Amazon

Amazon is readying a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to compete with the likes of industry veterans Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks. It's another step toward cloud computing, and it will be available later this year.

Amazon is no stranger to the cloud. The retailing behemoth launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006. EC2 is a Web service that hosts business software applications. Then Red Hat tapped into the cloud last November with a beta version of its Enterprise Linux operating system on EC2. Now Amazon is expanding the cloud.

Consumer electronics giant Best Buy announced Monday that it will acquire digital-music pioneer Napster for $121 million. Under the terms of the agreement, Napster shareholders will receive $2.65 for each outstanding share. The companies expect the purchase to be completed in the fourth quarter.

Brian Dunn, president and COO of Best Buy, said the deal will give the retailer's customers an expanded range of options for the delivery of electronic media.

A number of news outlets say they have confirmed that Amazon.com is on the verge of releasing an updated version of its Kindle e-book reader. And, rumors say, Amazon will change its focus from mass-market books to the education market.

Tim Bueneman, an analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that Amazon sees a major opportunity for the Kindle with college students. He also told the paper that Amazon is planning several new versions of the device.

On-demand data centers took another step toward becoming commonplace today, as AT&T announced the global launch of its Synaptic Hosting service.

Synaptic Hosting offers what the company called its "next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses." Customers will be able to purchase large-scale computing and applications on demand, through virtualized servers. Services to the user will be provided through AT&T's IDCs, or Internet data centers.

Paying Only for Capacity Used

At first, just a handful of employees at Sanmina-SCI began using Google Apps for tasks like e-mail, document creation, and appointment scheduling. Now, just six months later, almost 1,000 employees of the electronics manufacturing company go online to use Google Apps in place of the comparable Microsoft tools. "We have project teams working on a global basis and to help them collaborate effectively, we use Google Apps," says Manesh Patel, chief information officer of Sanmina-SCI, a company with $10.7 billion in annual revenue.

Without the fanfare that typically accompanies such product announcements, Amazon.com on Tuesday launched two new online-payment options that target small businesses. That makes Amazon.com a direct competitor with both Google Checkout and eBay's PayPal.

A new kind of farm is popping up. Tucked away on small plots on America's back roads, it cultivates no soil or seed.

Rather, it nurtures curiosities about everything from porn to pinochle expressed in a nearly endless sequence of 1s and 0s queried from desktops, laptops and iPhones around the globe.

The computer server farm -- huge banks of computer servers doing the heavy-lifting logic of Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon -- is bringing bits of Silicon Valley to places like Pryor, Okla., and Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Is the electronic book approaching the tipping point? That topic both energized and unnerved people attending BookExpo America, the publishing and bookselling industry's annual trade show, which ended at the convention center [in Los Angeles] on Sunday.

Much of the talk was focused on the Kindle, Amazon's electronic reader, which has gained widespread acclaim for its ease of use.

Over the past 14 years, Amazon.com has mastered the art of getting physical copies of books, music and movies to customers through the mail. Now it is trying to add to its repertoire in a hurry.

The market for entertainment and information is inexorably going digital. One day, most music, movies and perhaps even words will be sent as bits over the Internet instead of in bulky boxes. More than half of the company's $15 billion in sales last year came from CDs, DVDs and books, shipped from Amazon's 30 cavernous distribution centers around the world.