Amazon

One might think that Austin-based mobile check-in and social networking company GoWalla would be happy that one of their competitors is now gone, but the story is more complicated. Groupon …

This morning buttocks are tightly clenched all across internet-land, as Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service, which is used by many big-name companies and services, has spectacularly crashed, taking down Quora, FourSquare, Hootsuite, and a whole host of other well-known services that use Amazon’s cloud to power their backend.

Jews across the globe will be starting the celebration of passover tonight, as they have done for the last couple of thousand years. But why is this year different from other years? Well, it has a really superbly made video telling the entire passover story with a slightly modern mobile twist.

Amazon.com Inc. appears to have a penchant for jumping into untested markets recently, for example with the launch of their Cloud Player, which has attracted more than a cursory glance from the music industry. Now the online retail giant is looking to shake things up again by offering a new, cheaper Kindle with build-in ads.

Due to some kind of foul-up at Google Inc. a lucky man by the name of Tim Schiesser, who just so happens to be a tech writer, has been given access to a previously unheard-of Android Test Market, where it would seem app developers can trial their wares before releasing them to the general public.

Those sneaky Amazon.com Inc. engineers are at it again. While rumours swirled that Google Inc. was preparing to launch their cloud-based Google Music service, Amazon.com has gone right ahead and stolen their thunder with a streaming solution of their own!

Through an apparent scoop by the Home Shopping Network (of all people) we have learned that e-book retailer Barnes & Noble Inc. may be planning to launch their very own store for the popular Nook Color tablet.

It’s been many months in the making, but today Amazon have finally taken the wraps off their Appstore for Android sporting a modest 3,800 Apps, including an exclusive version of Angry Birds that will no doubt help drive uptake of the new platform.

Amazon.com’s curated Android Appstore has been some time in the making – it opened to developers a few months ago, and we’re assured it will be seeing a public launch “very soon.” In the meantime, Amazon.com has obviously been wining and dining the app royalty of this world, and as a result has scored a pretty hefty coup.

Last week Apple announced they would be beefing up their In-App Purchases system (the catchily-named IAP API), introducing new rules which mandate all Apps that sell additional content, services or subscriptions MUST use Apple’s system, and pay them a 30% cut for the privilege.

It would seem that digital publishing, the messiah many publishing houses have been pinning their hopes on to stem the losses paper magazines are making, is finally taking off.

On the eve of their big press conference where they are expected to announce their “Gmail killer”, Facebook has overtaken eBay in value to become the third most valuable web-based company in the US.