Apple shipped 11.8m iPads during the quarter, down from 15.4m units in the fourth quarter of 2011, and grew its worldwide share from 54.7% in 4Q11 to 68% in 1Q12. Amazon, which stormed into the market in 4Q11 to grab second place with 16.8% of the market on shipment of 4.8m units, saw its share decline significantly in the first quarter to just over 4%, falling to third place as a result. Samsung took advantage of Amazon's weakness to regain the number two position while Lenovo vaulted into the number four spot, followed by Barnes & Noble at number five.

Google is selling some of its analytic guts as an online service, in an effort to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services in the market for enterprise cloud computing.</p><p>

In November, Google offered a limited number of developers access to some of its most powerful data analysis software, part of what Google uses to index the Internet, in a product called <a href="https://developers.google.com/bigquery/">BigQuery</a>. On Tuesday, Google announced that it was selling that software, which can scan terabytes of information in seconds, as a service to corporate customers.

Although Apple is listed as the first defendant, the bulk of the case is really about the publishers involved: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster. According to the government, these publishers greatly feared Amazon's $9.99 Kindle book prices, which they called "wretched," and worked for years on a scheme to raise prices and limit competition. They also feared that consumers would get used to paying $9.99 for bestsellers and ultimately decrease publishing profits.
Apple was more than willing to help; it wanted favorable deals as it entered the ebook market combined with higher margins on more-expensive products.

Amazon says that in the 14 months the program has been running, it has sold over two million Kindle Singles. Seventy percent of each sale goes to the author or publisher, and Amazon keeps 30%. Amazon wouldn’t disclose its total revenues from those two million singles, but the minimum price of a Single is $0.99 and most are $1.99 (the author or publisher sets the price). So with an average price of $1.87 multiplied by two million, a rough estimate of Amazon’s 30-percent cut is $1.12m.

Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of H.P.’s cloud services… did not say how much the computing services would cost, but said “we are not coming at this at ‘8 cents a virtual computing hour, going to 5 cents.’” Amazon recently cut its prices, and its lowest cost computing is 2 cents per hour, though with extra features it can cost more. While Amazon tends largely to have a self-service model, Hewlett-Packard’s cloud will also offer more personalized sales and service, Mr. Singh said.

H.P. also plans to offer a number of tools for developers to use popular online software languages, like Ruby, Java, and PHP, as well as ways for customers to provision and manage their workloads remotely. The service will also include an online store where people can offer or rent software for use in the Hewlett-Packard public cloud.

<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/28/apple_needs_to_shake_up_subsidised_business_model/">Amazon's</a> <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/13/android_forking/">fork of Google's Android</a> is a far bigger threat to Apple's iOS than Samsung or other Android licensees ever were, because it comes backed by an entire ecosystem of Amazon-supplied content. This hurts Apple, but it also minimises Google's benefits from Android, as well, as Amazon's Kindle Fire comes with an Amazon browser, not Google's. And Amazon, not Google (or Apple) cleans up on content purchased through the device.

Nick Bergus recently posted a link on Facebook to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MR3IVO/ref=nosim/0sil8">a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant sold by Amazon</a> -- it's only $1500! Then the post got sponsored and his family and friends started seeing it when they used Facebook, <a href="http://nbergus.com/2012/02/how-i-became-amazons-pitchman-for-a-55-gallon-drum-of-personal-lubricant-on-facebook/">turning Bergus into a pitchman of sorts for an absurd amount of sex lube</a>…

Get used to this...promoted word of mouth is how a lot of advertising will work in the future.

So how can a late entrant like Amazon, with little-to-no hardware DNA, waltz in and knock off a consumer electronics juggernaut like Samsung, a company that also enjoyed strong growth in 2011?  This is where we believe things get interesting.  In short, Amazon’s launch of Kindle Fire had more in common with an Apple-style launch than it did with aligning with the Android system. To date, the Android world has focused on marketing the operating system and the “power” of the devices, with quality of content and the consumer experience subordinated in priority.

[Carlos] Bueno raised money with Kickstarter to publish his book through Amazon’s self-publishing service, making his book available in a variety of electronic formats and also as a print-on-demand book—each time a physical copy is purchased, it’s printed specifically for that order. Bueno set the price of the book at $14.95 and has sold about 1,000 copies.

But in the last few weeks, Bueno has seen his book become the center of a strange phenomenon on Amazon: the bot market. A reseller in Amazon’s used books section was offering the book for $55—even though the book was available for forty dollars less on the same website.  Then another one appeared, selling for $14.94—lower than the retail price. Another was for sale for $12.50. The only way these resellers could profit would be through excessive shipping and handling charges. 

Even stranger, these resellers are offering “Very Good” or “Like New” used copies of a book that is printed on demand—that is, they’re offering used copies of books that probably don’t even exist.

ChangeWave asked 254 new Kindle Fire owners a series of questions regarding their overall satisfaction and key likes and dislikes, to gauge their reaction to the new tablet device.

Customer Satisfaction. When asked how satisfied they are with their new tablet device, better than one-in-two Kindle Fire owners (54%) say they are Very Satisfied. Another 38% say they are Somewhat Satisfied.

In previous ChangeWave surveys we've found that the percentage of tablet owners who say they are Very Satisfied with a particular device is highly predictive of future demand for that device. So how does the Amazon tablet rating match up against other tablet devices?

While the 54% Very Satisfied rating for the Kindle Fire is considerably below the 74% rating of the industry leading Apple iPad*, it is higher than the 49% average rating for all of the other tablet devices combined.