Is Amazon Poised for World Domination?

Amazon is often portrayed in the media as an unstoppable behemoth indiscriminately crushing everything from indie bookstores to big box stores on its way to world domination. But recently more have started to question that narrative. Amazon’s July attempt at entering the smartphone market was a highly-publicized disaster, but critics are pointing to far more […]

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Is Amazon’s eBook Subscription Service a Big Deal?

Last week Amazon launched a subscription service called Kindle Unlimited, immediately dubbed the “Netflix for ebooks” by just about everyone. It costs $9.99 per month to subscribe, which works out to be $120 per year. For that reasonable price you get unlimited access to a library of over 600,000 books as well as around 2,000 audiobooks. That […]

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Do eBooks Do More Harm Than Good?

This week Wired published a provocative article about ebooks. In the piece, titled “The Abomination of eBooks,” author Art Brodsky points out how the applicable rules for ebooks are fundamentally different than those for print books; in particular ebooks are leased rather than actually bought and owned. Because of this, he argues that it doesn’t make […]

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Amazon, Apple, Google? Which Cloud Music Storage Service Is Best?

Editor’s note: This page was last updated on 9/12/2013. We will continue to update this article as these services change. If there’s something we need to fix or should add, just leave a comment below the post. When you want to listen to digital music, there are two main types of services to choose from. First, […]

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The Past Present and Future of Cloud Computing

Note from the editor: This is an article by Jeff Fields. If you’re interested in contributing to Social Web Q and A, check out our guest post guidelines. In basic terms, cloud computing consists of using a central network of data servers and CPUs with their attendant memory and processing power as a multi-user accessible […]

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What is a Vertical Search Engine?

Q: What’s a vertical search engine? Is Google one, or is it something else? When we think of search engines, Google typically comes to mind first. This is perfectly natural, since they own a dominating market share over Yahoo and Bing, the closest competitors. But there are plenty of other search engines that stick to […]

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Why is the Kindle Fire So Cheap? Thoughts on Amazon’s Strategy

Q: I saw that Amazon’s new tablet computer is being sold for only $199! The iPad 2 starts at $499. How is Amazon able to make their product so much cheaper? Tablet computing is one of the hottest topics today in technology today, and the major companies are jockeying for position as prices fall and […]

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Personal Cloud Computing Services: the Future of the Web?

Q: I keep hearing about cloud computing but never with a clear definition. How does it affect me and will it really be the future of the web? Just about everyone in the industry is in agreement that the future of computing is “on the cloud.” Cloud computing has already started to revolutionize the way […]

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