Amazon has partnered with Sony to launch Amazon Instant Video on the PlayStation 3, marking the company’s first partnership with a game console. Other services, like Netflix, work on the Xbox and Nintendo Wii. Amazon customers who pay $79 a year for its Prime delivery service will now be able to stream more than 17,000 TV shows and movies using the PS3. Previously, the videos could be viewed using some set-top boxes, over the Internet and on Amazon’s Kindle tablet.
Read MoreGoogle Inc., undaunted by a short-lived attempt to sell a smartphone on its own, is now pushing into Apple’s iPad market. The Internet search company is planning to market and sell tablets directly to consumers through an online store, similar to rivals Apple and Amazon.com Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. The move is an effort to turn around sluggish sales of tablet computers powered by Google’s Android software. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreA remark made by one of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s advisers has sent online shoppers — and investors — into an Etch A Sketch frenzy. In case you’ve missed the sandstorm, Eric Fehrnstrom, a top Romney adviser, said on Wednesday that if Romney wins the GOP nomination, the campaign will “hit a reset button” to take on President Obama in the fall. Fehrnstrom then added, “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.” While Romney’s rivals have pounced on the comment — Newt Gingrich’s camp has even created a SketchyRomney app — Etch A Sketch fans have pounced on the venerable toy, buying it in droves on Amazon.com. Politico reports that sales of the 1950’s relic shot up more than 2,000 percent on the e-commerce site, while Ohio Art Company , the maker of Etch A Sketch, saw its stock hit a 52-week high yesterday , before closing at $9.65, more than double its Wednesday closing price of $4. Here at AllThingsD , we say: Why go for the plastic version, when you can play with a digital Etch A Sketch on your mobile appendages? That’s right: Campaign platforms, errant Twitpics, awkward remarks — all erased with the shake of an iPad. It’s a politician’s best friend. For iPhone, there’s Etch A Sketch Premium, from Freeze Tag, Inc., a company that makes casual games for mobile devices and personal computers. It costs just 99 cents (or about 0.000001309367724577594 percent of the $75,609,012 Romney has raised to date). Unlike the physical Etch A Sketch, users of this app can change the color of the toy’s frame, choose from a color palette when drawing, use predrawn shapes or a background (like Hangman), and share their drawings with friends via email, Facebook or a photo album. As with the original Etch A Sketch, you simply shake it to erase it. But a smartphone screen is just too small for this kind of app, and the knobs of the Etch A Sketch appear to be cut off at the bottom. You can use your finger to draw, but that seems like Etch A Sketch sacrilege. Fortunately, there’s an iPad app from the same company
Read MoreOne way to stand out in a crowded category of devices is to employ a novel hardware design. Last year, Sony got decent marks from many reviewers, including me, for an Android tablet called the Tablet S, crafted to look like a magazine, with one thick, rounded vertical edge that made it more comfortable to hold than many other tablets. Now, the company has brought out another Android tablet with an even more radical design, and this one shows the limits of novelty. [ See post to watch video ] The new Tablet P, sold in AT&T stores, is a 7-inch long, narrow, hinged device with no exposed display at all. When you open it, twin small screens are revealed. Content can appear on one of the two screens, or be spread across both. It can operate over either a Wi-Fi or a cellular-data connection. It sounds cool, but the Tablet P has some crucial drawbacks. The most important one is that, to take advantage of its full viewing area by using both screens as a single display, you must put up with a thick, black, plastic bar across the center of whatever you’re viewing. That disruptive scar is the inside of the hinge, where the dual screens meet. Some apps avoid that absurd situation by cramming all their content into just one screen. But these screens are small, just 5.5 inches diagonally, closer to the area of a large smartphone than Sony’s Tablet S or the iPad, whose screens are about 10 inches. When content is spread across both screens, as it is in the Web browser, the combined display is about 7 inches, but that black bar is present. To be fair, Sony has modified or created some apps so they take intelligent advantage of the dual screens, without the black bar to annoy you. For instance, the email app uses the bottom screen to list your messages and the top one to show whichever message you’re reading. Similarly, the stock video player, and many games, use the bottom screen for control buttons and the top for the content. But at launch, there are only about 40 such specially adapted apps out of the hundreds of thousands of Android apps the Tablet P can run.
Read MoreAmazon’s online catalog offers millions of everyday items for sale, but how many consumers think of visiting Amazon to buy a meal in a restaurant or a haircut at the local salon? Over the past year, Amazon has slowly been entering that space, too, to go up against industry-leading Groupon. So far, it’s done fairly well. For example, Amazon ranks fourth in the U.S., following Groupon, LivingSocial and Travelzoo, according to Yipit, a deal aggregator, which closely tracks the major players. Starting early tomorrow, the company is planning a publicity stunt to raise its awareness even further, by posting $10 Amazon.com gift cards for five bucks. The offer will be distributed on the AmazonLocal site , via email and on some Kindle devices, and has the potential to sell-out since limited quantities will be available (Note: Don’t get too excited, it’s limited to one per customer).
Read MoreMiramax CEO Mike Lang is leaving the movie studio after a 14-month long stint. A Miramax press release says Lang is resigning, and that the company doesn’t have a successor lined up. Lang took over the film company after private equity investors had purchased it from Disney, and helped it hammer out a series of distribution deals, particularly with digital outlets like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.
Read MoreAmazon has added shows from Discovery’s cable networks to its “Prime Instant Video” service, which offers free videos for Amazon Prime members. Like other video licensing deals Amazon has struck, this one will give it access to “library” content from channels like Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet. Amazon says the deal brings its Prime catalog to more than 17,000 titles. Discovery and Netflix struck a similar deal last year.
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Just as a few massive chain stores eventually came to dominate the traditional printed book market in North America, the e-book marketplace is a kind of oligopoly involving a few major players — primarily Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS). And while bookstore owners of all kinds are free to decide which books they wish to put on their shelves, these new giants have far more control over whose e-books see the light of day because they also own the major e-reading platforms, and they are making decisions based not on what they think consumers
Read MoreOMGPOP is a gaming company that has been plugging away at it for some 5 years, backed by $16 million in venture funding. It’s had OK but not overwhelming results. Until this month, when it released Draw Something . The game is essentially a mobile version of Pictionary, and for whatever reason it’s a huge hit. Maybe it touches on some of the same things that Words with Friends mines, except it doesn’t require spelling. In any case, it’s currently atop both the free and paid charts at the iTunes App store. And because it’s the kind of game that gets better as more people play it, it’s probably going to stay there for a while. CEO Dan Porter says Draw Something, which didn’t exist a month ago, is now averaging 2 million active users a day. So how does a startup ride that kind of rocket growth? Bigger question: Now what? I asked Porter to jot down some thoughts about what he’s learned the last few weeks, and what he thinks happens next. This is an edited version of his email replies: All Hands On Deck Two weeks ago there were five people working on the game. Now there are 40 people. We redeployed resources from a ton of other projects, and with the growth even those people are maxed out. If we were a 10-person company now instead of a 40-person company we would be dead. It causes disruptions when people are quickly moved from one thing to another, but everyone likes being associated with a winner. Self-Reliance We started out heavily reliant on Facebook and Amazon S3. We started making too many calls to S3, and almost took down one of their data centers
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