Amazon is really trying hard to make its Kindle eBook reader to become a multi-function device – much like the Apple iPad. But I guess, due to the limited technical capabilities of the Kindle, making it at part with the iPad in terms of multi-features would be a hard feat to accomplish. Well, at least Amazon is trying and its latest effort will be rolled out with the new firmware  version 2.5 upgrade for Kindle – Facebook and Twitter integration.

Well, it’s not really a full Twitter and Facebook integration since this would be pretty hard to accomplish. What the new feature will let you do is to let you share book passages with friends on Facebook and Twitter directly from your Kindle. Unfortunately, that’s just how far Amazon can probably stretch the Kindle’s social capability.

But, don’t let this lack of powerful social features disappoint you. There are other new features that the Kindle firmware version 2.5 that are worth waiting for. These include:

• Collections: Organize your books and documents into one or more collections.
• PDF Pan and Zoom: Zoom into PDFs and pan around to easily view small print and detailed tables or graphics.
• Password Protection: Password protect your Kindle when you’re not using it.
• More Fonts & Improved Clarity: Enjoy two new larger font sizes and sharper fonts for an even more comfortable reading experience.
• Popular Highlights: See what the Kindle community thinks are the most interesting passages in the books you’re reading.

Kindle’s firmware upgrade will be rolled out automatically via OTA to all Kindle users in the coming days.

Again, it’s all about Apple and the iPad. Probably realizing that they need to push both their e-readers near to consumers some more, especially now that the iPad was proven to be a good competitor in the e-reader nice, Amazon and Nook are reportedly pushing their devices to brick and mortar stores.

And so the Kindle which is currently available only through Amazon.com will soon be making its way to Target.com. Engadget managed to score a shot of Target’s inventory handheld showing the Kindle device.  In addition, Target.com might start selling the e-book reader starting on April 25. Why it took Amazon this long to make its Kindle available on brick and mortar stores is not important anymore. What’s important is that casual buyers who chance upon it on Target’s store shelves might actually make an unplanned purchase of the Kindle.

As for Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, another reliable source revealed that the Nook will be available on Best Buy brick-and-mortar stores. Curently, you can only score a Nook through Barnes & Noble online store or from Barnes & Noble outlets.  The proof was once again revelead by an inventory system, this time from Best Buy showing that B&N’s Nook will be available on Best Buy stores starting April 18.

What remains to be seen now is whether this will lead to an increase in both the sales figures of Nook and Kindle.  What we don’t know right now is how much these devices will be sold on stores. Will they be priced lower than their selling price online?

Over at the Daily Bits, I was just discussing about how the iPad can possibly kill the Amazon Kindle, partly because of  the iPad’s rich, colorful display as against the Kindle’s boring grey e-ink display. You want another proof? How about checking the iPad App Store and searching for Kindle for iPad?

Yes folks, Amazon’s Kindle for iPad app is now part of the growing list of early iPad apps releases just in time for the release of the iPad tomorrow. And boy does it look’s awesome? Indeed! Just take a look at the sample screenshots provided on the app’s page on the iPad App Store.

Kindle for iPad features a rich, colorful, and vibrant main app page. Displaying book covers in full color against the old-familiar blue Kindle theme.

Feature-wise, it’s pretty much the same Kindle mobile app for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac and PC.

Additional features made specifically for the iPad include:

• new beautiful interface, tailored to the size, look and feel of the iPad
• new home library view with pinch, zoom, and scrolling support
• new page turning animation
• adjustable screen brightness

Kindle for iPad also supports Amazon’s Whispersync that automatically syncs your last page read , bookmark, notes, and highlights across all of your devices.  The app also lets you purchase e-books from the Kindle Bookstore which you can also use these e-books on your other Kindle apps.

Obviously, Kindle for App does not recommend the iBookstore so it’s either you use Kindle for iPad or the iBooks from getting your e-book fix on your iPad.

Call it coincidence or a a deliberate attempt at possibly spoiling the intensifying excitement over the release of the iPad. But Amazon’s recent airing of two TV ads for Kindle is a sign that the company is not just going to let the iPad steal the Kindle’s existing dominance on the e-book market.

The two TV ads features are short snappy and trendy clips showing the theme “books in 60 seconds.” Meaning, that’s how fast you can get hold of a full edition of a published book in your Amazon Kindle, through its 3G wiresless connectivity or via the Internet. The Kindle TV Ads are pretty well done, colorful and able to send the message that the Kindle can bring “colors” to what you read.

Interestingly, Amazon has commissioned airing of the two commercials into prime time on major channels. Makes us think that Amazon has really spent a lot to push their campaign. And of course, it shows how serious they are in staying competitive against the iPad.

Here’s the other Amazon Kindle TV commercial.

When the issue on the e-books pricing of those who will be in the iPad’s iBookstore started spreading, many are saying that it will be to Amazon’s advantage.  The Kindle Store’s average price for an e-book is pegged at $9.99 and Amazon is even sacrificing some sales just to maintain this pricing even at a loss for them.

Analysts are saying that the iBookstore will not be able to compete against this pricing and that e-books to be sold will be priced higher than the e-books sold in the Kindle Store.

That may not be necessarily true at all.  The blog AppAdvice got hold of a preview that shows otherwise. It seems that most e-books that will be sold in the iBookstore  are also priced at $9.99. In fact, out of the 32 e-books that were on the New York Time’s Bestsellers, 27 titles have $9.99 price tag.

In fact 4 of  the top 5 bestsellers will be sold in the iBookstore for $9.99.

If the iBookstore will be able maintain this price ceilings for most of the books that will be made available once the iPad is launched, Amazon is definitely facing a stiff challenge to their well established and widely accepted e-book business.  Indeed Amazon has all the reason to be worried and should start working on various enhancements to the Kindle store as well possibly on the Kindle device as well.  But except for the lack of color display and other computing functionalities, I think Amazon may have already exhausted all possible features that it could probably include in the Kindle.

So, will you be buying the iPad and use it as an e-book reader and purchase your e-books from the iBookstore? Or will you use the Kindle App for Tablets which will also run in the iPad and purchase your e-books from the Amazon Kindle Store still?

Suddenly, Amazon announced the availability of Kindle for Mac app. As if sending a signal to all Mac users planning to buy the iPad for e-book reading purpose that they can do the same thing with their current machine.  That they don’t need to spend some precious $525 dollar just to have an e-book reader.  They can do so with their existing machine and with the help of Amazon’s Kindle for Mac.

Now that I have let that issue out, let’s get into the details of the Kindle for Mac. Features? Pretty much what the application can do with its other iteration – Kindle for PC, Kindle for iPhone, and Kindle for BlackBerry.

Some of these features will let you:

• Purchase, download, and read hundreds of thousands of books available in the Kindle Store
• Access their library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free
• Choose from 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
• Add and automatically synchronize bookmarks and last page read
• View notes and highlights marked on Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle for iPhone
• Read books in full color including children’s books, cookbooks, travel books and textbooks

Amazon also promise to roll out some more features soon. These include – full text search and the ability to create and edit notes and highlights. Kindle for Mac is available as a free download requiring around 20MB of your Mac’s storage. It works for all Intel Mac models.  Ready to take this app for a spin?  Here’s the download link - www.amazon.com/kindleformac.

Amazon should be thankful for the Holiday season as it can rest easy on the stress brought about by Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Sony PRS e-Readers.  It looks like there are more Kindle owners right now than before as it is now the most gifted item on Amazon. And if this is not enough, on Christmas Day, Amazon achieved quite a record-breaking sale on Kindle books than the printed ones.

And no one could be more pleased than Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos as he claims:

“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history. On behalf of Amazon.com employees around the world, we wish everyone happy holidays and happy reading.”

I could just imagine Dan Brown grinning from ear to ear right now, since his new book “The Lost Symbol” is among the top-selling Kindle books on Amazon. And so did Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help.”

Going back to Amazon’s Holiday shopping report. It was noted the Amazon’s sales peak was on Dec. 14, when consumers flock to the site and ordered 7 million units of various Amazon products. Amazon shipped to over 178 countries on this day.

Aside from the Kindle, the 8GB iPod Touch, Garmin nuvi 260W 4.3-inch GPS unit are also among the hottest-selling Amazon Electronics products.

So, did you get any of these items as a Christmas gift?

Read the full Amazon PR here.

One of the main appeals of cloud computing services is the quantized flexibility of their billing schemes — you pay only for the computing resources you need, for the amount of time you need them. That means billing can usually be adjusted on two dimensions: resources required and duration of use.

Now Amazon, ever thinking out of the box, adds a third dimension to the billing flexibility of their cloud computing services: market demand. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (more popularly known as Amazon EC2) has launched a new service: Spot Instances. Now you can bid for Amazon’s spare computing resources as they fall within your price range in real time.

Here’s how it works, in a nutshell. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances carry a Spot Price based on current market demand. You can bid on those instances in an open market. Whenever your bid matches or exceeds the Spot Price, your instances start running. Whenever the Spot Price exceeds your bid, your instances are terminated. Persistent Spot Instances will automatically restart once the Spot Price equals or falls below your bid, whereas one-time Spot Instances will simply terminate without restart. Regardless of how high you bid, you never pay more than the actual Spot Price.

As you can imagine, this system results in your rented computing instances running whenever they meet your price, and stopping whenever they don’t. That’s fantastic for controlling costs, but it’s unusable for any application that needs to stay up and running for any fixed continuous amount of time. Unless you want to place ridiculously high bids, don’t expect to run any high-availability systems on EC2 Spot Instances: Web sites, game servers, healthcare systems, battlefield control systems, et cetera.

The silver lining on this ephemeral cloud, however, is that it’s great for any application that doesn’t need to stay up and running for any fixed continuous amount of time: image and video processing, scientific research data processing, financial modeling and analysis, pharmaceutical and life sciences simulations, et cetera.

This eBay-style bidding approach to selling cloud computing resources should prove to be a very interesting experiment. It’ll almost certainly save people a pretty penny on rented computing power, so long as their applications don’t have to be available on demand. If Amazon EC2′s Spot Instances model proves successful, expect other cloud computing providers to come up with their own bidding systems.

I’m pretty sure this has been planned out a long time ago but it is only now that Amazon is launching this service. I’m talking about Amazon’s Disc+ On Demand service which lets you stream or download standard definition videos of DVD and Blu-ray Discs you buy from Amazon’s Video Store.

Disc+ On Demand currently has around 300 titles of DVD and Blu-ray movies which are for streaming or downloading. This is just a fraction of Amazon’s more than 330,000 DVD titles, so don’t expect to find most of the current movies that you’ve missed during their regular theater run. But for some older movies, Amazon’s Disc+ On Demand may probably have them already.

Of course, allowing its customers to download movies to their computer without some restrictions would be a little dangerous for Amazon. Hence, Amazon put up a long list of legal terms and conditions associated with the service.

Whether these will be enough to fend off legal issues remains to be seen and would depend on how far consumers are willing to take Amazon’s offering. Although this is not the first of its kind, it’s still good to know that Amazon is trying out something new to revive people’s interests on home video consumerism. That is despite the alternatives that consumers might take to satisfy their home video needs.

Amazon Disc+ On Demand is available for U.S. customers only.

Via NewTeeVee.

With the  Black Friday  shopping craze in the U.S. finally over, it’s now time to look into some figures that were derived out of all the online retail e-commerce transactions by online retailers that participated. According to comScore, there was a total of $595 million online sales on November 27, Black Friday.   This makes Black Friday as the second heaviest online spending day for 2009.

This year’s Black Friday online sales represents an 11% increase against last year’s Black Friday sales data. Overall spending now amounts to $10.57 billion – a 3% increase from last year’s data. More →