According to comScore, Web traffic to Amazon in the U.S. rose 14.8 percent, far outstripping that of overall U.S. Internet traffic, which grew just 3.5 percent. “It appears that Amazon is gaining share the old-fashioned way,” ThinkEquity analyst Ed Weller noted last week, “by acquiring more and more customers…and selling more to each of them.” Judging from the nice gain in third-quarter earnings the company posted after Thursday’s closing bell, that would seem to be the case.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s hair-shirt apology for Kindlegate was a nice gesture, but it didn’t go over particularly well with Justin Gawronski, a Michigan high school senior who lost his homework when the retailer remotely deleted a copy of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” from his Kindle earlier this month. He’s filed a class action suit against Amazon seeking to prevent it from deleting books from Kindles in the future.

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Well, this is unexpected. Amazon has agreed to purchase online shoe retailer Zappos.com in a deal valued at about $850 million. Under its terms, the retailer will acquire all outstanding Zappos shares in exchange for roughly 10 million shares of Amazon common stock, valued at about $807 million, and some $40 million in cash and restricted stock. If the shoe fits, right?

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It was like a liveblogging tournament this past week–one that included a lot of the big players, but ended in a three-way tie.

According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft-Yahoo deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown also wondered whether Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz on his trip to the Bay Area this week, or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination.

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Much ado about the Amazon Kindle 2.0 this week:

After its official unveiling on Feb. 9, the e-book reader started shipping on Monday, and actually managed to grab much–but not all–of the hype that’s surrounded Twitter of late. The device has been met with much acclaim, though it’s by no means unanimous.

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QOTD

They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

– Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, on Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature

QOTD

There is no vision for that. We deliver video to IP [Internet protocol]-connected devices today, but they aren’t made by Amazon. I don’t see why we would need to make such a device. There is a proliferation of such devices. Plus that technology is being built right into televisions.”

– Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says the company has no plans for a video Kindle.

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Back in December, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos claimed that the 2008 holiday season would be the company’s best yet, but he offered nothing in the way of data to back it up. Well, here’s the proof. The online retailer reported a nice gain in earnings for the fourth quarter thanks to strong sales during the holiday shopping season. And its shares are trading up nearly 10 14 percent on the news.

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The short list of candidates for President Elect Barack Obama’s cabinet-level CTO may be quite a bit shorter than Washington insiders claim. In the run-up to Tuesday’s election, Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Princeton professor Ed Felten and Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos were among the names of those who might be considered for the job. But it’s beginning to look more and more like the Obama camp already has someone in mind for the position: Julius Genachowski.

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This year’s D conference had its share of great lines–tired ones, too (we’re all clear on the subject of Facebook and information sharing, right?). Here’s a selection of the former…

I will probably never be a CEO again.”

–Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang states the obvious

It’s a company that creates technology.

– Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answers the question, “What is a technology company?”

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The Amazon bears are growling this morning.
Shares in the company, which have already lost more than 20% of their value in 2008, slipped further in early trading (but recovered later), though Amazon said yesterday that profits more than doubled in its fourth quarter. “This quarter showed accelerated sales growth and record operating profits,” CEO Jeff [...]

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