Archive for the ‘Amazon’ Category
Steve Jobs Stakes Out the TV Den
Posted on: May 5, 2008
- In: Amazon | Blockbuster | Caught in the Act | CinemaNow | Den | Hewlett-Packard | Microsoft | Netflix | Out | Sony | Stakes | steve jobs | TV
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A week ago, the family was stuck on I-95 between Washington and New York for seven hours. The Meatgrinder, as it is affectionately known to us, had a little case of congestion and after five hours of quality time, we were reduced to silently hating the intermittent FM signal and the brake lights that framed our existence.
But after we hooked an Apple iPod to a doohickey that works with the radio, the car suddenly filled with an hour’s worth of storytelling from a podcast of “This American Life,” followed by some quality time with Taylor Swift, an improbably gifted teenage country star. The ability to program our temporary purgatory lifted the pall and before we knew it, we were home.
But once we went inside, we hit the halt button on Apple. There was the second season of “Friday Night Lights” on Netflix, “John Adams” from HBO on the digital video recorder and back copies of “Weeds” from Showtime, there for the plucking from the on-demand service.
While a lot of us carry a little bit of Steve Jobs around in our pocket, Apple is now after the remaining bit of life-share that it doesn’t already own, the home front.
On Thursday, the company announced deals with 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment, among others, to sell movies for download on iTunes on the same day they are released on DVD.
The “day and date” downloaded movies (as they are called in industry jargon) will play only on Apple gadgets, but that characteristic may finally give the company the toehold in the American den that it has been looking for via Apple TV.
The movie business, because it makes its living on big fat video files that are harder to share than audio files, was able to watch and learn as the music industry shrank under the weight of pirated downloads and then reluctantly embraced a 99-cent solution from Mr. Jobs. And now every song, now and forever, is worth 99 cents, a price that attains for both the red-hot duet by Madonna and Justin Timberlake “Four Minutes,” and the forgotten B-sides he made when he was in a boy band.
The music companies still owned the songs, but Apple owned everything else — pricing, format, distribution and the lucrative revenue stream of manufactured devices.
When it comes to video, Apple has competition. Microsoft, Sony and Hewlett-Packard are vying to offer Web-enabled TV, while Amazon, Blockbuster, CinemaNow and Netflix sell movies digitally. So unlike the music companies, the movie studios seemed to be holding most of the cards.
They still might have blown it.
Who Should Collect The Amazon Tax?
Posted on: May 3, 2008
A fight is brewing between Amazon and the State of New York over who is responsible for collecting state sales taxes on online purchases. Up until now, online retailers have only had to collect state sales taxes in states where they have physical locations—the same way that catalog retailers are treated. Otherwise, it is up to consumers to declare goods bought over the Internet as out-of-state purchases. (Right. I’ll go find those receipts).
Since most people don’t bother to declare online purchases on their tax forms, the State of New York recently passed some legislation (tucked into last month’s budget bill) known as the “Amazon Tax”
. This new law conveniently redefines any Amazon affiliate as part of the retailer, and since there are plenty of Amazon affiliates in New York State, puts the burden of collecting the state sales tax onto Amazon. Clearly, this ridiculously stretches the boundaries of what constitutes Amazon and what does not. So Amazon is suing New York State to overturn he law.
Amazon argues that the law is “overly broad and vague” in its attempt to place the company physically inside the state, and also complains that the law unfairly targets Amazon as opposed to online retailers in general. (Although it does apply to all online sales, not just Amazon’s).
The law, as written, is just a bad law. And it would set a dangerous precedent. Not because New York State shouldn’t try to collect the $50 million in estimated uncollected sales taxes owed to it. But because the law is tortuous in the way it attempts to do that.
A marketing affiliate is not part of Amazon. If I put some Amazon book recommendations on the side of TechCrunch , set up an affiliate account, and readers click through and buy those books, that does not make TechCrunch part of Amazon. It is a marketing arrangement. Just like someone who sets up an AdSense account does not work for Google.
- In: Amazon | Day 2 | live | live blogging | Next Web (2008) | Next Web conference | TechCrunch UK
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On Day Two of the Next Web conference, we are once again streaming it live from Amsterdam (click more). Kicking things off is Robert Scoble, who is talking about the new digital divide: People with friends and people without friends. The old digital divide (rich versus poor) still exists. But the new digital divide is a consequence of how social software works. You have a better experience on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Upcoming or even Google Reader the more friends that you have. But if you don’t have any friends, the experience really sucks.
The speaker lineup today includes: Robert Scoble, Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), Jessica Mah (17-year-old blogger/entrepreneur), Chris Saad (DataPortability.org), startup demos, and comedy troop Boom Chicago.
(Photo by Anne Helmond).
Update 1: Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK is live blogging the startup pitches.
Update 2: Boom Chicago performed. Then Amazon CTO Werner Vogels (live blog). StumbleUpon founder Garret Camp talked about the future of discovery and search. Startup demos. Boom Chicago. Chris Saad and Khris Loux (data portability).
The Clean Energy Scam
Posted on: March 29, 2008
From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world’s greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the “savannization” of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it’s going to get worse fast. “It gives me goose bumps,” says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. “It’s like witnessing a rape.”
The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It’s been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it’s released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked–he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil–but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. “You can’t protect it. There’s too much money to be made tearing it down,” he says. “Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work.”
This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.
Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they’re serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.
Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.
Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world’s top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it’s running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it’s subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It’s the remorseless economics of commodities markets. “The price of soybeans goes up,” laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, “and the forest comes down.”
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