's hefty investment in Living Social and an infrastructure far more mature than Groupon's, Amazon may be waiting for just the right moment before really making its move. Meanwhile, daily deals superhero Groupon moved further into the location-based mobile commerce space through a partnership with Loopt. Soon after the Loopt announcement, Groupon launched Groupon Now, which inserts real-time, location-based offers into the daily deals game. Such offers are usually only available for a few hours, do not include the typical Groupon tipping point and are meant for impulsive mobile users.

5. Shop Till You Sit: Tablet Commerce Tablets are all the rage this year. A recent study by eMarketer.com predicts that one in three online consumers will use a tablet at least once a month by the year 2014. Appel iPads are positioned to dominate the tablet market until 2015. So what are people doing on their tablets? Shopping, naturally. And thus the boom of tablet commerce. Amazon.com, the top revenue-producing Internet retailer, naturally leads the pack with a strong tablet-optimized site. Couch commerce, the act of sitting on one's couch and shopping from a smartphone and tablet, saw a strong increase this year - especially after Thanksgiving dinner and on Black Friday. Amazon launched its Kindle Fire tablet on September 28. ReadWriteWeb Writer Jon Mitchell calls it a store with a screen, quite literally suggesting that its sole purpose is to be a media consumption device. As the Kindle Fire continues to gain consumer mindshare and more developers flock to the Amazon Appstore (don't call it the App Store, OK?), we expect more tablet commerce growth in this area. Shopping catalogs designed specifically for tablets will add to the tablet commerce experience. Google launched a shopping catalog app for tablets back in August. Google Catalogs, as they're called, are like "window shopping with your iPad and Android tablet." The only potential problem for retailers? Now they won't have catalog readers' home addresses on hand.

7. Don't Forget The Dongle Dongles refer to a device that is connect to a computer to allow access to wireless or protected software. In the case of mobile commerce, a dongle would be a mobile credit card swiper that attaches to the mobile device. Square, Verisign and Intuit lead the way in dongle innovation. But with Google Wallet and NFCs (near field communications) on the move, do dongles have a future? Square's Card Case digital wallet is a dongle. It lets you pay by saying your name and only your name - if the merchant you visit is in the Square directory. With its dongle reader, Square aims to make mobile payments mainstream. Intuit's recent mobile payments innovation introduce the dongle-to-debit-card. The company wants to make it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to accept transactions on the go. While Square is the leader in the dongle world, Intuit offers QuickBooks, tax refunds, bank partnerships, health check-ins and other management systems. Dongle providers such as Verifone, Intuit, Erply, ROAMPay, TRUSTe and PayAnywhere will continue to push their products as the space evolves.

Amazon's cloud services are vulnerable to attack via a "massive security gap" that enables hackers to access user accounts and data, a team of German researchers has revealed.

Security researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) found that Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Web Services was vulnerable to different methods of attack, including signature wrapping and cross site scripting, Those security holes have since been closed.

But similar security holes may still be open in other cloud infrastructure offerings, the RUB team found.

Shares of Amazon were down about 1% $202.52 by mid-morning Friday. The stock is up about 13% for the year to date. The Kindle Fire is estimated to cost a total of $201.70 to build each unit, a number that includes a bill of materials — or BOM — of $185.60, with another $16.10 in manufacturing costs for each unit, iSuppli estimates. The tear-down estimate does not include cost figures for software, licensing or royalties that Amazon may pay on the device.

Amazon began shipping the Kindle Fire on Monday, after first unveiling the device in late September. The tablet costs $199 — about 60% less than the cheapest iPad from Apple Inc. /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL -0.16% , which currently dominates the tablet market. Analysts expect the Kindle Fire to make the largest dent in the tablet market next to the iPad, after other devices using Google’s /quotes/zigman/93888/quotes/nls/goog GOOG -0.89%  Android operating system have largely failed to generate strong sales. The low price of the device, along with Amazon’s large library of books and other digital content, are expected to contribute to the appeal of the Kindle Fire. But Amazon does not break out data on its device sales.

Barclays Group analyst Ben Reitzes spoke to Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer about the threat the new $199 e-reader/tablet hybrid poses to their uber-dominant iPad. Apparently the two execs were as cool as ice cubes in a fire-proof box on the matter. After the conversation, Reitzes wrote in a note to investors that the low price point will likely make some waves, but that the Android-based Kindle Fire also means more fragmentation in the tablet market--a phenomenon that has helped keep the iPad on top of the heap. Here's more of what Reitzes had to say:

While compatible with Android, the Apps work with Amazon products. The more fragmentation, the better, says Apple, since that could drive more consumers to the stable Apple platform. We believe that Apple will get more aggressive on price with the iPad eventually but not compromise the product quality and experience.

That remains to be seen. Amazon has so far contended that it's not looking to compete head-to-head with the iPad. The Kindle Fire's specs are significantly more spartan than those of Apple's slate, and--coupled with the disruptive price point--target a completely different type of tablet buyer (the iPad 2 starts at $499).

The Tor developers are calling on people to sign up to the service in order to run a bridge - a vital point of the secret network through which communications are routed. "By setting up a bridge, you donate bandwidth to the Tor network and help improve the safety and speed at which users can access the internet," the Tor project developers said in a blog.

"Setting up a Tor bridge on Amazon EC2 is simple and will only take you a couple of minutes," it promised.

Users wishing to take part in the bridging project, need to be subscribed to the Amazon service.

"Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos says the online retailer won't collect tax from most of its 90 million customers until Congress clearly mandates it. Although a growing number of states are demanding that Amazon collect and remit tax on sales within their borders, such demands are 'interference in interstate commerce' and prohibited by the Constitution, Bezos said."

The story involves a music blogger named JP, who runs the appropriately named JP’s blog. JP also has a Twitter account, where he mostly seems to post links to his blog One such post was about the leak of the new album by The National. That post includes a link to Amazon where people can purchase the new album… and also a link to a download of one song (in MP3 format) from the album. Someone — and it’s not at all clear who — apparently filed a DMCA claim over the Twitter message about the leak, and Twitter responded by taking down the tweet and sending JP a note: jp917, Apr 22 03:10 pm (PDT): Hello, The following material has been removed from your account in response to a DMCA take-down notice: Tweet: http://twitter.com/jp917/statuses/12499491144 — New Post: Leaked: The National — High Violet http://jpsblog.net/2010/04/20/leaked-the-national-high-violet/ Twitter is receiving a takedown notice (in theory) from the copyright holder, and Twitter is merely responding to that takedown and notifying the user. Second, JP claims that he only linked to Amazon and not to a download, but looking at his blog post, there are two clear links to a single song from the album — one at Mediafire and the other via Box.net. He makes no claim that these are authorized, so perhaps they are potentially infringing, which makes things a bit messier. It is true that his main link is to Amazon, encouraging people to purchase, but there are those MP3 links as well (though, again, only to a single song, not the whole album).Read more at techdirt.com

Ever since Amazon released the Kindle, it now sells more e-books than it sells physical books: Amazon reported that it sold 115 e-books for every 100 physical books it sold in 2011. Unfortunately, e-books are still very much the same as physical books: they are static, their content is not updated nor does it include videos or interactive infographics.

If you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod, we highly recommend downloading “Our Choise”. Not only is it an intelligent and interesting book, its format is the first peek into what your book experience will become in the next few years. It might be time to kiss those physical books goodbye after all.  If you’re not convinced, check out the great demo given at TED:

How could Google, the high priest of the cloud and the parent of Android, analytics and AdWords/AdSense, not be a standard-setter for platform creation?

Amazon's strategy seems to be to embrace "open" Android and use it to make a platform that's proprietary to Amazon, that's a heck of a story to watch unfold in the months ahead. Even more so, knowing that Amazon has serious platform mojo.

Case in point, what company other than Apple could have executed something even remotely as rich and well-integrated as the simultaneous release of iOS 5, iCloud and iPhone 4S, the latter of which sold four million units in its first weekend of availability?

Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. SSDs (aka flash memory) are well known for their ability to significantly increase storage I/O performance and decrease power consumption when compared with hard disk drives, but until recently they have been too expensive for consideration in most data centers that aren’t backed by serious computing needs and deep pockets. That’s starting to change with the advent of new companies promising ever-lower prices on enterprise-grade flash storage, but making flash available as a service to cloud customers is still relatively unheard of.

However, adding flash is just par for the course for CloudSigma, which has been making a name for itself on high performance and customer choice since launching in the United States recently. The company’s U.S. presence is based out of the mind-blowing SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas, and CloudSigma chose 10 GbE interconnects as its standard to ensure its cloud can fully utilize the throughput horsepower of new technologies like flash. A couple weeks ago, it announced support of Oracle’s Solaris operating system, which also is unique among cloud providers (although Amazon Web Services does support OpenSolaris).

Although SSDs in the cloud are cool enough by themselves, they’re part of a larger trend toward making cloud computing a more palatable delivery model for all types of workloads. What began as a platform for hosting web applications has expand to enterprise apps such as ERP software from SAP, and even into massively parallel HPC workloads. AWS even offers GPU instances on an HPC cluster, which has resulted in several companies benchmarking AWS as among the fastest supercomputers in the world. Jenkins said CloudSigma will “absolutely” offer GPUs at some point, and might even go as far as to expose specific processors for rendering digital media.

Starbucks is launching its first major augmented reality app this holiday season that will let customers animate their coffee cups with their smartphones.

Starbucks Cup Magic launches for iPhone and Android devices in the U.S. next Tuesday. (In Canada, just the iPhone version will launch.) As demonstrated in the video above, the app works by pointing your phone’s camera at the company’s red holiday season coffee cups and 47 additional objects, such as bags of coffee, on display at Starbucks retail locations.

Doing so will produce animations involving five characters — an ice skater, a squirrel, a boy and a dog sledding and a fox — on your screen. You can also interact with the characters. For instance, if you tap the boy on the sled he does a somersault. Those who activate all five characters can qualify to win an as-yet-unnamed prize.

Amazon’s use of the iPhone camera to recognize and classify objects was preceded by Google, which released Google Goggles, a similar technology, for Android in December 2009 and for the iPhone last October.

Clipboard aims to become the go-to service for saving and sharing the relevant parts of any page or service available on the Web, including much of its core functionality, or put differently taking care of everything in between simply bookmarking a URL and having to save an entire Web page.

Using a bookmarklet, Clipboard users can ‘clip’ things like search query results, stock quotes, tweets or Facebook status updates, video clips, images with captions, a Google Maps map, a forum answer, an Amazon book review, an eBay product summary, a digital coupon, and the likes.

Select part of a Web page or service, and use your mouse (simply by hovering over something or, preferably, by using the scroll wheel) to increase or decrease the number of ‘zones’ you would like to clip. Your selection – including links and images etc. – will be saved to your Clipboard profile instantly, and you can jump straight to it to visit your clip collection

Peer 1, the hosting provider, has joined the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines the elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those many would consider more akin to a Platform-as-a-Service.

For example, instead of a virtual machine, a customer buys a “resource pool” that they can customize to fit their needs, as opposed to buying a small, medium or large virtual machine.

The company also offers auto scaling, a feature more common in Platforms-as-a-Service such as VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Microsoft’s Azure or Heroku. However, the service is pay-as-you-go and deployed on demand. It includes a dashboard that functions as a fuel gauge for compute resources that shows IT pros when to spin up additional resources.

Wal-Mart’s social and mobile plans are starting to take shape only two months after acquiring Kosmix of Mountain View, Calif.

When Kosmix was purchased, it was building a database called the social genome project, which kept track of what people were interested in and what products people were talking about.

the executives say they are hard at work defining how the mega-retailer — with $419 billion in sales and 1.5 billion online visits a year to its Web site — will address the two very disruptive platforms: social and mobile.

Nielsen reports a 39-percent Android platform market share across the major smartphone manufacturers, while Apple’s iPhone operating system claims a 28 percent stake.

A new app storefront forecast by Strategy Analytics says the app economy is strong and getting stronger. Paid downloads are expected to drive nearly $2 billion per quarter by the end of 2012. They predict the Android Market will overtake the Apple App Store in quarterly volume by the end of 2012. Android will be helped with additional assistance from third party distribution outlets such as the Amazon App Store, GetJar, Nook App Store and others.

The race right now is primarily between three parties – PayPal, Dwolla, Square and newcomer Clover Pay. Each of these services have its ups and downs, but it’s worth noting that they can all be used for peer-to-peer payments and that’s how we’ll be reviewing them.

PayPal Setup: Nearly instant. You can sign up for a PayPal account in just a couple of minutes, then have it funded from a credit card almost immediately after. Pros: Widely accepted payment form, in use by millions. Full-featured mobile app on iOS and Android, including the ability to scan checks for deposit. Tight integration with the USPS and eBay makes for easy collection and shipping. Cons: Often criticized for high fees. PayPal tends to lock down accounts for investigations with a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach. Terms of service disallow many actions, and are quite obtuse in important sections.

Dwolla Setup: Signing up for and using Dwolla is quick, but you’ll need to tie it to your bank account to fully leverage its abilities. This can take 3 to 5 business days, depending upon your bank. But, if your bank supports instant transactions, you won’t have the typical transfer lag. Pros: Dwolla charges only $0.25 per transaction, no matter how much money is being transferred. A highly-secure mobile app is available for Android and iOS. Instant transfers to and from your bank account, if your bank is part of the participating network. Dwolla is integrating with merchants, allowing you to pay directly from your account. Instant feature will “loan” you up to $500, charging a $5 fee only if you don’t pay it back before your statement is over. Cons: This could be a pro, depending on how you see it. Dwolla has no debit card function. It’s intended to be used as an extension of your existing bank account. Smaller base of users means that you’re not as likely to find a Dwolla customer for exchanging funds.