TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Lawmakers in a number of cash-strapped states are poised to revive efforts to make Amazon.com and other internet retailers collect sales tax — efforts that, if successful, could have far-reaching consequences for Amazon’s fast-growing e-commerce business.

Seattle-based Amazon only collects sales tax in a handful of states. But last year, a variety of state legislatures, looking for new sources of revenue to fill budget holes, tried to force Amazon and other internet retailers to collect sales tax on web purchases.

Amazon pushed back and managed to stomp out or neuter most of those efforts in 2009. But with many states continuing to face acute budget crises, some state lawmakers appear likely to raise the topic again in the new year.

A lousy economy. An up-and-down year for Microsoft. The rise and fall of media. There was certainly plenty to cover in 2009 when it came to technology news. But what was the biggest story of the year? We're winding down The Flashies, our year-end online awards of the biggest events in technology. Today marks the last category -- Tech Story of the Year -- so make sure to cast your vote.

As you can see, we're focusing not on individual posts but rather on overarching stories that we followed throughout the year. Continue reading for our take on each story. As with previous categories, feel free to offer a write-in candidate in the comments below. We'll announce all the Flashies winners in a post next week.

Amazon.com has never revealed sales data for its Kindle electronic readers, and CEO Jeff Bezos has said the company may never do so. But Amazon's recent string of press releases (see here, here and here) touting Kindle sales records, without revealing any actual numbers, is starting to get on Wall Street's nerves. Reuters, in an analysis piece, says "investor patience with the lack of details has begun to wear thin."

Is Amazon.com planning to offer its call center technology to other companies? A new job posting from the online retailer seems to indicate so. Amazon is seeking engineers to work on its "internally developed Call Center Platform" who will help take the technology "to the next level, making it available to organizations outside of Amazon."

That would be an interesting addition to Amazon's growing suite of cloud computing services.

Update: The job posting was briefly taken down yesterday following this report but is back up now.

What buzzword most defined the past year in technology? That's the intriguing question in today's Flashies category, as we get close to wrapping up our year-end community choice awards.

And the nominees are ...

Continue reading for our take on each word. As with previous categories, free to offer a write-in candidate in the comments below. Other readers will be able to support your nomination by logging in and clicking the "like" button next your comment. We'll announce all the Flashies winners in a post after the end of the year.

This holiday season is shaping up to be a decent one for online retail, but looks like the big players may have been the real beneficiaries.

ComScore just came out with a new batch of numbers, which shows online spending from November 1 through Christmas Eve increased 5 percent from the same period a year ago, to $27 billion. That's a big improvement over last holiday season, when online spending was down 3 percent. But this season's sales uptick may have not have been evenly distributed.

How would you move this mountain? Photo via robertpaulyoung

Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft are known for their tough -- some would say down right perplexing -- job interview questions. For example, we had a friend who was asked during an Amazon.com job interview earlier this year to calculate the weight of a Boeing 747. The answer isn't quite as important as the thought process.

Now, Glassdoor.com -- the folks who earlier this month released a list of the best and worst CEOs -- has compiled 25 "oddball" interview questions of the year. The Sausalito company, which is backed by Zillow.com's Rich Barton, put together the list from more than 14,000 interview questions that job candidates submitted on the site.

Of course, you will find some real curve balls from Microsoft -- "How would you move Mt. Fuji?" and Amazon.com -- "Given a dictionary of words, how do you calculate the anagrams for a new word?" Bellevue-based Expedia also makes the list with this question: "How would you sell me eggnog in Florida in the summer?"

Keep reading for the full list, and let us know how you'd answer some of the tougher questions. Speaking of which, Glassdoor found from its survey that tech job interviews were harder than other job interviews and that the candidates had a slightly less favorable experience during the process.

Flickr image via infrogmation

As Amazon.com racks up sales and profits, pressure is once again mounting on the online retailer to start charging sales tax on the products its sells. The case was made in a column this weekend in The New York Times by Randall Stross, a business professor at San Jose State University.

Stross starts his piece with an interesting anecdote that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos originally considered locating his company on an Indian reservation near San Francisco -- in order to access tech talent but avoid sales tax in the country's most populous state. As history has it, Bezos couldn't set up shop on the reservation and moved the company to Seattle.

According to Stross, Washington is one of five states where it collects sales tax. But Amazon also has operations -- warehouses, customer service operations, development centers, etc. -- in 14 other states where it does not collect sales tax.

We were pretty excited to unwrap some geeky gifts this holiday season. But not quite as pumped as this little boy who went nuts after opening an Xbox360. (Note the dog's reaction too).

As for team TechFlash: Eric got a Kindle. John got a Sony digital video camera. And Todd? We're hearing reports that Santa gave him some new underwear.

Anyway, today's a day when millions of Americans watch football and try to figure out their new gadgets. (I already gave up trying to install software for my mother-in-law's new Coby Digital Photo Keychain. Really, why is this so difficult?).

What was the big holiday tech gift for you this holiday? And have you encountered any horror stories so far in trying to assemble or learn your new gadgets?

Holiday shoppers who were hoping to purchase last minute gifts at some of the top e-commerce retailers in the country were greeted with a surprise Wednesday evening as a denial of service attack slowed down sites such as Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Expedia and others. Cnet's Tom Krazit has details on what went wrong, noting that the attack hit the UltraDNS data centers in Palo Alto and San Jose, Calif.

Amazon.com's S3 and EC2 Web services were also hit, causing additional outages and lag times for some smaller Web sites.

We've already highlighted some of the "tech debacles" of the past year. But with the holiday upon us, we're feeling a little more cheerful. That brings us to today's installment of The Flashies: "Tech Triumph of the Year." Vote in this poll, or offer a write-in candidate in the comments.

For a more detailed description of each nominee, keep reading.

Apple's Steve Jobs, Cisco's John Chambers and Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos are among the best-performing CEOs in the world, according to a study released this week by the Harvard Business Review.

Jobs ranked number one, while Chambers came in fourth and Bezos ranked seventh. But one of the big names in the tech industry was noticeably absent: Microsoft's Steve Ballmer.

The Harvard researchers came up with the rankings of the top 100 CEOs by looking at total shareholder return of 1,999 executives. It only studied those CEOs who held the position no earlier than January 1995 and no later than December 2007, knocking out execs such as Larry Ellison, Bill Gates and Jack Welch.

Busy legal times for Amazon. The online retail giant is negotiating a settlement to a lawsuit over cracked Kindles. Now the company has been slapped with a lawsuit from a small electronics retailer called Sellify. Sellify is suing Amazon for trademark infringement and defamation, among other things, over Google search ads that paint Sellify as a "scam artist." The lawsuit alleges that an Amazon affiliate, not Amazon itself, is buying the ads, but argues that the affiliates are acting as Amazon's "de facto agents."

With Kindles apparently selling like hotcakes this holiday season, Amazon.com is trying to make a complaint about cracked Kindles go away. The online retail giant has reached an "agreement in principle" with a Seattle man who sued the company back in July, alleging that a Kindle he bought his wife as a birthday gift developed cracks and eventually froze up due to an ill-fitting Kindle cover.

No details yet on the terms of the settlement. The plaintiff, Matthew Geise, had sought unspecified damages and class action status for the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Seattle. Perhaps Amazon will take the opportunity to set Kindle policy, like it did with the settlement over its Orwellian book deletions.

Flickr photo via brownpau

Is the big snowstorm that blanketed parts of the East coast producing a sales bump for Amazon.com and other online retailers? Web data firm Coremetrics reports online retail sales on Friday through Sunday — the weekend before Christmas, when online sales traditionally drop off — were up more than 20 percent from the same period a year ago. Coremetrics said free shipping and other promotions being dangled by web retailers are luring more shoppers, including those who were snowed in and couldn't get to the malls.