Amazon

Amazon.com announced Thursday that it has acquired audiobook company Audible.

The deal comes with a price tag of about $300 million in cash and short-term investments, and it is expected to be completed by the second quarter of this year.

Audible, which was founded in 1997 and operates services in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as operations in Germany and France, sells more than 80,000 audio versions of books, newspapers, and magazines, as well as television and radio content.

"Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection, and the broadest device … Read more

Today we talk about Amazon trying to patent custom 404 pages, how weird Digg is now that their algorithm has changed, and books that make you dumb. Also, Jeff gets his hands on Suda 51's latest M-rated Wii game, No More Heroes, and we'll take a stroll down arcade memory lane.

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EnterpriseDB has ported its Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL database to a new platform: Amazon.com's hosted compute cloud.

The company on Tuesday started taking invitations for a beta program for EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition that will launch in March. The final product should be available this summer, according to EnterpriseDB Chief Technology Officer Bob Zurek, who spearheaded the initiative.

Amazon already offers a hosted database, called SimpleDB, but Zurek said that its database is designed for transactions and industrial-strength applications.

The service works with clustering software from Elastra, which means that servers and storage are quickly brought online to meet changes in … Read more

This weekend we moved our Mule Enterprise distribution to Amazon's S3 service and so far it's been pretty fantastic. A couple of simple calls not only allow for a file to have download permissions but also allow for time-bombed URLs if you need them.

Add to that the fact that the bandwidth is blazingly fast (shockingly fast, I dare say) and the move to the S3 cloud is a huge win--and a major market disruptor.

Despite having blogged about Amazon's EC2 and S3 before, I didn't understand the full impact until now. Kudos to Amazon.

I … Read more

Amazon.com is delving even deeper into the film industry, with subsidiary Internet Movie Database signing a deal to acquire Withoutabox.

Withoutabox develops online tools and operates a service to aid independent filmmakers in submitting their work to festivals worldwide and in promoting their films.

Withoutabox, based in Los Angeles, said it has worked with 150,000 filmmakers since its founding in 2000. The Internet Movie Database draws more than 50 million unique visitors each month with its searchable database of movies, TV, and entertainment programs.

The definitive agreement, announced Thursday, is designed to offer a wider selection of films … Read more

UPDATED: January 14, 2008 5:30pm The book isn't actually available until May! Web 3.0 and 4.0 should be in flight by then.

My pal Sarah Lacy's book about Web 2.0 "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" is now on sale on Amazon.com. I have been giving her grief about the stupidity of Web 2.0 since she has been writing this magic tome, but I have to offer my sincere congratulations to her for cranking this sucker … Read more