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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (117073)	2/7/2001 2:40:00 AM
From: Anthony@Pacific	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

The buyers were the ones who stand to gain the most by amzn existance..you know that..GSCO and its paid whores. cant earn a fee when the stock is zero.. Plus th big short doesnt hurt, while you mayt have posted more negative info, I have shared your opinions all the way from the very beginning..Im not trying to steal any limelight here... I congratulate you on being so astute when so many preferred being sheep and led to slaughter. These are the same people who will attend a dinner wher Clinton speaks about Miliken even after losing 80% to their brokers at Morgan Stanley...morons complete morons.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (117073)	2/7/2001 3:49:57 AM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Glenn, this why I think Amzn is worth $600 million. >In the name of convenience and safety, big business and big government keep pushing the boundaries of privacy and surveillance. Consider the latest from online retailer Amazon.com Inc. and the Super Bowl. Trusting businesses to protect privacy is always a risk, because personal data is a valuable commodity. That's why I'm hesitant to take at face value a new Amazon service that looks quite useful -- and which, at least for now, is sensitive to privacy concerns, more so than many other e-commerce sites I can name. On Tuesday, the company announced the ``Honor System'' -- a method for making payments to Web sites, either as voluntary contributions or payments for services or information. The Amazon service is similar in some respects to services such as PayPal (www.paypal.com), providing a way to make small payments conveniently. On its face, the Honor System has value for Amazon, participating Web sites and Web surfers. It gives Amazon, which collects a toll for every payment, a way to capitalize on its billing system. It gives sites a relatively painless system for collecting money from users. And, as noted, it gives average folks an easy way to make payments. But for the folks on Amazon's customer list -- some 29 million of us -- there's more to consider. Web pages are a collection of information, including text and graphics, that are dished out by server computers. When you visit a page, the information you see in your browser may be coming from several different computers. Third-party sites using the Honor System put notices on their pages, inviting customers or volunteers to click through to Amazon's payment pages. The notices originate from Amazon's own computers, which send them when someone is looking at the page in question. Amazon customers may not know it, but stored on their personal computers are little pieces of software code called cookies that let Amazon identify them when they visit Amazon.com's site. This can be helpful, because it lets the company recognize a return visitor and lets customers avoid re-typing all their information when they want to buy something. Under the Honor System, Amazon will be able to learn when its customers are visiting third-party sites using the service -- whether or not the Amazon customers click on the notice on those third-party sites. This is a fairly dramatic increase in Amazon's ability to learn things about its customers -- a windfall of information the company can and surely will use to sell things more effectively. Amazon indicates it will keep aggregate information about its customers' visits to the participating third-party sites. But the company says it's removing individual customers' names and other potentially identifying information from any such data logs. I'm not crazy about giving away information, even in the aggregate -- not when it's being collected without my consent in any respect. But this is life in the new world of marketing, where companies make these kinds of deals. Amazon's promise to remove identifying information from its new database would be more reassuring if the company hadn't unilaterally changed its overall privacy policy last year. The company says it strengthened the policy. Really? The previous policy had pretty much assured customers who requested it that their data would never be shared or sold, period. The subsequent policy said that customer data was an asset and would be treated like one if Amazon felt it necessary to sell the company or a business unit. Amazon now tells me that if such a sale occurs, it will contact customers who'd opted out and give them the right to prevent transfer of their data. That's progress, but I'd trust this assurance more if it had been an explicit part of the new policy. Besides, who knows when the policy -- on this or the Honor System logging -- might change again? Amazon has been on my don't-shop list for a while in any event, largely because of the company's abuse of the patent system -- a separate issue I've discussed before. In general, Amazon doesn't inspire my trust. Governments can never be trusted to protect privacy, because law enforcement is in the business of invading it in order to catch crooks. We have a Bill of Rights, among other safeguards that in theory protect us from abuse by those entrusted to protect our safety. But technology keeps racing ahead of law and tradition. At the Super Bowl game in Tampa 10 days ago, surveillance cameras snapped photos of everyone entering the stadium. The football fans weren't notified. Then the pictures were digitized and sent electronically to various law enforcement databases, where they were compared with photos of known criminals. Again, on its face, you might see nothing wrong with this. We wouldn't want a terrorist to get into the Super Bowl, after all. There's plenty wrong, actually. Civil libertarians have raised any number of questions about the way it was handled, among them whether fans should have been notified they were being placed, in effect, in a police lineup and whether Florida law required the police to save and make publicly available the photographs. The exercise should make you shudder just a bit, because it foreshadows what's coming. Cameras are spying on us everywhere we go these days, which is bad enough. But the ability to capture images digitally and then compare them with databases, using pattern-recognition software, means we're moving closer to an era when we'll effectively be under surveillance -- individually -- at all times in public places. Now that's truly scary.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (117073)	2/7/2001 8:08:25 AM
From: Gary Korn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

February 7, 2001 Amazon to Charge Publishers To Promote Books by E-Mail By NICK WINGFIELD and MATTHEW ROSE Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Amazon.com Inc. is finding a new way to get money from book publishers, and once again potentially blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial judgments. The Seattle-based Internet retailer recently notified publishers that it will begin to charge them as much as $10,000 per title in exchange for a better shot at having Amazon recommend their books in special e-mail promotions sent to customers. Previously, the e-mail recommendations were free to publishers and were based solely on the judgment of Amazon book editors. With the new fees, Amazon is extending a longtime practice on its Web site of allowing publishers to nominate a book and charging them if Amazon editors agree it is worthy of a recommendation. Amazon says it will continue to recommend titles via e-mail for which it has received no fee from the publisher -- possibly confusing some customers about what are effectively advertisements and what are titles selected for purely editorial reasons. Those titles would likely include expected best-sellers, books from well-known writers or other titles Amazon's editors believe are good. Though Amazon says it will disclose which titles it received payment for, users will have to click on a hyperlink to the Amazon Web site to see which titles fall into that category. Amazon plans to begin sending the e-mails containing the paid recommendations within the next couple of weeks. The new fees involve a program Amazon calls Past Buyer Mailings, mass e-mailings that send book recommendations to existing Amazon customers based on their purchasing history on the Web site. Amazon recommends books using various criteria, including suggesting books by authors that customers have already shown an interest in. The company may also recommend similar authors or genres, such as mysteries or autobiography, suited to a customer's tastes. Amazon emphasizes that all of the book recommendations sent to its customers over e-mail, like many recommendations on its Web site, are selected by teams of editors. But the new arrangement could give Amazon a financial incentive to select titles for which publishers are eager to cough up a large sum to be included in e-mail promotions. In addition to the new fee levied if publishers' nominations pass muster with Amazon editors, the publishers will be required to buy advertising on one of Amazon's pages, pushing the cost of the total package to as high as $17,000. Amazon says it will regularly reject titles it deems unworthy of promotion. Amazon spokeswoman Kristin Schaefer described the new e-mail program as an extension of what Amazon has been doing since it began accepting placement fees from publishers in ex change for exposure on Amazon's Web site. "Now we're allowing publishers to have input as to what titles they would like to have included in those e-mails," she said. Some publishers say Amazon should tread carefully with the new policy. Laurence Kirshbaum, chief executive of AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Time Warner Trade Publishing, says Amazon could hurt its reputation if it doesn't fully disclose that publishers are paying to get their books publicized this way. "If you don't distinguish between editorial and advertorial you could lose credibility," he says. Amazon raised concerns among customers and media critics in 1999 when it first began charging publishers to increase their chances of receiving a featured slot on Amazon's heavily-trafficked Web site. Initially, it didn't disclose the titles for which publishers had paid promotional fees, saying that all of its recommendations were vetted by Amazon editors. Amazon later began disclosing specific titles backed by payments -- in a section reached by clicking on a hyperlink on its Books home page -- after complaints from customers. Amazon still lists those titles: Among the ones listed Tuesday were "A Painted House" by John Grisham and "Crooked River Burning" by Mark Winegardner. Amazon executives have said that their disclosure policies are better than those of traditional "bricks-and-mortar" retailers, who also accept payments from publishers in exchange for favorable placement of books in their stores. Publishers typically pay for such placement from so-called cooperative marketing budgets, which represent by far publishers' greatest marketing expense. Every year, publishers give money to retailers -- both online and bricks-and-mortar -- based on the amount of sales they generate. The retailers can use those "co-op" funds to promote titles in various ways -- whether through print advertising, in stores or on the Web -- usually with the publishers' consent. E-mail has become one of Amazon's most effective marketing tools. The company won't say exactly how many of the Past Buyer Mailings it typically sends out, but it has grown to be a favorite marketing technique among Amazon's publishing partners, with many publishers saying they often see significant spikes in sales following the promotional e-mails. According to an e-mail sent to publishers, Amazon has told publishers that it will cost between $5,000 and $10,000, depending on the book, for Amazon to promote their titles through e-mail. According to the e-mail sent to publishers, Web-site fees start at $2,000 for promotions on "category" home pages and $12,000 for promotions on the more visited Amazon Books Home Page. Amazon declined to comment on the authenticity of the e-mail or the fees it charges publishers for promotions. Some publishers say the new fees connected with its e-mail promotions will be tough to stomach. The cost of promoting a title on the Amazon Book Home page and through e-mail -- the most expensive combination -- is about 40% higher than the cost of getting a book placed in a prime location in one of the major chain bookstores, according to one publishing executive. Getting good in-store placement is one of the most effective ways of pushing a book. Amazon's fees are "way beyond the budget," says John Oakes, publisher at Four Walls Eight Windows Inc., a 30-book-a-year New York publishing house. "It doesn't matter what you are told by Bertelsmann or Simon & Schuster; that is a significant amount of money for any publisher." It's also hard to justify the cost as the e-mail is a one-shot marketing tool, says Mr. Oakes, who says he hasn't yet been notified about the change. The additional charges will likely make life harder for smaller publishers like Mr. Oakes with limited amounts of marketing cash. If publishers can't or won't pay to promote smaller titles, the program could hurt Amazon's ability to promote quirky books that sometimes grow into best-sellers but aren't obvious successes. Publishers worry that the high cost of the e-mail program compared with other marketing expenses could drastically cut into their co-op budgets and hurt their ability to promote other books, especially low-selling literary titles. "It's robbing Peter to pay Paul," says one publishing executive.