Inside Amazon-dot-com

Amazon.com (AMZN) is putting up its first warehouse in Mumbai, India’s largest city, practically announcing just how serious it is in breaking into the market of second most populous country in the world. Mumbai alone has a 12-million-strong population and more than 3 million active users on the Web. It’s an e-commerce market worth more than $5 billion in 2010 – and it’s expanding at a double-digit rate year after year! Admittedly, most of this value comes from the Internet travel industry, which is not (yet) Amazon’s line of business. Nonetheless, India’s e-commerce sector is also growing at a rapid pace.  What Amazon will probably do is acquire a significant local Indian retailer, fold the acquired retailer into Amazon, and then grow from there.  That’s how they did it in China, remember? Amazon bought Joyo.com for $75 million and turned it into Amazon.cn.  In India, Letsbuy.com, FlipKart, and Specifically.in – all trusted local online retailers – a...

There’s something exciting happening at Amazon Web Services. It promises to remove the biggest headaches involved in database administration, which is, of course, database administration itself! The product is a no-SQL database cloud service designed specifically for Web applications, social games, mobile apps, and big data applications.  Amazon.com calls it DynamoDB. Its benefits, as reported by Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels, are “extremely fast, predictable performance, seamless scalability, and” – get this – “zero administration.” According to Dr. Vogels, Web site owners who use DynamoDB can now stop buying more and more hardware to keep up with ever-increasing capacity. Their developers no longer have to spend so much time trying to predict how much hardware they need to serve their capacity. With DynamoDB, he reported, increasing capacity is literally as easy as turning a dial. Turn the dial up to increase capacity during your peak hours, then turn it down when...

As per a news release posed on Indiana Government’s official website, the Indiana Department of Revenue  and Amazon.com have reached an agreement whereby Amazon.com will start collecting state and local sales  tax on state resident’s web purchases. Such a collection of sales tax will start from the earlier of 3 months  from enactment of a federal law regarding collection of sales tax, or, if no such law is enacted by Dec. 31,  2013; by January 1, 2014.  Governor Mitch Daniels said while he believes that the real solution to sales tax issue is “a federal solution  that treats all retailers and all states the same” but for now, this agreement allows Indiana to address a large  short fall.  How large? The annual uncollected sales tax for internet purchases in India is estimated to be about $75  million. Of that, it is estimated that Amazon’s annual collection would amount to 20 to 25 million dollars.  Audio from the press conference m...