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‘Bic for Her’ Lady Pen Burned by Internet Review Flames

A pen for women must mean that it has lipstick on one end, right? BIC pens is the latest group to find themselves in hot water with women. Did they make politically incorrect commentary on the anatomy and physiology of women? No. Did they donate $100 million to the “I hate women for life” campaign? No. What they did make, though, is a pen. A lady pen, to be specific, and it has the women of Amazon.com fuming.

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Musician Seth Horvitz Orders TV From Amazon, UPS Delivers Military-Grade Semiautomatic Rifle

DC resident, Seth Horvitz, had quite a surprise when he got the Amazon.com package for which he had been waiting. It’s not every day that you open your door to find a military-grade semiautomatic rifle sitting there, but that is exactly what happened when musician Horvitz retrieved the package that UPS left for him.

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Students Can Now Rent Textbooks on Amazon

Gone are the days when paying through the nose is the only option for students who need textbooks, now students can rent textbooks from Amazon.com. While renting textbooks is not a new idea, the ability to do so through Amazon offers an attractive, easy, and simple textbook rental option, especially since so many students already have Amazon accounts.

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Now You Can Watch Amazon Prime Instant Video on the iPad!

Amazon made an exciting announcement today that users can now watch Amazon Prime Instant Video on the iPad. It appears that Amazon is slowly acknowledging that a large portion of its Prime member base has, and is loyal to, an iPad. With many Prime members frustrated that the free book lending benefit of a Prime membership only works on an actual Kindle device, Amazon seems to finally have learned to play nice with their Kindle’s adversary with today’s announcement that Amazon Instant Video is now able to be used on the iPad.

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Amazon’s New Amazon Career Choice Tuition Assistance Program

Amazon today announced their new “Amazon Career Choice” program which is, in fact, a tuition assistance program. Actually, it most closely resembles the old G.I. Bill that the military used to offer, whereby if you spent four years in the military, the government would pay up to a certain amount for up to 4 years of college (the payment would go directly to you so long as you were in school full time). In the case of the Amazon Career Choice tuition assistance, an Amazon employee (“Amazon Associate”) who has been with Amazon for at least three years, can get up to 95% of their tuition paid for qualifying academic programs.

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US Government Files Anti-Trust Collusion Lawsuit Against Apple and Publishers Over Alleged eBook Price-Fixing

Much of the technology world was stunned to learn that an antitrust lawsuit against technology giant, Apple Inc, and several book publishers, was filed by the US. Government Wednesday morning. The lawsuit charges that Apple and the named publishers conspired to raise the retail prices of electronic-books in order to shun the competition, namely Amazon.com, who many say has monopolized the e-book industry.

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Why am I Getting So Much Email from Amazon? (And What to Do About It)

If you are getting a lot of email from Amazon, besides order confirmations, and wondering why, this may be the reason (and here’s what to do about all that email you are getting from Amazon).

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Amazon Ships New Kindle Fire

Amazon started shipping their new tablet based Kindle, the Kindle Fire today. Here is what Amazon sent today to those eager customers who had pre-ordered the Kindle Fire.

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Amazon Launches New “My Habit” Private Designer Label Sale Website at MyHabit.com

Amazon has announced the opening and launch of MyHabit.com, a “private fashion sale” website, through which you can buy designer clothing at, claims Amazon, up to a 60% savings. Of course it’s not all that private, as anyone can sign up for it. The deal is (no pun intended) that each exclusive super-deep discount deal starts at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time, and lasts just 72 hours. That’s right, it’s like Woot for designer clothing. So, if you got that email saying “We’re excited to introduce our valued Amazon.com customers to our new private-sale website, MYHABIT,” it’s really from Amazon. And, oh goody, they are encouraging people to invite their friends with friend-spam saying “Hi, MYHABIT features daily events from a hand-picked selection of designer and boutique brands up to 60% off with fast, free shipping and free returns. Membership is instant, easy and free.”

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Amazon Initiates Effort to Get Calfornia’s Internet Sales Tax Repealed

Amazon has decided to tackle states that are adopting Internet sales taxes head on, by underwriting and spearheading a referendum to have the newest Internet sales tax, that in California, repealed.

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California Newest State Dumped by Amazon After Passing Affiliate Sales Tax

California is the newest state to pass a law taxing sales at companies like Amazon when those sales are generated by a local (in this case California-based) affiliate or associate. And, not unexpectedly, about five minutes after California Governor Jerry Brown signed the legislation, California becames the newest state to have their affiliates dumped by Amazon. As we’ve pondered before, is it arrogance or simple ignorance that is leading these state legislatures to pass laws that, instead of bringing in new taxes, are depriving their state economic engines of taxable spending fuel? Instead of bringing more income into the state, by chasing away the affiliate programs, they are depriving their own residents of income – income which would come back to the local economy.

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The Amazon Prime Win a Free Kindle 3G Sweepstakes – It’s Legit, But with a Catch

Many of you received an email from Amazon this week which invited you to enter the “Win an Kindle 3G from Amazon.com” contest in honor of Amazon Prime, and, of course, and as you should, you were suspicious and are wondering whether it’s a scam. in fact, the “Win a Free Kindle 3G Sweepstakes” is legitimate! No purchase necessary, and here is how to enter (even if you didn’t get that email). You’ll need a Facebook account, as it involves the Amazon Facebook page, and that’s where the catch comes in.

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Amazon Rolls Out Email Service

As Amazon takes on more and more of a competitive stance against the likes of Google and Microsoft, Amazon has added to its cloud offerings an email sending service which effectively makes Amazon an email service provider. The Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) joins other Amazon cloud offerings, including storage, video and other file hosting, and Amazon’s flagship EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service which allows you to create virtual servers on the fly (and in the cloud).

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Amazon and the Elastic Beanstalk: New Amazon Offering Simplifies Development and Deployment Over Amazon’s AWS Cloud Computing Services

Amazon has just announced their “Elastic Beanstalk”, which they describe as “an even easier way for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud.” “AWS” stands for Amazon Web Services. The “Elastic”, first coined for Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” (Amazon EC2), refers to the ability to increase or decrease your viritual server capacity on the fly. The service, which is essentially an interface for all of the underlying Amazon AWS offerings, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Notification Service, and Elastic Load Balancing and Auto-Scaling, is available at no additional charge.

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Amazon’s “Shopping-Enabled Wikipedia page” on Amazon Suggests Amazon / Wikipedia Deal

Have Amazon and Wikipedia struck a deal? It sure seems that way, with the roll-out of Amazon’s new “Shopping-Enabled Wikipedia pages” being displayed right on Amazon. While both Amazon and Wikipedia are being unusually tight-lipped about it (read as: nobody is admitting to anything), it appears that there is either a formal or informal deal between Wikipedia and Amazon, or else Wikipedia is foolish enough to be losing out on a huge source of potential revenue.