amazon in canada

Amazon.com has applied to open and run its own fulfilment center in Canada. Currently, Amazon outsources all inventory control and delivery to Canada Post because of existing rules on foreign ownership of “book publishing and other cultural industries”. For those who don’t know, Amazon.ca has a very limited item selection compared to Amazon.com and pricing is higher. There’s also no fancy features like Amazon Prime. According to a Globe & Mail article it looks like the Harper government might approve the application. Unforunately, both book publishers and book sellers aren’t crazy about the idea. If Amazon lost its application the only winner would be Chapters/Indigo (which probably owns 90% of the bookstores in Canada) and places like BestBuy.

Personally, I can’t wait. Online retail in Canada is a certified wasteland. The only exception to that is Well.ca.

Engine Yard Cloud Price Reductions | Engine Yard Blog. on small and medium hosts. sweet.

A couple photos of Amazon’s UK Fulfilment Center. it’s big.

Stephen R. Covey Grants E-Book Rights to Amazon – NYTimes.com. exclusive rights for a year. you know book publishers must be locking that stuff down now.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. amazon is auctioning off any spare ec2 capacity on a per-hour basis. talk about commoditization.

Journal of Eivind Uggedal: VPS Performance Comparison. Linode was the clear winner. EC2 did pretty poorly.

8 Reasons You Can Finally Love Ebook Readers (Thanks to Nook). comments about barnes&noble’s nook, a kindle competitor. really nice lcd screen, wifi, and a million books in their store. pretty nice.

Amazon.com: International Kindle. launched in over 100 countries. Canada did NOT make the list along with Afghanistan and Burkina Faso. I can’t believe that.

A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others – NYTimes.com. it would be pretty cool if Amazon did something like this. See what kind of prediction people come up with across 100 different product lines. And here’s the whitepaper to the winning netflix algorithm.

s3-swf-upload-plugin – GitHub. just randomly came across this and i can totally use it. flash object that lets users directly upload to your s3 account.

Amazon to Acquire Zappos.com – NYTimes.com. $800M stock deal. Good deal for Amazon as their stock is at $88 with a 56 P/E. Zappos CEO says they’ll operate separately and the link includes a video from Bezos.

Amazon.com: Kindle DX: Amazon’s 9.7″ Wireless Reading Device. it’s a bigger kindle and costs $479 USD. Not sure why they launched this so soon after the Kindle 2.

Amazon.com: Video Game Trade-In. Not only do they sell used stuff, now they buy it.

Amazon.com: Kindle 2. In the promo photos it kind of looks like a giant greyscale iPod. Still not in Canada though.

CanadianTire.ca is no longer selling online. That’s right. They’re just stopping. It’s really time for Amazon to expand in Canada.

Amazon Gets In On the Public Data Arena | FlowingData. includes US Census data and the Human Genome.

Exploding Offer Season – Joel on Software. about pushing back on recruiters. i’ve been meaning to write some posts about being on both sides of the amazon recruiting world.

Amazon CloudFront. content delivery network for s3 with edge points in 8 US cities, 4 in Europe, 2 in Asia.

Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging. that’s awesome. no ridiculous plastic blister packs and no waste on an extra box or packaging.

Amazon Web Services Blog: Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities. load balancing, monitoring, automatic scaling, and windows support. all coming in ‘09. load balancing will be so nice.