Jeff Bezos – praag.org

Amazon launches its ‘Fire’ smartphone

Amazon announced its first smartphone today, a bold move into a segment currently dominated by Apple and Samsung. At an event in Seattle, CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Fire Phone, a smartphone with a 4.7-in. 3-D display, a 2.2-GHz quadcore processor, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and 2 GB of RAM.

The device, which has a heavy focus on multimedia, will offer unlimited photo storage and a dedicated button to launch the camera app. It will be sold exclusively on AT&T’s network at a price of $199 for a 32-GB version with a two-year contract or $299 for a 64-GB version. Amazon is also throwing in a free year of Amazon Prime, its customer-loyalty program (existing Prime members will get a bonus year tacked onto their current subscription).

The device is currently available for preorder on Amazon’s website and will begin shipping on July 25.

The new phone is designed to be tightly integrated with Amazon’s myriad services. The company’s Instant Video service will be preinstalled on the device, as will Amazon’s newly launched music-streaming service. The phone will also come with a new program called Firefly, which allows people to scan objects, songs and TV shows (sort of like an all-purpose Shazam app) so that Amazon can identify them and offer a way to purchase them from its store. In total Firefly can recognize 100 million items, Bezos said. “Fire Phone puts everything you love about Amazon in the palm of your hand,” he said in a press release.

The phone’s 3-D capabilities are its most unique feature. Through a technology dubbed Dynamic Perspective, the Fire Phone uses four cameras placed on its front face to track a person’s head movements at all times. This allows the phone to offer a real-time 3-D-like display that presents more depth to images than a typical smartphone screen. During the event, Bezos demonstrated the phone’s map app, which showed looming skyscrapers leaping off the screen, as well as an app that allowed the user to sort through dresses as if they were in an actual 3-D space. The phone’s motion sensors allow users to scroll within certain apps by tilting the device rather than touching the screen.

Like the Kindle, the Fire Phone will run on a modified version of Android and support some apps native to Google’s operating system. Popular apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, ESPN and HBO Go should be available for the device when it launches. Amazon has also released development tools to allow companies to make apps that make use of Dynamic Perspective and Firefly.

The device demonstrates Amazon’s growing interest in creating hardware. In addition to its popular line of Kindle e-readers and tablets, the company released its first set-top box, the Amazon Fire TV, earlier this year. The company has always been reticent to disclose just how successful its hardware ventures are — Bezos said today that there are “tens of millions” of Kindle owners, and there’s no real data on Fire TV sales — but smartphone sales dwarf those other segments. More than a billion smartphones were shipped globally in 2013, with Samsung and Apple controlling nearly half the market between them.

Amazon will face an uphill battle taking on those two giants, but the company has a history of eschewing profits to smother competitors in other markets. They may be embarking on a similar strategy today — the 32-GB version of the Fire Phone, for instance, will sell for $100 less than a similar model of the iPhone 5S. – Time.com

Amazon buys Washington

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), whose founder Jeff Bezos is purchasing the Washington Post (WPO), ranks among the biggest spenders among high-technology companies seeking to influence the work of the federal government.

Former U.S. Senators Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, and John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat, are among those working for Seattle-based Amazon, which spent $1.7 million on lobbying from January through June, ninth highest among high-tech companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group that tracks lobbying.

The company weighed in on issues with Congress, the Commerce Department and the Federal Trade Commission on matters such as Internet sales taxes and privacy, patent laws, cybersecurity and online wine sales, Senate filings show.

“They have a huge number of issues before the federal government and now he’s bought the hometown paper for covering those politicians,” said Bill Allison, editorial director for the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based watchdog group. “There’s always a concern you’re going to have a conflict when you have wealthy publisher. Given all of Amazon’s issues, it’s hard to see where Bezos won’t have a conflict.”

Ethics specialist Bob Steele agrees.

“There are certainly competing loyalties,” said Steele, director of the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. “If he handles it very well, it’s possible to manage those competing loyalties, but it’s also possible for competing loyalties to turn into conflicts of interest that could erode the integrity of his journalistic obligations.”

Like other high-tech companies, Amazon has increased its lobbying spending. The company’s 2013 totals for the first six months of the year are 31 percent higher than the $1.3 million spent during the same period a year earlier. In 2000, when the company first reported it was lobbying the federal government, it spent $246,000 during the first six months.

Amazon’s team of lobbyists also includes former Assistant Treasury Secretary Jonathan Talisman, who served in the Clinton administration; Elizabeth Frazee, former aide to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican; and Holly Fechner, former counsel to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon, is purchasing the Post on his own, paying $250 million to the Washington Post Co., for a newspaper which has been held by the family of Post CEO Donald Graham since 1933.

Bezos must consider the reputation of the Post going forward as he acquires a newspaper at the heart of reporting on and editorializing about Washington’s issues. Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based journalism training organization, says Bezos would undercut the value of his purchase if he used the Post to advocate for his business interests.

“He will have to create — and I have no doubt that he will — a standard of independence and transparency in his newsroom,” McBride said. “It doesn’t make any business sense for it to become a mouthpiece. It makes business sense to do the right thing.” – Bloomberg

Amazon to buy Washington Post

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will buy the Washington Post newspaper for $250-million in a surprise deal that ends an 80-year ownership of the paper by the Graham family and hands one of the United States’s most influential publications to the businessman whose internet company has transformed retailing.

Bezos, hailed by many as technology visionary, called his acquisition a personal endeavor and reassured employees and readers of the 135-year-old newspaper that he will preserve its journalistic tradition, while driving innovation.

The acquisition, the latest in a flurry of deals for print publications, including the New York Times Company’s sale of the Boston Globe for $70-million, is a another sign of the unprecedented challenges newspapers face as advertising revenue and readership decline.

Shares of the Washington Post Company climbed more than 5% to $599.85 after the announcement – their highest level in almost five years.

Chairperson and chief executive of the Washington Post Company, Donald Graham, said in an interview that he and his niece Katharine Weymouth, Washington Post publisher, made the decision to put the newspaper up for sale earlier this year after looking at its financial forecasts.

“For the first time in either of our lives we said to each other: is ownership by the Washington Post Company the best thing for the newspaper? We could keep it alive, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was could we make it strong?”

The Amazon chief executive took his message directly to employees in a letter posted on the newspaper’s website.

“I understand the critical role the Post plays in Washington, DC and our nation, and the Post‘s values will not change,” Bezos wrote in the letter.

“There will of course be change at the Post over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership,” Bezos added. “We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.”

In addition to the newspaper, Bezos gets other publishing businesses, including the Express newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing.

The real estate, including the paper’s headquarters business and online news sites such as Slate, will remain with the Washington Post Company, and the paper’s operations will be kept separate from Amazon.com, according to the Washington Post.

The Washington Post is the seventh largest daily in the US.

While its legend and status loom large, the Washington Post represents only a fraction of the company which has expanded into a stable of holdings, including education and healthcare services and, most recently, industrial supplies.

And yet, the Washington Post suffers from the same hurdles besieging big city newspapers across the US. The company’s newspaper division reported an operating loss of $49.3-million for the six months ending June, compared to a loss of $33.2-million during the same period last year.

Weymouth, who will continue to serve as the paper’s chief executive and publisher after the sale, said she did not think there was a “magic bullet” to resolving the paper’s problems, but that the resources Bezos brought to the table were a plus.

“He’s smart and innovative and has access to a lot of smart people,” she said.

Bezos, who has built Seattle-based Amazon.com into a shopping and online technology force over the last two decades, made a small foray into media earlier this year with an investment in internet news site Business Insider.

Bezos is the world’s 19th richest person with a fortune of $25.2-billion, according to Forbes. His investment vehicle, Bezos Expeditions, is invested in a number of companies including Twitter and Business Insider.

His major personal project is called Blue Origin, which aims to be one of the first non-government funded ventures to send people and cargo into space, potentially winning lucrative contracts that were once fulfilled by NASA.

Bezos has already spent millions of dollars on this project, with millions more in the pipeline.

He did not elaborate in great detail on his motivations behind his latest deal, which caught many industry watchers by surprise. He does not play a prominent role in politics but has been described by friends as holding libertarian views. He and his wife did make public a $2.5-million contribution to a Washington state campaign to legalize same-sex marriage last year.

The deal comes on the heels of near-unprecedented media deal activity this year, with the Globe transaction announced just over the weekend, News Corp spinning out its newspapers, and the Tribune Company hiving off its publishing business like the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune from its broadcasting division.

“It will be interesting to see, is this the first step in the transformation of the business?” said John Miller, senior vice president at Chicago’s Ariel Investments, a top-10 investor in the Washington Post. “The board is making the right decision. They obviously felt like it was a good deal. It will be interesting to see how they allocate capital going forward.” – Reuters