Continuing to grow its suite of services aimed at mobile app developers, Amazon today announced App Engagement Reports, free app usage reports that are now a part of the company’s Mobile App Distribution Portal. The reports are designed for Amazon Appstore developers in need of information about app performance and revenue.

Specifically, the reports include daily and monthly active devices, installs, sessions, average revenue per device, and retention metrics, and they can be filtered by marketplace, viewed in chart form, or downloaded as a CSV, the company explains in this afternoon’s official announcement. Developers will also be able to change the data range on the reports in order to see historical trends.

There are six Engagement Reports now being provided:

• Overview: A summary of key usage data for your app or game
• Average Revenue: Daily and Monthly Average Revenue per Device (ARPD) and Average Revenue per Paid User (ARPPU) for In-App Items
• Retention: Daily Retention for days 1-3-7 and Weekly Retention for weeks 1-2-3
• Active Devices: Daily Active Devices (DAD), Monthly Active Devices (MAD), and Sticky Factor (DAD/MAD)
• Sessions: Total Daily Sessions and Average Sessions Per Device
• App Installs: Daily Installs and Uninstalls

At launch, the reports are only available for those apps that were submitted and published after October 25, 2012. For developers who haven’t updated their apps since then, they’ll need to either republish the app or submit an update in order to activate the reporting feature. However, there’s no need to make any other changes to the app’s code or integrate any additional software.

The report will include data for apps running on Amazon devices like the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, as well as any other Android devices running the latest version of the Amazon Appstore mobile app.

App analytics and sales figures are crucial to making Amazon’s Appstore a more complete service – these things have long been standard features of competing stores like Google Play or Apple’s iTunes, for example. Though many developers still integrate third-party SDKs to allow for increased capabilities and more detailed reporting beyond what comes out-of-the-box, it’s expected for the Appstore itself to at least provide some sort of basic insight into an app’s traction and sales. Amazon says that reports have been a “popular request from developers,” and that’s likely an understatement.

The addition of the new Engagement Reports comes on the heels of several other changes Amazon has introduced in recent months to beef up its Appstore offerings for developers. Not only has it been expanding its footprint globally, the company has also added features like in-app payments, subscriptions, and even its own virtual currency, Amazon Coins, in order to give developers more revenue generation possibilities.

Now that developers have had a little time to experiment with those new offerings, it only makes sense that they should be able to track how well those features are performing, and whether or not they have an effect on key metrics like ARPU (average revenue per user) and retention.

Additional information about the various parts of the reports and how to access them are explained here. Meanwhile, an Engagement Reports FAQ offers the answers to even more specific questions about the new reports.

No, we still don’t have any word from Amazon on where it stands with a smartphone, but it’s definitely making its mobile ambitions clear anyway. Today, the e-commerce giant took two more steps in its strategy to scale up its Kindle Fire tablet business. It announced that it will now sell the two higher-end versions of the device, the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, in 170 countries. And it also said that its Amazon Appstore will now be available in 200 countries.

Pre-orders in 170 countries begins today with the first models shipping out June 13, priced at the local equivalents of $284 for the 8.9″ model and $214 for the 7″ model.

Up to now, the Android-based Appstore, which works both on Amazon’s Fire tablet range but also other Android devices, has only been live in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China and Japan, with Brazil next in line. It makes sense that Amazon will have opened it up at the same time as it’s ramping up its Fire tablet distribution.

“We are thrilled to be expanding the reach of our global app distribution to nearly 200 countries,” said Mike George, VP of Apps and Games at Amazon, in a statement. “By further expanding the distribution of apps to millions of customers around the world, we are continuing to make it easy for customers to enjoy their Amazon apps on Kindle Fire and any Android device.”

Amazon will be kicking off with a couple of free games — a tradition of Amazon’s when it opens up a new store front to focus on some bestsellers. In this case, it will be “Fruit Ninja” and “Cut the Rope: Experiments,” which will be free respectively on May 23 and May 24.

On a more long-tail note, it’s important for Amazon to make its Appstore as globally available as possible as a way of enticing more developers to the platform. In addition to giving them the promise of wide audiences, Amazon has also turned on features like in-app payments, subscriptions and even its own virtual currency, Amazon Coins, to give developers more flexibility in how they make money on its plaform (and, taking a page from Apple’s book, tie them and users further into the Amazon ecosystem in the process). It comes also on the heels of the company previewing the global Appstore availability in April, when it began to invite developers to start submitting their apps.

The company, as usual with Amazon, has remained tight-lipped on how many tablets it has sold since launching the Kindle Fire range in 2011. Today, however, Dave Limp, VP, Amazon Kindle, noted that the Kindle Fire HD (the 7″ model) has been the company’s “#1 best-selling item in the world” since being launched.

Although the HD is available with an optional LTE component in the U.S. it looks like this rollout is WiFi-only: to improve range and service, it comes with dual-band Wi-Fi capability for both 2.4 GHz network and 5 GHz network services. As with other Kindle Fire products, the two models going on sale today will work with Amazon’s existing and wide range of content, including apps, films, TV, games and 300+ books “exclusive to the Kindle Store.”

The move comes two months after Amazon dropped the price on the bigger two tablets, with an 8.9″ screen, to $269. At that time, it started selling it in Europe and Japan.

To date, Amazon has been selling the two HD tablets in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan. For a company like Amazon, which operates on a basis of competition-beating prices and low margins, it’s important for it to add as much scale as it can to its operation, so expanding Fire HD sales globally is an essential part of that strategy.

Amazon has reportedly submitted plans for a new futuristic headquarters in Seattle that combines a skyscraper and a tri-sphere, bio-dome-like structure. According to the plans, the structure will be able to hold various forms of plant life and become a place where employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.”

Because, God forbid, employees walk to the park that’s three blocks away.

Here’s an excerpt from the plans (also, hat tip to GeekWire for the find):

While the form of the building will be visually reminiscent of a greenhouse or conservatory, plant material will be selected for its ability to co-exist in a microclimate that also suits people. To encourage growth and maintain the health of the plants, the building’s interior will include high bay spaces on five floors totaling approximately 65,000 SF and capable of accommodating mature trees. The exterior enclosure will be highly transparent and be composed primarily of multiple layers of glass supported by a metal framework. In addition to a variety of workplace environments, the facility will incorporate dining, meeting and lounge spaces, as well as a variety of botanical zonesmodeled on montane ecologies found around the globe. The building will be anchored at either end by publically accessible retail spaces entered from 6th and 7th Avenues.

Generally, it all sounds very cool and very futuristic and very trendy (read: Apple did the whole “plans for a spaceship” thing ages ago). However, it’s interesting to see how the biggest companies in tech are tackling the issue of working in an office or with a more loose structure.

Remember, everyone made a pretty big deal out of Marissa Mayer’s recent policy change that requires all Yahoo employees to work in an office. And just recently she announced that Yahoo would be taking up space in the Times building in New York’s Times Square, which is capable of housing up to 700 employees.

As it stands now, all of the big four tech companies — Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — favor keeping employees in the office.

Google has one of the best campuses you could dream of, both in Mountain View and in New York, feeding employees free lunch from world-renowned chefs. Apple is working to build out one of Steve Jobs’ final projects, a new spaceship office. Facebook has the same diversions: chess boards, and video games, and basketball courts, and free lunch.

So of course, the fourth horseman in the race, Amazon is devising its own tricks to keep employees at the office as long as possible. It’s a win-win: Employees do more and better work due to a pleasing and comfortable work environment, and employers get more, and better work, out of their employees.

Also, there’s a perfectly good park just three blocks from the new campus.

Here’s the full set of plans:

Amazon’s new HQ design by John Cook

[Biodome rendering via NBBJ]

Sometimes a writer creates a universe so compelling that others feel the need to join and help flesh out that world with their own tribute fiction. And sometimes you make something crappy like Gossip Girl and loads of people want to write using those characters and that world anyway. Now Amazon is introducing a way to let writers profit from their fan fiction, via “Kindle Worlds.”

Worlds joins Kindle Singles and Kindle Serials as a way for authors to earn money from digital publishing, and the best part is that in this case you don’t even have to be all that creative – the idea is to let fans create stories around original properties from other authors, offering them up for purchase on the Kindle book store. Amazon then pays out royalties to both the original rights holder, as well as to the fan fiction author, with the author making around 35 percent of all net revenue for works over 10,000 words.

There’s also a new revenue model aimed at shorter works, which would be between 5,000 and 10,000 words and will typically sell for under a dollar. Under this scheme, the author’s cut will be a digital royalty of 20 percent.

Fanfic writers can sign up now at the official Amazon Kindle Worlds website, and the company expects to launch the Worlds storefront in June. There will be over 50 commissioned works included in the store at launch, Amazon says, and then it’ll be launching its self-serve submission platform for all authors to add their own completed works for consideration.

This is a very shrewd business move on the part of Amazon, since it leverages existing popular properties in a way that would never be possible with just one series author (or even a small list of a few running a title), and since it taps into the existing massive market for fan-created fiction that already exists on the net. Heck, I’ve still got an extremely bad and extremely long Star Wars extended universe manuscript hidden in a closet somewhere. If I can find that, read my childish scrawl well enough to transcribe it, and if Amazon ever secured those rights from Disney, I’d consider throwing it up on Worlds for some easy cash.

Amazon says it’s in the process of securing licensing deals from a variety of sources, including TV, movie, books, games and music properties. The only question I really have about this to be honest is why did this take so long to happen? If you want a near-bottomless supply of written content, fanfic is where it’s at.

XOXO, Gossip Girl.

In the wake of releasing eight comedy series pilots into the wild last month, Amazon is starting to make decisions concerning which pilots will be purchased for development and which will get the axe.

According to Reuters, the company has chosen to build out Alpha House, a show featuring John Goodman about four Senators in DC who live in a house together, along with Betas. Betas tells the story of startups trying to make it in the world and stars Ed Begley Jr. Amazon picked up this series back in March.

On the other end of the spectrum, Zombieland was cut from consideration, along with Browsers, a musical comedy following four young kids who work at an online newspaper.

I’ve watched all eight of Amazon’s new comedy series pilots, and have to say that Zombieland’s death disappoints me. Betas was funny enough, and obviously catches our particular attention considering it covers the lives of four “computer geeks” who are building a startup and trying to get funding in Silicon Valley.

Zombieland, on the other hand, is a bit of an upset. Based on the 2009 hit movie Zombieland starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone, the show ranked as one of my favorites having not seen the movie. But die-hard Zombieland fans felt the series failed the same quick-wit and devastating charm only Woody Harrelson can provide.

Writer and producer Rhett Reese broke the news on Twitter:

Our Zombieland series will not be moving forward on Amazon. Sad for everyone involved.—
Rhett Reese (@RhettReese) May 17, 2013

I'll never understand the vehement hate the pilot received from die-hard Zombieland fans. You guys successfully hated it out of existence.—
Rhett Reese (@RhettReese) May 17, 2013

Reuters reported that Zombieland received an average of 3.5 stars in 5,500 reviews, whereas Alpha House received 2,600 reviews with an average of four stars and Betas received more than 1,500 reviews averaging 4.5 stars.

The company has not been entirely clear about its feedback methodology for deciding which shows to purchase, but has explained that this is a first try at something new. There are no hard and fast rules for choosing how to move forward, and the company has said it will develop up to seven of the series, or none at all.

Obviously, we’re already locked and loaded with two of the pilots, and we’ll wait to hear back on the remaining four.

[via The Verge]

Google is under fire in the UK for its tax practices in the country, and a new key witness (who spoke to The Sunday Times) might put them in deeper hot water when he hands over a reported 100,000 emails and documents to the British Revenue & Customs (HRMC) services. Barney Jones, a former Googler who was at the company between 2004 and 2006, says he has material proof that Google’s London sales staff which would negotiate and close sales for the UK market, despite claiming its Dublin HQ handled finalizing all deals.

Jones was prompted to speak out by testimony given to the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last week by Google VP Matt Brittin, who said that London-based Google staff were never closing any ad sales deals, though some selling efforts were made there. Brittin had previously gone on record in November 2012 with statements asserting that no one in the London office was doing any kind of ad selling.

The matter of where the deals were finalized is especially important because if a sale closes in London, it’s likely they’d be taxable in Britain, rather than in the extremely low tax-rated Ireland. Jones told the Sunday Times that Google is fully aware of this, yet there are still records of Google staff closing major deals from companies like eBay and Lloyds TSB, but Google doesn’t seem at all certain that any of the documentation will absolutely prove that it has done anything strictly against UK tax law, according to a statement provided by Google Direct of External Relations Peter Barron to the Sunday Times.

“As we said in front of the public accounts committee, it is difficult to respond fully to documents we have not seen,” the statement reads. “These questions relate to Google’s business in the UK going back a decade or more. None of the allegations put to us change the fact that Google pays the corporate tax due on its UK activities and complies fully with UK law.” Google reiterated this statement to TechCrunch when we contacted them for comment.

Ireland uses its lower corporate taxation rate, which is 12.5 percent, or a little over half of Britain’s 23 percent, to attract big names who base their European corporate headquarters there, including Apple and Facebook in addition to Google. The search giant is currently under fire from UK parliament members for its tax practices, thanks to a Reuters investigation that revealed statements it made last November to the PAC about its London operations may not have been entirely accurate.

Amazon is next in the PAC’s sights for its UK tax practices, as Reuters has also recently uncovered evidence to suggest that it, too, is doing a lot of selling through an autonomous London-based unit, despite routing its sales on paper through a tax-exempt affiliate based in Luxembourg. In fact, for most on Google’s footing, avoiding taxes seems to be the exception, not the rule, and a recent piece by V3′s Madeline Bennett explains that even if this fresh round of hearings reveals that these schemes do run afoul of UK tax regulations, it’s unlikely we’ll see situations change all that dramatically. Governments are too dependent on the general economic benefits of hosting big corporations, and get too much out of awarding them contracts, she says, to risk doing long-term harm to those arrangements.

Still, what Jones claims to have would be incredibly embarrassing for Google, especially if it spells out in no uncertain terms that closing deals was regularly handled by Google’s London staff, in direct contradiction to what Brittin has told the committee, but until we see the goods, there’s no telling how deep down the rabbit hole his information actually goes.

Amazon has just announced a new content deal with NBCUniversal, bringing a host of new television series to the video streaming platform.

Some of those titles include Covert Affairs, Defiance, Grimm, Hannibal, and Suits. And what’s more, the company is pulling content from NBCUniversal’s children series such as Curious George and Land Before Time, which will be available with Kindle FreeTime Unlimited.

With platforms like Hulu and Netflix growing rapidly, and moreover making strides to offer the biggest libraries of content that include original programming, Amazon too has been working tirelessly to build out its offerings. According to the company, Amazon now offers more than 40,000 movies and TV episodes to Prime members, which can be watched across a wide variety of platforms including iOS, Kindles, Roku, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii (U).

In terms of availability, Covert Affairs and Grimm will both be available today, while Hannibal will not be ready until later this year, and Defiance will be out early next year. Amazon is also bringing SyFy series such as Alphas, Eureka and Warehouse 13 to the platform, along with Smash, featuring Debra Messing.

Here’s what Brad Beale, director of digital video content acquisition for Amazon, had to say:

We listen carefully to our customers to find out which TV shows and movies they find the most entertaining. Our expanded agreement with NBCUniversal gives Prime members access to even more exclusive content that they can stream instantly, at no additional cost. Compelling shows like Covert Affairs, Defiance, Grimm, Hannibal and Suits are big wins for our customers and we look forward to adding more titles soon.

Alongside expanding its library offerings, Amazon is also boosting its original programming efforts. Most recently, the company released eight comedy pilots and six children’s series pilots to get feedback from customers. After they make their decision, they’ll buy out the remaining episodes of the series which people seem to love.

E-commerce leviathan Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming: Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency, is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth of the currency — equivalent to 500 Coins — into all Kindle Fire users’ accounts to use on apps and in-app purchases on its platform. The company says that this is equivalent to “tens of millions of dollars” worth of Amazon Coins.

Coins, which were first announced in February, are the company’s move into an area that has been a strong way for app publishers to generate revenue through their apps. In that sense, the launch serves a two-fold purpose for Amazon: a way of encouraging developers to come to its platform (something Amazon has already been working on), and to spur more revenue generation.

A lot of the talk in virtual currency of late has been around the potential for bitcoin and other new monetary instruments fuelled by a network effect. But before bitcoin became the buzz, there were already a number of other virtual currency networks run by Facebook, Zynga and many more, with aim being to spend the “money” on gaming and other apps on their platforms.

Unlike bitcoin, and more like Amazon Coins, most virtual currency is based on users redeeming standard currencies for “virtual” ones on the network in question. This money can then be used to buy new features in a game, or extend your life, or to send “virtual gifts” to friends. One idea here, I think, is that users are more likely to spend money when it’s less transparent that they are doing so; in Amazon’s case, 500 Coins sounds a lot more exciting than $5. Another is that it ties a user more closely in with a particular game and a particular platform. Amazon Coins will give Amazon a way of more reliably monetizing users longer-term.

Amazon Coins is an extension of other social services that Amazon has added to its app platform. Specifically, Game Connect lets developers list virtual goods for sale on Amazon.com — a way of also marketing those games themselves; and GameCircle is a kind of social network that lets users measure their achievements in games against their friends and other players. On top of that, Amazon also allos for in-app purchases using real-world money as well.

Amazon says that it will be offering discounts of 10% to those users who buy Coins in bulk. Developers will get a standard 70% revenue share on all coin spend.

This looks like it is just the beginning of Amazon Coins, which the company says will extend to other services on the platform — and likely outside of the U.S. over time, given that virtual currency has proven popular outside of the U.S. in markets like Asia and Europe.

“Today we are giving Kindle Fire owners $5 worth of Coins to spend on new apps and games, or to purchase in-app items, such as recipes in iCookbook, song collections in SongPop or mighty falcon bundles in Angry Birds Star Wars. And with discounts of up to 10% when you buy Coins, this is a great way for customers to save money when they buy apps, games and in-app items,” said Mike George, Vice President of Apps and Games at Amazon, in a statement. “We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities—today is Day One for Coins.”

Whether that will ever include making purchases on Amazon.com with Amazon Coins remains to be seen — but it seems that in any case Amazon Coins will be one more way that Amazon will build out its e-commerce empire ever further.

Woot, the daily deals site that Amazon bought in 2010 for $110 million, built a reputation for its “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” business model for shifting goods. Now, the company is facing up to a shift of a different kind: that of its own talent. In the last week, TechCrunch has learned that five six key employees are parting ways with the company.

They include Darold Rydl, who had been president of the company and one of its very first employees; CTO Luke Duff, who has been the technical lead for all things Woot since 2005; CFO Rene Gonzalez; Dave Rutledge, who had been the creative lead on all of Woot’s editorial content as president of Woot Workshop; and Jay Johnson, leading both the deals and affiliate marketing divisions at the company as director of deals.woot. Rydl and Gonzalez have already left, and the other three have given notice but will be with the company for another week. Update: after publishing, we found out about another departure: lead developer Shawn Miller is also leaving, with his last day May 17.

This comes 11 months after founder and CEO Matt Rutledge (brother of Dave) also left the company.

No, these six are not banding together for a new startup. Rydl distributed a note to staff and then later posted it on Facebook (we copy it below) describing a desire for a change of scene, and we understand that each is doing his own thing.

(We have reached out to Amazon for a response to this story.)

But we have also been hearing another story about what’s going on at Woot that may have spurred some of these departures, simmering issues with Amazon management that have finally started to boil over. “I don’t think any of us ever envisioned leaving Woot,” one person told me. “I thought I would stay there and grow with the company as the industry changed. But there were a lot of frustrations.”

These, we understand, are connected to a gradual set of changes at the company over the years as it has bedded down at Amazon. “Amazon wanted to come in and do things in a different way, not considering the importance of the other stuff,” I was told.

It seems like one of the thorny points is Woot’s CEO, Garth Mader, who had been put in place by Amazon to work under Matt Rutledge, and was promoted after Rutledge left.

In short order, changes pushed through by Mader have spread to various aspects of Woot’s business.

Turning straw into gold

The site, founded in 2004 by Matt Rutledge when it was first incubated inside Rutledge’s preexisting company Synapse Micro, was one of the pioneers of the “daily deal” model of selling goods online. It did so in an irreverent way aimed at disrupting the relationship between buyer and seller by making it far less formal. The original concept was to sell one “crap” item at a time that was at the end of its line (consumer electronics was a mainstay) at a competition-busting price, and then to launch another product at midnight each day.

Breaking up the pattern of single items for sale until they sold out, once a month Woot also sold a “Bag of Crap,” a group of items for a single price. Frank and funny commentary ran through all of this, along with an attempt to remain transparent with consumers through forums and details about how much of an item was sold.

All this brought a cadre of loyal users to the site — some 5 million per month at its peak, according to Rydl’s letter — rushing to buy things that, in a sense, no one else wanted to buy. Turning straw into gold, as Rydl describes it in his letter below.

Today, things have changed. Woot no longer shares data on how much of a product has sold. If you think about it, that kind of transparency also runs counter to how Amazon is about its own sales numbers for specific products.

Meanwhile, the Bag of Crap stopped getting sold monthly, because it was deemed to be too much of a strain on the system, and the server crashed every time it was sold. “That wasn’t an acceptable customer experience,” the source says Woot was told. “But there were a million people trying to get 1,500 items, of course they would crash.” It didn’t make sense to scale up the hardware to support something we did once per month, he said. The workaround was that the company ended up creating a scavenger hunt to find a (less frequently offered) Bag of Crap, but given that users had to “like” Woot on Facebook to get the first clue, “the perception for many was that it simply went away.”

Another change was more backend but crucial to Woot’s business model. The company made a “big push” to ship products using Amazon’s fulfillment system but this proved inefficient and far less profitable for the kinds of products that Woot sold. The Woot method involved a big palette with the item able to be taken and thrown into a shipping box; the Amazon method was less simple, if perhaps more professional.

“The end result was that our variable costs quadrupled. We used to be able to sell 50,000-100,000 items per day at a lower price point, but now we can’t profitably sell items under $10 because the variable cost for shipping got too high.” It’s unclear whether at some point Woot will revert to what it had been doing in the past.

However, there is more possible pain to come in this area, with wider ramifications. Along with the push to move product into fulfillment by Amazon, Woot scaled down its warehouse operations but has never communicated to the operations staff what the plan is for them. Our source says that “has left the remaining operations staff with an uncertain future and has had a dramatic effect on morale as others across the company wonder if their group will also be shuttered as more Amazon services are used. The fear is that soon, all Woot employees will be asked to move to Seattle [from its current HQ in Carrollton, TX, north of Dallas] or they will be replaced by Amazon services.”

The bigger picture for daily deals

To be fair, there have been other pressures on Woot’s business that have less connection to Amazon’s ownership. Daily deals, as we have seen with Groupon and Living Social, have become less fashionable, partly because of an oversupply of companies working in this space.

“The fact that so many retailers started doing these kinds of promotions and started pushing so many emails I think led to fatigue,” our source says. Woot resisted emails, until two years ago, but “even then a small percentage came from there. Most still came from direct traffic, from people hitting the site every day to be engaged with the content.”

That direct traffic on the site, nevertheless, is down nearly 30 percent year on year, and is continuing to decline.

But ironically, because Woot is selling significantly more items now than it did in the past, this hasn’t impacted business. In fact, Woot’s revenues have been growing at a 20 percent rate over the last two years, and 2013 appears to be shaping up in the same range. Specifically, through Woot Plus, its flash-sales section, the site now offers more than 400 SKUs every day instead of six a year ago.

(Amazon does not break out how individual businesses are performing in its earnings statements.)

The Zappos fairy tale

The story of how Woot was acquired and subsumed into Amazon can be a cautionary tale for other startups. Our source says that Woot had envisioned it would follow in the path of Zappos, the shoe and fashion e-commerce site that was acquired the year before Woot for $1.2 billion. Into that sale was built the idea that Amazon would stay hands-off. At the time of the acquisition, Zappos CEO Tony Hseih noted in a letter to employees:

“We plan to continue to run Zappos the way we have always run Zappos — continuing to do what we believe is best for our brand, our culture, and our business. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are switching out our current shareholders and board of directors for a new one, even though the technical legal structure may be different.”

Indeed, while some of Amazon’s acquisitions still do get to do things their own way, more or less, there are others that have been held to more integration.

This is, of course, to be expected: Amazon’s wafer-thin-margin business model is predicated on economies of scale, so it doesn’t make much sense to run different organizations within it in ways contrary to that.

“Maybe because we were only a $110 million transaction, we didn’t have as much leeway in how things worked out for us,” our source said. But that brings a mixed fate: “The core reason we’re all leaving Woot is because we’ve lost the ability to do what’s best for our brand and culture. The business will no doubt continue to grow because Woot can leverage Amazon systems, but Woot will look more and more like Amazon until it is unrecognizable.”

Rydl’s letter:

“In the summer of 2003, a little group of three started kicking around ideas, hoping to let a little wholesale company [to] move a ton of crap. None of us believed the guy in a DeLorean who stood out front yelling “THIS IS WHERE IT ALL BEGINS, YOU GUYS!!!” In retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have called the cops on him. Our bad, guy.

But anyway, that little project soon garnered international acclaim and earned the love and adoration of millions of fanatical customers, all of them begging us for the crap no one else wanted. Every day, I felt fortunate to be around the sort of people who could turn straw into gold.

But today, after lots of soul searching, I’ve decided to take up new challenges. Tomorrow I leave Woot to embark in a new direction. No destination is clear, no course is plotted, but I remember the excitement of starting something from scratch, and I can’t ignore the urge to go create something new.

With my parting words, I want to make it clear: each of you should be proud of your contribution to Woot.com. With the simplest business idea ever (and no advertising dollars to spend) we attracted over 5 million customers, managed well over a billion dollars in sales, and spawned an entirely new industry.. from SCRATCH. We grew from a team of 15 to over 200 people in multiple states, and we even earned the attention of the biggest internet company in the world, a company that decided that it would be safer to flat out buy us instead of trying to compete. Few people in this world have accomplished what we did – always remember to reflect on these wins and celebrate them. In the world of retail, you guys are the freakin’ Justice League.

Please know that I am so incredibly proud of each of you and what we’ve all accomplished together. And understand I didn’t arrive at this decision easily. Nevertheless, I know my decision is right. I leave you all in the capable hands of my hand-picked leadership team – I am 100% certain that they are ready to take the lead. Although you may miss me with your hearts, day-to-day you’ll never feel a thing. And please, keep any tears off the product in the interest of optimizing the customer experience.

More seriously, I still consider my time at Woot to be one of the best things I’ve done, and I’m proud to have worked with all of you over the years. My love for Woot runs deep and eternal. Keep doing great things. After all, you’ve done so many already…..what’s one more?

Woot on,

Darold

Amazon offers a range of hardware, including its Kindle e-readers and tablets, but now it’s looking to expand the line with two new smartphones and an audio-only device that streams music, according to the Wall Street Journal. The phones include a high-end one with a glasses-free 3D screen, as well as another about which details were not included in the report, which presumably would be a more traditional design.

Amazon has been rumored to have been working on a phone for a while now, and the recent hiring of top Windows Phone evangelist Charlie Kindel also raised alarms that Amazon might be in the smartphone business soon. Natasha wrote about how Kindel had previously discussed Android’s fragmentation problem, and how it provided opportunity for other players to step up and innovate. This could be what he’s attempting at Amazon, and these devices might be part of that project, although nothing about its plans have been officially revealed as of yet.

The rumored 3D device is said to use some kind of retina-tracking technology to present a holographic image that’s viewable without glasses, and that hovers above the screen. It sounds a little like a gimmick to be honest, especially considering how CE devices with 3D have fared so far, like the 3DS, which recently has downplayed its 3D capabilities in recent marketing. Other phone makers, including HTC and Sony, have also dabbled with 3D displays on phones, all of which have essentially failed to make an impact.

Lately, however, a lot of companies have been creating hardware which doesn’t necessarily have an immediately apparent niche. There’s the Chromebook Pixel, for instance, as well as Google Glass and rumors of the Apple smart watch. There’s the Acer Aspire R7 more recently, too, all of which essentially point to a need to have a big, splashy marquee product that isn’t necessarily the hottest consumer device.

Amazon’s other phone could be the more mass-market play, and the dedicated audio player sounds like it might want to become the iPhone of the streaming music generation. WSJ says that some of these devices might launch as soon as in the next few months, though there’s no guarantee that they won’t be shelved, so 3D screens could also just be something Amazon is testing internally.

We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and have yet to hear back, but will update this post if they provide any official comment.

Quidsi, the Amazon-owned parent company to a collection of single-word, e-commerce domains, including Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, Yoyo.com, and more, is today launching a new membership program called Familyhood Plus. The program offers consumers free two-day shipping with no minimum purchases and other exclusive deals.

Prior to today, Quidsi sites would only promise free two-day shipping for orders of $35 dollars or more, but these could include a cart filled with items from across all the Quidsi-owned sites. In addition, the company notes that many orders are now being delivered in a day or sooner, and in New York and San Francisco, Quidsi has been experimenting with same-day delivery for orders placed before 9 a.m. That makes the need for an exclusive shipping program negligible, perhaps.

The new Familyhood Plus program is similar to Amazon’s own Prime membership program, which provides Amazon.com shoppers with free two-day shipping with no minimum order size. Amazon Prime is $79 per year, in part due to its other features, including unlimited access to Prime Instant Video and the Kindle Lending Library.

Meanwhile, Quidsi’s Familyhood Plus program doesn’t have annual membership pricing set yet, the company notes. Instead, the program, which offers support across all 10 of the Quidsi-run sites selling items for home, kids, babies, and pets, will be available only as a pilot trial for now. Using the coupon code “GOCRAZY,” consumers can try the program for free during the first three months (*they must shop on a site they haven’t bought from before to get the trial going), with annual pricing likely offered when the trial completes.

The free shipping will apply to more than 90 percent of the products on Quidsi sites, except for the “Add One” items which, like Amazon.com add-on items, are products offered at a discount when tacked onto larger orders. When ordered alone, these “Add One” items will not qualify for free shipping. However, AutoShip orders and those placed via mobile devices and native apps will receive the free shipping benefit.

Familyhood Plus members are also agreeing to receive promotional emails which offer exclusive deals, but there’s an opt-out process for those not interested in that aspect of the new service.

Amazon has been ramping up its Quidsi properties this year, bringing Diapers.com to the iPad in February, adding pet medications to Wag.com in March, and debuting children’s fashion site Look.com just last month.

More details on the new membership program are here.

Last quarter, Amazon, which has been a freight train and Wall Street darling over the last year, surprised analysts by reporting lower-than-expected earnings. Expectations were high considering the holiday shopping season, but Amazon saw net income drop 45 percent to $97 million in Q4, compared to $177 million in 2011, although on the bright side, net sales continued to increase (by 22 percent) to $21.2 billion.

Today, Amazon continued the trend, still finding itself in a bit of a hangover after missing expectations in Q4. The eCommerce giant reported earnings from Q1 after the market closed this afternoon, in which it saw cash flow increase 39 percent to $4.25 billion, compared to $3 billion for the prior year, while net sales increased 22 percent to $16.07 billion in Q1, compared to $13.18 billion in first quarter 2012.

And by mixed results, we mean that Amazon blew away earnings-per-share expectations at $0.18 in Q1 on revenue of $16 billion. Leading up to today’s announcement, Wall Street expectations were much lower for EPS, with analysts expecting $0.08 EPS for the quarter. In turn, the Street expected Amazon to report sales of $16.2 billion, which the company just missed with $16.07 billion in sales.

In spite of the mixed results, as the market has been wont to do over the last year, Amazon’s stock was trending up, closing at $274.70 per share, on rumors that the company could be launching its own TV set-top box this fall, bringing more of the company’s hardware into your living room.

Tellingly, in today’s announcement, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t touch on the numbers or falling profits, instead plugging the company’s efforts to take on Netflix with some original programming of its own for Instant Video customers. Last week, the company launched 14 new comedy and kids pilots on Instant Video, which quickly became the “most watched TV shows on Instant Video,” the company said Monday.

“Amazon Studios is working on a new way to greenlight TV shows. The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say,” Bezos said in today’s earnings release. “I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don’t matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production. We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

Other points of interest: Amazon’s free cash flow fell 85 percent to $177 million year-over-year, compared to $1.15 billion in the year prior, due in part to dishing out $1.4 billion to purchase new office space in Seattle. Operating income decreased 6 percent to $181 million in Q1, compared to $192 million in the same quarter last year, while net income fell 37 percent to $82 million from $132 million in Q1 2012.

The upside for Amazon continues to rise, thanks to its move into original programming and the expansion of its selection for Prime Instant Video, which is in part due to new licensing agreements with A+E, CBS, FX, PBS And Scripps. This means that shows like Downton Abbey, Justified and Under The Dome, as well as content from Food Network, the Cooking Channel, the Travel Channel and HGTV will all be headed to Amazon. The company said that Prime Instant Video now has 38,000 movies and TV episodes in its collecton.

In addition, Amazon touted the launch of its new MP3 store for Safari, which allow iPhone and iPod touch users to discover and purchase digital music from the company’s catalog. This comes on the heels of reports today that the influence of the company’s Appstore is growing and shows high revenue potential. Amazon also announced its Cloud Player for iPad and iPad Mini this quarter, extended AutoRip to vinyl records and announced the launch of Kindle Fire HD 8.9″.

Good news also came for authors and readers, as Amazon announced that it will start paying its authors their royalties monthly, ahead of the twice-a-year industry standard, along with the acquisition of popular book recommendation hub, Goodreads.

All in all, it was a busy quarter for Amazon, especially for AWS, which launched a slew of new products over the last few months and again lowered its prices. The company said in its announcement today that AWS “has lowered prices 31 times since it launched in 2006, including 7 price reductions so far in 2013.”

Looking forward, Amazon is lowering expectations, however, as it said today that it expects sales to come in between $14.5 billion and $16.2 billion next quarter — equivalent to a 13 to 26 percent increase from Q2 2012. In turn, it expects operating income to be between -$340 million and +$10 million. In other words, a potential loss.

For more, find Amazon’s Q1 earnings announcement here.

According to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek, e-commerce behemoth Amazon is preparing to launch a set-top box this fall, in hopes that you’ll consume all of your content through its spin on the now-common device. The company is already working hard to push its Kindle line to consumers, and this box would be for people who don’t want to deal with the fanciness of Apple products, the gaming nature of Microsoft’s XBox, the half-baked Google TV or the little engine that could, Roku.

Yes, this is a crowded market, but Amazon has something that these other companies don’t have, which is warehouses full of things to sell to people while they watch TV. I imagine that you’ll be able to shop as you would online or on your mobile device, right on your TV set. That means that the temptation to pick up that new TV, while you’re watching your old crappy one, could overcome you during a show. One button click and a new TV could be on the way.

Think of it as Home Shopping 2.0. With some interesting programming to watch, of course.

Instead of acquiring a smaller company that already has its own product in the wild, Amazon has decided to build this in-house, under its Lab126 umbrella in Cupertino.

Amazon has been building up its content viewers by bundling it with Amazon Prime shipping for free, trying to entice anyone who is already spending regular money with them to try other things out. What shipping has to do with free movies and TV, I don’t know, but customers seem to be happy with it thus far.

Reasons for doing a set-top box are obvious, with its original content being the most popular on the platform since it launched. As Amazon finds its way to more niche shows that it can present exclusively, the reasons to grab an Amazon-branded device for your TV makes more sense. In the same way that Apple leverages each of its devices to sell new ones, Amazon is learning how it’s done. It also doesn’t help that it has millions of shoppers visiting its site daily looking for new things.

Some could say that Amazon is late to the game, but I see Jeff Bezos and company taking smart, calculated steps to capitalize on mistakes made by others, much like it did with the Kindle, staying close to a purer paperback-esque reading experience.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Amazon’s business model, CTO Werner Vogels reminded us today, is based on “low margins, high volume”, and today the company announced a development on how it’s applying that principle to its enterprise services. From today, AWS is expanding to Europe its Redshift data warehousing service and its EC2 High Storage service. Amazon first announced the intention to take Redshift global in February; it’s actually turning on Europe today.

The news of the international expansion was made this morning during the Amazon Web Services Summit in London, part of a wider roadshow for AWS. Redshift, Amazon’s petabyte-scale solution to better manage huge backlogs of data, was first announced in November 2012. It is very competitive on price: traditional data warehousing solutions can cost between $19,000 and $25,000 per terabyte while Redshift charges $1,000 per terabyte per year.

Big data, Vogels said in a speech today, will be the crux of competitive advantage in the future, but also, it can be the biggest stumbling block. “The database will be the bottleneck,” he said.

Vogels also took the audience through what he sees as the cloud services to watch in the future — a primer, of sorts, for what we may expect to see from AWS in terms of its product roadmap.

Internet of things: “To me it’s much more important that you see these devices as part of a wider strategy.” He described how Shell, an AWS customer, has plans for hundreds of thousands of sensors; and larger consumer developments around wearable technology like the Nike Fuelband and connected everything. “All of these devices in the hands of customers will need to have their data stored somewhere.” Is that a sign of more security services coming from AWS?

Security and privacy: If I had to put some money on it, I think security and privacy are two areas where Amazon will be looking to do more, not just to protect its own cloud platform from attacks, but also because tech companies whose services are based on cloud infrastructure, and who may already be customers of Amazon’s (or a competitor) are also increasingly becoming targets for attacks. “Encryption will be the most important tool to protecting your customers,” he predicted. “It’s important to realize that encryption will be a really important tool.”

Other areas where we might expect to see more AWS developments are more competitive price reductions (unsurprising, especially considering Microsoft Azure’s recent overtures for competing on price).

And there will be more sophisticated ways of manipulating big data, in ways that are perhaps more self-service and less technical. “At this point, the cloud is the default environment for big data,” Vogels said. “But much of big data processing is still pretty raw. What we’ll see is that there will be targeted solutions for you to do customer targeting. You will no longer look at analytics but what you really use for things you want to do.”

The rest of this morning’s presentation was focused on showing off just how much AWS has exploded in growth since first being launched in 2006.

As Amazon noted last week during its AWS Summit event in NYC, it now stores over 2 trillion total objects in S3, and processes 1.1 million peak requests/second as of Q1 2013. (These and other numbers may well get updated when Amazon announces its quarterly earnings later this week.)

Vogels describes AWS Marketplace, launched almost exactly a year ago, the “Amazon.com for enterprise software.” It’s seen a 102% rise in active customers in the last year, he noted.

This is likely to be the lever for much of AWS’s growth as it matures as a platform. AWS Trusted Advisor has made 329,000 recommendations (and now over 330,000 he says) across $22 million in cost savings.

Vogels defended how the company has been slow to date in adding more features to AWS overall. “We bring out limited feature sets because we do not pretend to know what our customers want,” reminiscent of Jason Fried’s idea of big ideas needing to be cut in half in order to execute them well. “We had no idea how this space would develop but this way we can react immediately.”

But as the popularity of AWS and cloud services (and competition to Amazon) continues to grow, the pace of development has accelerated from its introduction of nine AWS products in its first year. “Last year we launched 159 new features. And this quarter alone we’ve launched 53 new features and services. We’re on track to roll out more this year than last,” he noted.

AWS, as Amazon likes to remind us, has had 31 price reductions since 2006. Vogels’ take on this is not unlike that of Amazon as a whole: “We believe that if we can help you drop your costs down you will be more successful in the long run. For us it’s a high volume, low margin business and we really know how to do that well.”

Amazon eats its dogfood. Vogels says that on a typical day 40% of your capacity is unused but some months worse: in early November nearly 80% of traffic is unused. In November 2010 Amazon.com swapped out the last of its physical services, and then a year later did the same for its international operations.

Amazon is pulling a Netflix today, in the sense that it’s now touting the release of its original programming as the “most watched” TV shows on the Amazon Video service since launch on Friday. Netflix previously issued the same statement about its original show, “House of Cards.” But it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, here. When Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said that its new political thriller was the most-watched piece of content on the site, it was a few weeks after its release, not days.

It was also more remarkable because, in Netflix’s case, it was a single series, as opposed to a collection of content that includes more than half a dozen comedy pilots and six other children’s shows. Plus, Netflix’s content library includes many more blockbuster titles and big-name TV shows for an unknown property like “House of Cards” to compete with, again making Netflix’s news, generally speaking, a “bigger deal.”

That being said, count me in as one of those who took some time this weekend to peruse some of what Amazon Originals had to offer. (Hey, New Year’s Resolutions, remember?)

I didn’t get through much, to be honest – just the pilot of the Silicon Valley-based “Betas,” which you may find yourself either loving or hating. The series is well-liked on Amazon so far, with 4.4 out of 5 stars – and I can certainly confirm it’s a step up from Bravo’s reality show about startups. Still, it’s rough to watch and downright awkward at times, as it turns stereotypical ideas about startup culture and young founders into fodder for humor – like when the hot girl at the bar broadly refers to all these startup types as “aspeys” - apparently shorthand for those without social skills.

It portrays one of the characters as precisely that, too. He often drops pronouns when he talks for some odd reason, and basically loses it while others in the shared workspace engage in some sort of Nerf gun war as he’s trying to work.

Oh, ha ha.

But there are some funny moments as well, some of which are a bit too NSFW to describe here. (Check out Moby’s cameo, for example).

And…I’ll leave it at that.

In terms of the children’s shows, it was much harder to get a feel for them, as the ones we watched were decidedly unfinished works. Cartoons were not animated, Jim Henson’s puppet show was barely puppeted and so on.

In testing these, ahem yes – I secretly replaced my toddler’s iPad with a Kindle Fire and watched for her response – she actually seemed well-enough entertained with the selection, though she got bored with Tumbleleaf (which I found too treacly, to be honest). She enjoyed Teeny Tiny Dogs for a bit, and really enjoyed Sara Solves It, likely for its now-familiar style mimicking much of today’s educational programming for kids, where problems to solve are integrated into the shows’ story lines.

Amazon has taken a different route with its original programming. Instead of funding the development of shows outright, it has left the greenlighting option in the hands of consumers, saying that it will determine which pilots are picked up based on user feedback.

But with news that the shows made up 8 out of 10 of the most streamed episodes across the video service over the weekend, and that thousands of customer reviews have led to more than 80 percent of ratings reaching 4 or 5 stars, it may be difficult for Amazon to say no to any of the new programs.

Back in March, Amazon Studios announced that it had ordered six comedy series pilots to debut on Amazon Instant Video, further proof that the current television model is desperate for disruption. Today those pilots are finally available, released into the hands of viewers here in the US and the UK.

Based on user feedback, Amazon will decide which of the pilots will be ordered for a full season available exclusively on Amazon’s Prime Instant Video network in the US and LoveFilm in the UK. In fact, Amazon surprised with two extra comedy pilots, as well as the simultaneous launch of six children’s series pilots which were ordered back in January.

While competitors like Netflix and Hulu are working on their own exclusive content offerings, Amazon has taken a different route. Hulu has been offering exclusive content for more than two years with a broad range of different offerings, whereas Netflix has gone big with one drama, House of Cards, delivered binge-style with a full season available at once.

Amazon, on the other hand, has decided to leave the power in the hands of consumers. User feedback will determine which of the total 14 pilots will become a real-life TV show based on ratings and reviews. Amazon will also monitor a number of other metrics like chatter on social media, focus group responses, and the general voice (or lack thereof) of the internet.

There are no hard and fast rules about how many series will be built into full seasons — it all depends on user feedback.

At first thought, I had some pretty serious reservations about this pilot-first, season-later ploy from Amazon. For one, it’s tough to fall in love with a show after 28 minutes, and only 28 minutes. And let’s say you do fall in love with Tallahassee, just a young guy in love in the middle of Zombieland, or the three charming young high school teachers in Those Who Can’t. How, then, do you stay interested while Amazon takes these shows back to the drawing board for full season production and development.

Yet, after speaking with the company about the reasons behind the decision (and seeing the content myself), it actually makes sense.

“To pick just one show would mean that we’re rejecting many other shows,” said Roy Price, Director of Amazon Studios. “We’re doing it this way presumably because we don’t believe in the guru model of television where we should just make decisions using our great wisdom. When you have the internet as a platform for your service, the right way to do this is to give people a sample and see what they like.”

As it stands now, a very small group of old rich people are the ones deciding which scripts become the shows we watch on Primetime and beyond. But what do they know? They might see me on the streets, but homie, they don’t know me. That’s why Amazon Studios deliberately wanted to do multiple series pilots at once, to offer a breadth of potential content to its users.

If you’re interested in checking out Amazon’s new comedy and children’s series, head on over to Amazon Instant in the U.S. or LOVEfilm in the UK and grab a bowl of popcorn. And be sure to tell Amazon what you think, lest you find yourself five months down the road wondering what became of your favorite characters.

We’ll be hitting you with a full review of the comedy pilots a little later in the day, but for now you can head on over to Amazon Instant to check them out yourself.

E-commerce giant Amazon looks like it is gearing up for the latest chapter in its international expansion: an operation in Russia. According to this article in Forbes (in Russian) the company has opened its first office in the country, headed by Arkady Vitrouk. Vitrouk is the former general director of ABC-Atticus, a publishing group owned by media baron Alexander Mamut.

Forbes cites unnamed sources but notes that the appointment, and the office opening, have not been confirmed by Amazon itself. However, we’ve discovered that Vitrouk’s LinkedIn profile does confirm him as director of Kindle Content for Amazon in Russia.

Looking a little closer, Amazon is hiring for at least three other positions for Russia specifically for its Kindle business and the sourcing of local content: a senior product manager for Kindle content pricing, and a principal for content acquisition for Kindle Russia, and another content acquisition manager.

A visit to amazon.ru currently redirects to the company’s main page for Europe, with links to other countries’ local sites, including the UK, France, Spain, German and Italy. The Forbes article also notes that Amazon has applied for patents in Russia around some of the activities we know it for already: storage and delivery of goods; the storage of electronic texts and media files; and book publishing. We have contacted Amazon and Vitrouk himself for more detail and will update this story as we learn more.

The news comes in the same week that Amazon announced that it would take its Appstore business international — extending it to nearly 200 countries, another sign of how the company is gearing up for more scale. It also follows reports (again unconfirmed) that Barnes & Noble is also preparing for more Nook activity in Russia.

Russia is currently Europe’s largest internet market, according to a recent study from comScore, with an online audience of 61.3 million users.

That, combined with Russia’s rapidly rising middle class, has led to a boom in e-commerce. Morgan Stanley believes the Russian e-commerce market will be worth $36 billion by 2015, up from $12 billion in 2012.

Russia has been a noticeable hole in Amazon’s footprint, but that has spelled opportunity for local and other international players, too.

Ozon — commonly called the “Amazon of Russia” — has raised $121 million in funding and has been building up a very Amazon-like business, complete with a logistics network.

As we’ve pointed out before, this is especially important in a country like Russia, which doesn’t have a solid, extenstive pre-existing delivery infrastructure that spans across the whole of the huge country.

That, and the lack of credit card penetration, has meant that companies like Ozon and fashion/home goods site KupiVIP (itself flush with $120 million of funding) have built out fleets of their own delivery trucks, with drivers who take cash on delivery for goods (KupiVIP, focusing on clothes, will even wait until the recipient tries something on, so that the item can also get returned on the spot if it’s unsuitable).

Meanwhile, eBay earlier this month, during its analyst day, called Russia the “number-one priority” for expansion for both eBay and PayPal. In 2012, people in Russia bought over $400 million of goods on eBay.

Ozon’s business has been built on its extensive logistics network to deliver a soup-to-nuts range of goods, but it has not ruled out doing more in cloud services. However it seems less interested in Kindle-style products like tablets, e-readers and digital content.

This is where Amazon could come in. In another BRIC market, Brazil, Amazon has been building out a business based on its non-physical goods — Kindle books and Kindle devices.

This could be one route to how Amazon decides to tackle Russia, at least in part. In that sense, it’s interesting that the Forbes report specifically names as the head of Amazon in Russia someone whose immediate experience lies precisely in publishing, rather than e-commerce or retail, and that he’s already heading up business for the company there in that vein.

P.S. I write “at least in part,” because it turns out that Amazon is also hiring for other Russia-related expansion plans. Fashion e-commerce site Shopbop, owned by Amazon, is seeking a marketing manager for a new rollout in Russia. Amazon has also been headhunting in Moscow for software engineers — although these would be for relocation to Seattle.

A new patent published by the USPTO today (via PhoneArena) indicates that Amazon is looking into a way to limit the amount of data exchanged when two parties engage in a mobile payment transaction. The patent describes a way to sub in unique identifiers for information like name and email address that would otherwise be used to verify the identities of buyer and seller.

Participants who want to keep their information to themselves would have to first register with the service, which presumably would be operated by Amazon. They’d then be issued temporary tokens, which expire once a transaction is completed to help initiate and complete the payment. No information about either party would be revealed, with Amazon itself the only one involved with the identity of buyer and seller.

To initiate a transaction, what you would do is send a text to Amazon’s mobile payment service, something like “PAY 20,” which authorizes a payment of $20. You’d get a code in response, which you could then send to the merchant or payee, and they’d be able to use that to credit their own account. Security measures, like tying a code at least partially to a recipient’s phone number, would ensure only that party could redeem it to make sure messages couldn’t be faked or intercepted and redeemed by others.

If Amazon were to implement this, they could become a competitor for payment intermediaries like PayPal. Given that its online marketplace already competes with PayPal owner eBay, and that it already has millions of user accounts with active credit cards on file, it’s not too much of a stretch for the company away from its core business.

Last year, we reported that Amazon might be working on a Square competitor, which would be another different entry into mobile payments. Anonymized payments based on SMS or email codes might be a different way of looking at the same problem, but it’s an indication that Amazon is at least investing research and development dollars into the idea.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was on stage today at AllThingsD’s Dive Into Mobile event in NYC, talking about his book and his vision for Google. When asked about how he and Google feel about projects that take Android as their base and then build something different with them, like Amazon’s KindleOS or Facebook Home. Schmidt’s response was extremely positive.

On the subject of Android forking and Facebook Home, he responded “I think it’s fantastic.” “This is what open source is all about,” he said, adding that he “suspect[s] it’s one of the few reasons Android is the number one solution right now.” At the time of its unveiling, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company didn’t even have to work with Google to make Home a reality.

That, and Facebook Home UX features, like the removal of the Google search bar from the home screen, and in general the backgrounding of various Google features, led some to speculate that it isn’t exactly something Google would be thrilled with. Google issued an official statement on the matter, talking about how it “demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular.”

Schmidt’s statement stuck to the company line but also went further, indicating an enthusiasm for efforts like those undertaken by Facebook and Android. He said that people who don’t work with open source technology can’t seem to understand the value of people taking your OS and doing something different with it, but at Google, there’s a genuine appreciate for those kinds of projects.

“This is called ‘what Android is about,’” he said later in response to a question by Business Insider’s Steve Kovach. “[Facebook] read the rules and they adhered to them. If you look at what Facebook did they maintained full application compatibility. I think it’s a tremendous endorsement of the platform and what it can do.”

Amazon has launched a new store catering to mature adults and seniors, the company announced today. But while “Amazon Seniors” would have a nice ring to it, Amazon went with a more polite, if wordy, branding: “50+ Active and Healthy Living Store.” As the name implies, the new store will be focused on a variety of “healthy living” needs, including nutritional products, wellness, exercise, fitness, medical, personal care, beauty and entertainment items and more.

The site also serves as another smart extension of one of Amazon’s lesser-known features: subscription-based ordering. Today’s its “Subscribe & Save” program allows Amazon customers to schedule automatic deliveries of household products (cleansers, paper towels, etc.) and other replenishable goods, including baby products (diapers, wipes, etc.), personal care items (deodorant, lotions, etc.), and more.

With the new Amazon 50+ store, that same type of automatic re-ordering is possible for products aimed at the older crowd, like vitamins, incontinence care products, shampoos, and the like. When ordered via Subscribe & Save, customers are entitled to a discount – up to 15 percent – on items purchased.

Targeting seniors’ interest in clipping coupons to save, Amazon’s senior store – oops, sorry, it’s 50+ store – also includes a “Coupons” section promoting items which are discounted by either a percentage off or dollars off. This section, featured prominently on the store’s homepage, lets consumers virtually “clip” the coupon, then receive the discount at checkout.

The senior store isn’t only an e-commerce site, Amazon notes in its announcement this morning – in addition to the usual product info, ratings, recommendations and reviews, it will also offer a “Resource Center,” which provides tips on beauty, healthy eating, caregiving, and other topics, designed to aid shoppers in product discovery. The content provided here is powered by GrandParents.com, and includes articles on things like “Boosting Brain Power” or “Losing Weight,” for example.

“We’re excited to offer customers in the 50+ age range a place to easily discover hundreds of thousands of items that promote active and healthy living,” said Chance Wales, Director of Beauty and Health & Personal Care for Amazon in a prepared statement. “This is a destination where a customer can purchase anything from vitamins and blood pressure monitors to skin care items and books on traveling the world,” he added.

Though older consumers tend to be late adopters of online services and the web in general, they’re still a powerful part of the Internet population. According to Jupiter Research, one-third of the U.S. 195 million Internet users are over 50, per a study put out a couple of years back. As of last spring, Pew Internet found that 74 percent of those 50-64 use the Internet, and 41 percent of those 65+ do, up from 41 percent and 12 percent in 2000. However, at the time, the study found that purchasing products online was “significantly less popular” with adults over 65. By catering to this group’s desire for savings and convenience, Amazon may have a chance to grow its demographically older user base.

The new store will be available from the web here: www.amazon.com/50activeliving.