What's this? This is an unbiased just-the-facts news timeline ('newsline') about Amazon, created by Newslines contributors. Become a contributor
91 postsAmazon.com, Inc. is an American company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. The company sells books, hardware, groceries, apparel, and millions of other products, as well as online services such as instant video, streaming music, and its own branded entertainment on its retail websites. Amazon has both a United States and international arm, and is known for the Kindle e-reader and the Fire smartphone.
Amazon files with security regulators to sell 2.5 million shares in its first public offering, according to the Security and Exchange Commission. The company expects to sell shares at $13 each, which values the company at $299 million.
Amazon buys Junglee Corporation and Planet All. The combined purchases will allow the online bookseller to go beyond books and compact discs to sell computer hardware and apparel on its retail website. Bezos:
We’re at an inflection point where we are now looking at a broader range of products.
Amazon has 3.1 million customers and made $203 million dollars already this fiscal term.
Amazon leases a highly mechanized warehouse in Fernely, thirty miles east of Reno, Nevada. The move reflects the company’s commitment to fulfill its 7.5 million orders of books, CDs and videos as reported in its last quarterly report. The company makes on average thirty-three dollars an order. The warehouse occupies eight acres of space and adds to the company’s existing distribution centers in Seattle and New Castle, Delaware. The new facility will employ three hundred people. Bezos:
Everything we do at Amazon.com is designed to continually enhance the shopping experience, and reducing delivery time does exactly that …. And this place is so huge, we can stock far more titles ready to ship right away.
Amazon opens its online retail website to third party merchants for a small fee. The company adds 500,000 new products to its inventory (about four times the offerings of the average Kmart). Bezos:
Sixteen months ago, we were a place we could come to find books. Tomorrow, we will be a place to find anything, with a capital A.
Merchants pay $9.99 a month to list their products on the site, and Amazon in turn learns more about the spending and purchasing habits of its customers.
Amazon announces it will offer its own credit card slated for release early next year. In a deal with NextCard, the cobranded Visa card will allow Amazon’s thirteen million customers to get online approval for a credit card “in as little as eight seconds.” The company, which has lost money in the last quarter, and has yet to make a profit, hopes to earn $150 million dollars in fees over the next five years. COO Joe Galli:
With the launch of the Amazon.com NextCard Visa, we are not only helping our customers find, discover, and buy anything they want online, but also showing our thanks by rewarding them with gift certificates based on credit card spending. The combination of Amazon.com’s online retail expertise and NextCard’s online credit card experience creates a valuable new shopping alternative that offers strong appeal to our customers and to all credit card users.
Amazon drops Mein Kampf from its German online retail website. The English translation of Adolf Hitler’s memoir, replete with denunciation of Jews, was a top second bestseller in Germany which prompted The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles to file a legal complaint in August against Amazon. A company spokesman:
We’re not shipping it into Germany. It’s still available at our Web site and can be shipped elsewhere.
The original German version is banned in Germany, but the English translation is not.
Amazon invests sixty million dollars in Kozmo.com. The investment will allow Amazon to ship products such as books and compact discs in one hour to residents living in select cities, such as New York and San Francisco. Joe Galli, president and chief operating officer of Amazon reports:
Kozmo.com has developed a strong track record for meeting a unique customer need, and this agreement provides us a one-hour delivery option for the types of products that customers may want immediately.
In an alliance with Greenlight.com, Amazon announces it will offer a car-selling service on its website. Amazon customers can choose a make and model from various trucks and cars available. After making an initial deposit with a credit card, the car is then purchased at a local dealership, or delivered to the new owner’s home. Jupiter Communications predicts online car sales will account for a third of “auto-buying transactions” by 2004. Greenlight.com has agreed to pay Amazon $82.5 million over a five year period. Bezos:
This is where car buying is going, and we have to be there. As people buy more and more online, they are going to keep coming back to the site that makes it easy and secure for them no matter what category.
Amazon announces it will open a French version of its online store, Amazon.fr, which will serve French customers in and out of France. Based in Guyancourt, the company will open a distribution center in Orleans.
Bezos:
With the launch of Amazon.fr, we’re making the Amazon shopping experience—with our obsession on customers—available to French-speaking customers everywhere.
Amazon revises its privacy policy. The new policy, according to the New York Times, discloses how the company collects financial information, Social Security numbers, product searches and the telephone number from which a user calls Amazon’s customer service line.
Amazon also discloses that it can purchase data about customers from other sources. With the new policy in place, in “the unlikely event” anyone who purchases Amazon will also own its customer data, which the company considers a “transferable asset.”
Amazon announces Amazon.co.jp, its first Japanese language website. The site will offer Japanese and English language content.
Bezos:
We can now make our customer-centric shopping experience—great service, selection and convenience—available to everyone looking for popular or hard-to-find Japanese-language books.
The site will offer book reviews, author interviews, and recommendations and will compete with existing Japanese retailers including Kinokuniya and Bertelsmann’s BOL.com
Amazon starts selling electronic books in Microsoft Reader format. Users can download the necessary software from Microsoft for free. The e-book store offers a selection of 1,000 titles. Thirty of the e-books are free. Customers can access the store at: www.amazon.com/e-books.
Once again, Amazon.com is redefining what it means to buy a book. The combination of Amazon.com’s incredible shopping experience and the unique capabilities and instant delivery available with Microsoft Reader will make electronic reading a powerful new reality.
The deal is worth a rumored $3 million as Amazon branches out its payments strategy, allowing users to text money to each other by SMS.
Later called the Kindle Keyboard, Amazon announces its third generation reading device. At $139 for a Wi-Fi only version and $189 with 3G, the K3, as some have called it, is according to Jeff Bezos:
… smaller, lighter, and faster, with 50 percent better contrast. Readers are going to do a double take when they see Kindle’s bright new screen and feel how remarkably light the smaller 8.7 ounce design feels in one hand.
In a business venture to promote talent, and to develop new content, Amazon launches Amazon Studios. It’s an initiative from the online retailer to entice screenwriters and filmmakers to submit scripts for possible production under a “first-look deal” with Warner Bros. The company hopes to promote potential feature-length movies and to award $2.7 million to the top submissions. If an Amazon Studios feature is released, the creator receives a rights payment of $200,000, and if the movie makes more than $60 million U.S. dollars at the box office, the original creators will receive a bonus of $400,000. Roy Price, Director of Digital Product Development:
Full-length test movies will show stories up on their feet and attract helpful feedback at an early stage. We hope that Amazon Studios will help filmmakers experiment and collaborate and we look forward to developing hit movies.
Amazon says electronic books have surpassed traditional print book sales for the first time. The company accounts for about two thirds of e-book sales. The company reports that it sells 105 e-books for every 100 print books it sells, including books that do not have an electronic version. The figures include sales of Kindle Singles, short form content from magazine and newspaper articles. The company does not disclose its Kindle sales figures. Bezos:
We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly. We’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.
Amazon announces it will acquire Goodreads, a website for book lovers to review and share good books they read. Goodreads, which has sixteen million members, will retains its San Francisco offices following the acquisition. Terms of the sale have not been disclosed. Otis Chandler, CEO of Goodreads, posts on the Goodreads blog:
Today I’m really happy to announce a new milestone for Goodreads. We are joining the Amazon family. We truly could not think of a more perfect partner for Goodreads as we both share a love of books and an appreciation for the authors who write them.
According to Amazon, the site will be an independently owned subsidiary of Amazon and will control all editorial content and the recommendations. This is the second time Amazon has purchased a book recommendation website. In 2008, Amazon acquired Shelfari, and it also owns part of Library Thing.
Amazon, through its Amazon Studios moniker, releases fourteen original pilots available for streaming on Amazon Instant Video. The pilots include a range of programming, from Betas, about a group of awkward techies trying to make it big in Silicon Valley, to Alpha House, about four Republican U.S. Senators who share a townhouse in Washington. It is the first time the online retailer has branched out into original programming, making it a competitor with Netflix (which also produces original content), HBO, and Showtime. Eight The pilots include a range of programming, from Betas, about a group of awkward techies trying to make it big in Silicon Valley, to Alpha House, about four Republican U.S. Senators who share a townhouse in Washington.of the shows are comedies, and six are geared for children. Anyone in the U.K., U.S., and Germany can watch the pilots for free, and based on user surveys Amazon will decide which shows are greenlit for a full series to be made available exclusively to Amazon Prime subscribers. Roy Price, Director of Amazon Studios:
For the past year the Amazon Studios team has collaborated with some of the best actors and writers in Hollywood to produce top-quality shows. Now we’ve handed the remote to our customers to hear what they think.
Amazon Studios debuts the first season of Alpha House its first original series. The show, a comedy written by Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau, is loosely based on a group of senators who shared a townhouse in Washington. Trudeau:
The first season is about the fight for survival among incumbent Republican senators first elected in the pre-Tea Party era. Even though they’re all solidly conservative, three of the four senators living in Alpha House are facing strong primary challenges from the right. The struggle to hold onto their core values drives both the comedy and the drama in our show.
The show stars John Goodman, Clark Johnson, Matt Malloy and Mark Consuelos. The first three episodes are free on Amazon Instant Video, but following its initial release each week new episodes will be added exclusively for Amazon Prime subscribers.
Three months after the launch of the 