Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is an American electronic commerce (e-commerce) company in Seattle, Washington. It is America's largest online retailer, with nearly three times the internet sales revenue of runner up Staples, Inc.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and launched it online in 1995. It started as an on-line bookstore but soon diversified to product lines of VHS, DVD, music CDs and MP3s, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, etc. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. It also provides global shipping to certain countries for some of its products.

On January 15, 2009, a survey published by Verdict Research found that Amazon was the UK's favorite music and video retailer, and came third in overall retail rankings.

History and business model
Amazon was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos called "regret minimization framework", his effort to fend off regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush. While company lore says Bezos wrote the business plan while he and his wife drove from New York to Seattle, that account appears to be apocryphal.

The company began as an online bookstore named "Cadabra.com", a name quickly abandoned for sounding like "cadaver"; while the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs for books might offer 200,000 titles, an on-line bookstore could offer more. Bezos renamed the company "Amazon" after the world's biggest river. Since 2000, Amazon's logotype is an arrow leading from A to Z, representing customer satisfaction (as it forms a smile) and the goal to have every product in the alphabet.

In 1994, the company incorporated in the state of Washington, beginning service in July 1995, and was reincorporated in 1996 in Delaware. The first book Amazon.com sold was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. Amazon.com issued its initial public offering of stock on May 15, 1997, trading under the NASDAQ stock exchange symbol AMZN, at an IPO price of US$18.00 per share ($1.50 after three stock splits in the late 1990s).

Amazon's initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect a profit for four to five years; the strategy was effective. Amazon grew steadily in the late 1990s while other Internet companies grew blindingly fast. Amazon's "slow" growth provoked stockholder complaints: that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough. When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered, and, finally, turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million, just 1¢ per share, on revenues of more than $1 billion, but the profit was symbolically important.

The company remains profitable: 2003 net income was $35.3 million, $588.50 million in 2004, $359 million in 2005, and $190 million in 2006 (including a $662 million charge for R&D in 2006), nevertheless, the firm's cumulative profits remain negative. As of September 2007, the accumulated deficit stood at $1.58 billion. Revenues increased thanks to product diversification and an international presence: $3.9 billion in 2002, $5.3 billion in 2003, $6.9 billion in 2004, $8.5 billion in 2005, and $10.7 billion in 2006.

On November 21, 2005, Amazon entered the S&P 500 index, replacing AT&T after it merged with SBC Communications. On December 31, 2008, Amazon entered the S&P 100 index, replacing Merrill Lynch after it was taken over by Bank of America.

In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing on-line shopping.

Merchant partnerships
The Web site CDNOW (cdnow.com) is powered and hosted by Amazon. Until June 30, 2006, typing ToysRUs.com into a browser would similarly bring up Amazon.com's Toys & Games tab; however, this relationship was terminated as the result of a lawsuit.

Amazon.com powers and operates retail web sites for Target, Sears Canada, Benefit Cosmetics, Bebe Stores, Timex Corporation, Marks & Spencer, Mothercare, and Lacoste. For a growing number of enterprise clients, currently including the UK merchants Marks & Spencer, Benefit Cosmetics' UK entity and Mothercare, Amazon provides a unified multichannel platform whence a customer can interchangeably interact with the retail website, standalone in-store terminals, and phone-based customer service agents. Amazon Web Services also powers AOL's Shop@AOL.

Locations

Headquarters
The company's global headquarters is located on Seattle's Beacon Hill. It has offices throughout other parts of greater Seattle including Union Station and The Columbia Center.

Amazon has announced plans to move its headquarters to the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle beginning in mid-2010, with full occupancy by 2011. This move will consolidate all Seattle employees onto the new 11-building campus.

Software development centers
The company employs software developers in medium- to large-sized centers across the globe. While most of Amazon's software development is in Seattle, other locations include:

1. Slough (United Kingdom)
2. Edinburgh (United Kingdom)
3. Dublin (Ireland)
4. Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad (India)
5. Cape Town (South Africa)
6. Iaşi (Romania)
7. Shibuya (Tokyo, Japan)
8. Beijing (China)
9. Tempe, Arizona (United States)

From Wikipedia

History of mobile phones

In 1908, U.S. Patent 887,357 for a wireless telephone was issued in to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this patent to "cave radio" telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as the term is currently understood. Cells for mobile phone base stations were invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T and further developed by Bell Labs during the 1960s. Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s, while hand-held cellular radio devices have been available since 1973. A patent for the first wireless phone as we know today was issued in US Patent Number 3,449,750 to George Sweigert of Euclid, Ohio on June 10, 1969.

In 1945, the zero generation (0G) of mobile telephones was introduced. 0G mobile phones, such as Mobile Telephone Service, were not cellular, and so did not feature "handover" from one base station to the next and reuse of radio frequency channels. Like other technologies of the time, it involved a single, powerful base station covering a wide area, and each telephone would effectively monopolize a channel over that whole area while in use. The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology are first described in U.S. Patent 4,152,647 , issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and assigned by them to the United States Government.

This is the first embodiment of all the concepts that formed the basis of the next major step in mobile telephony, the Analog cellular telephone. Concepts covered in this patent (cited in at least 34 other patents) also were later extended to several satellite communication systems. Later updating of the cellular system to a digital system credits this patent.
Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive is widely considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for handheld use in a non-vehicle setting. Cooper is the inventor named on "Radio telephone system" filed on October 17, 1973 with the US Patent Office and later issued as US Patent 3,906,166. Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973 to a rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.

The first commercial citywide cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. Fully automatic cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation). The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system went online in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in 1981.

In 1983, Motorola DynaTAC was the first approved mobile phone by FCC in the United States. In 1984, Bell Labs developed modern commercial cellular technology (based, to a large extent, on the Gladden, Parelman Patent), which employed multiple, centrally controlled base stations (cell sites), each providing service to a small area (a cell). The cell sites would be set up such that cells partially overlapped. In a cellular system, a signal between a base station (cell site) and a terminal (phone) only need be strong enough to reach between the two, so the same channel can be used simultaneously for separate conversations in different cells.

Cellular systems required several leaps of technology, including handover, which allowed a conversation to continue as a mobile phone traveled from cell to cell. This system included variable transmission power in both the base stations and the telephones (controlled by the base stations), which allowed range and cell size to vary. As the system expanded and neared capacity, the ability to reduce transmission power allowed new cells to be added, resulting in more, smaller cells and thus more capacity. The evidence of this growth can still be seen in the many older, tall cell site towers with no antennae on the upper parts of their towers. These sites originally created large cells, and so had their antennae mounted atop high towers; the towers were designed so that as the system expanded—and cell sizes shrank—the antennae could be lowered on their original masts to reduce range.

The first "modern" network technology on digital 2G (second generation) cellular technology was launched by Radiolinja (now part of Elisa Group) in 1991 in Finland on the GSM standard which also marked the introduction of competition in mobile telecoms when Radiolinja challenged incumbent Telecom Finland (now part of TeliaSonera) who ran a 1G NMT network.

The first data services appeared on mobile phones starting with person-to-person SMS text messaging in Finland in 1993. First trial payments using a mobile phone to pay for a Coca Cola vending machine were set in Finland in 1998. The first commercial payments were mobile parking trialled in Sweden but first commercially launched in Norway in 1999. The first commercial payment system to mimick banks and credit cards was launched in the Philippines in 1999 simultaneously by mobile operators Globe and Smart. The first content sold to mobile phones was the ringing tone, first launched in 1998 in Finland. The first full internet service on mobile phones was i-Mode introduced by NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 1999.
In 2001 the first commercial launch of 3G (Third Generation) was again in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard.

Until the early 1990s, most mobile phones were too large to be carried in a jacket pocket, so they were typically installed in vehicles as car phones. With the miniaturization of digital components and the development of more sophisticated batteries, mobile phones have become smaller and lighter.

From Wikipedia

Amazon dan Google Berhadapan di Bisnis e-book

Persaingan bisnis e-book akan semakin seru memasuki awal tahun ini. Google disebut-sebut akan masuk ke arena bisnis e-book melalui Book Serach. Peluncuran Kindle 2, pembaca e-book yang lebih menjanjikan dari Amazon.com, Senin (9/2) lalu akan menjadi pesaing berat bagi proyek baru Google tersebut.

Rencana Google dalam layanan Book Search di atas kertas memang sangat menjanjikan. Selain menyediakan akses online melalui browser web di komputer, layanan tersebut juga akan dibawa ke ranah ponsel. Google sudah mengumumkan kerja samanya dengan produsen iPhone, Apple, dan pencetak ponsel yang menggunakan Android untuk memuluskan rencana tersebut. Layanan mencari dan membaca buku secara gratis milik Google itu kini sedang dalam penyempurnaan dan akan segera bisa diakses lewat ponsel.

Seperti 'tersengat' oleh pengumuman Google tentang Book Search-nya itu, Amazon.com pun buru-buru mengeluarkan Kindle 2, pembaca e-book yang menjanjikan kinerja lebih baik daripada versi sebelumnya. Langkah Amazon tak kalah ambisius karena dialah retail online terbesar di Internet yang sudah menjual buku-buku digital.

Pihak Amazon menggelontorkan rencana itu setahun setelah mereka terbilang sukses dengan jualan Kindle versi pertama. Sejak setahun lalu itu, Amazon berhasil menjual layanan buku elektronik tersebut seharga 359 dollar AS atau sekitar Rp 3,7 juta.

Amazon pun mulai melirik jaringan seluler. Melalui jaringan selular, e-readers bisa mengunduh koleksi buku Amazon yang saat ini memiliki 230 ribu judul buku di peranti Kindle tersebut. Tak ubahnya Book Search besutan Google, judul buku-buku itu juga bakal mereka pasarkan lewat ponsel.
Melihat rencana Amazon dan Google ini, kiranya pasar e-book masih cukup luas dan menjanjikan. Jika selama ini hanya Amazon.com dengan Kindle-nya dan Sony dengan Sony Reader-nya yang bermain pasar ini, kelak vendor ponsel pun masuk dan bersaing.

Sisi lain hasil temuan Asosiasi Barang elektronik Konsumen Amerika (CEA) pun menjanjikan pasar ini, bahwa perolehan uang dari penjualan e-book reader meningkat 265 persen pada tahun lalu. Tahun ini, mereka memprediksi penjualan tersebut bakal meningkat 110 persen

Sumber: Kompas