TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Barnes & Noble has elevated its battle with Amazon.com, saying that customers browsing the shelves of B&N bookstores won’t find books from Amazon’s new publishing imprint.

The move is in response to Amazon’s recent deal to have Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish the print versions from Amazon’s New York-based publishing division.

While not a Big Six publisher like Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is still an important publishers that previously had ties with Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library earlier this month. The library lets Prime users -- those who pony up $79 per year for free shipping and other benefits -- download one book per month for free to their Kindle devices.

Washington State Tourism photo

If Amazon.com’s employees all lived in one city it would be more populous than the state capital of Olympia.

The Seattle-based tech and e-commerce giant has been hiring heavily. The company ended 2011 with 56,200 workers, a 67 percent increase from a year ago, when Amazon had 33,700 workers.

Amazon chart

Related TechFlash coverage: Amazon.com acts like a startup, but will Wall Street abide?

Amazon pulled in revenue like crazy in the last three months of 2011, with Kindle tablet sales tripling during the holiday shopping season. But the Seattle e-commerce and tech giant also spent like crazy to fuel its current growth surge. The result: net income was down nearly 60 percent.

Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings results -- released Tuesday afternoon -- show that net sales increased 35 percent to $17.43 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $12.95 billion in fourth quarter 2010.

Amazon’s fourth-quarter revenue missed the mark estimated by industry analysts on Wall Street. Amazon’s stock fell 8 percent, trading at about $178 a share in after-hours trading Tuesday.

Analysts are expecting to see Amazon’s revenue grow 40 percent, to $18.2 billion for the fourth quarter.

Amazon chart

Amazon’s cloud service for developers has seen explosive growth, a sign analysts say that Seattle’s ecommerce giant is rapidly becoming the dominate cloud provider.

“As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” Amazon’s AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr blogged.

That was a year-over-year growth rate of 192 percent, Barr blogged.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a web service for developers that allows for the storage and retrieval of data.

ReadWrite Cloud said that the growth reflects the overall rapid adoption of cloud computing and Amazon’s “dominance of the market.”

Will Amazon’s sales of the Kindle Fire offset the Seattle online commerce giant’s spending on distribution centers across the United States?

That is the question that many industry analysts are looking for an answer to when Amazon reports its fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday.

The Street.com asked if Amazon is “biting off more than it can chew.”

Analysts are expecting to see Amazon’s revenue grow 40 percent, to $18.2 billion for the fourth quarter. But the company is expected to report earnings of 19 cents per share, down significantly from its year-ago earnings of 91 cents per share, as spending takes a big bite out of profits.

Analysts say Amazon sold 6 million Kindle Fire tablets during the fourth-quarter holiday season, a figure that could bode well for Amazon’s strategy to have Kindle Fire owners buy up a lot of digital books, games, videos and other content.

In a note to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Scott Devitt said he expects Amazon’s margins to improve:

EMC Isilon Storage Division president Sujal Patel (from left), EMC chairman and chief executive Joe Tucci and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn at recent event where Isilon announced ambitious growth plans for Seattle. (PSBJ photo / Anthony Bolante)

The tech industry has become the new stable source of jobs, luring workers from other sectors who would have shied away from tech following the volatility of 1990s-era startups.

Tech giants including Amazon.com, Apple and Google increased their work forces by at least 50 percent over the past two years, according to Bloomberg News.

The competition for qualified workers has promoted these companies to look to people with non-technical backgrounds, and has drawn many from other sectors to pursue tech careers.

Amazon’s Quidsi unit sells diapers, toys, groceries and pet supplies. And now this unit of the Seattle-based online retailer may be looking to sell hiking boots and camping gear as well.

If so, Amazon would be going up against some big brands including REI, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Hibbett Sports and Cabela’s, analysts at Credit Suisse said Monday, according to a report by Reuters.

Gary Balter and other analysts called out recent job postings by Amazon and Quidsi announcing a new “sports and activities” business and an “Outdoor Sportsman" destination.

A posted job opening for director, merchandising for sports, would be located in Quidsi’s home base of Jersey City:

Amazon's Jeff Bezos has seen Kindle Fire sell briskly, but not as much as the rival iPad

Six million is impressive. But not as much as 15 million.

Amazon.com sold six million Kindle Fire tablets in the fourth quarter, said an analyst who increased his sales estimate from an earlier five million.

PSBJ photo / Anthony Bolante

Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna is putting the resources and expertise of his office behind a problem that is plaguing social media giant Facebook: spam that is targeting Facebook members.

Feisty fights over online spam, rising tech salaries, Apple earnings and a few major deals dominated the news this week.

Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna has teamed up with Facebook to fight spam that targets Facebook uses -- a.k.a. clickjacking -- by lobbing suits against Adscend Media LLC, a Delaware-based online ad network.

Adscend responded to the lawsuits on Friday, saying it complies with state and federal laws and is being falsely accused of clickjacking and "friending" users on Facebook as a deceptive means of spreading spam.

Good news for local techies: The average tech salary in Seattle is now $90,362 -- up 5 percent from one year ago -- and one out of three reported receiving a bonus in 2011. Another sign of a (potentially) healing economy: tech job postings have grown every month over the past two years.

With customers relying upon fellow customers' reviews at online retail sites like Amazon.com Inc. , a firm that promised free products in exchange for favorable five-star reviews has drawn the attention of federal officials.

The New York Times reports that a California company selling leather cases for Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle Fire tablets gave away its products to customers who would write favorable reviews on Amazon.com. Before Amazon officials took down the product page, the cases received 310 five-star reviews out of 335 reviews and nearly all the rest were four stars. The Federal Trade Commission said it is "very concerned" with the rating process.

Is Amazon pondering creating a standalone video-streaming service that will compete with Netflix?

That's what the New York Post is reporting, citing sources that say the Seattle online retailing giant's streaming plan would be different than a paid video-on-demand movie and TV service. Amazon currently offers its Instant Video free with its Amazon Prime $79 unlimited shipping service.

When a state passes new laws requiring retailers like Amazon that advertise on marketing affiliates to collect sales taxes, those affiliates are sometimes legislated out of business.

The New York Times reports that Illinois recently passed a "nexus tax" that requires out-of-state retailers that advertise through Illinois-based Internet marketing affiliates to collect and pay Illinois sales tax.

Apple's CEO has dissed the "limited-function" Kindle Fire

I guess when you can sell 15 million iPads and 37 million iPhones and turn in record revenue and profits, you can feel a little cocky.

Apple's CEO Tim Cook said he didn't see the introduction of Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet having much effect on Apple's sales of iPad tablets

The Wall Street Journal's All Things D reports that Cook said there wasn't an "an obvious effect on the numbers" of iPad sales after Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire last year. Cook added that Amazon might sell a "fair number" of Kindle Fires, but consumers won't be happy with such "limited function" tablets.

iPhone 4S

Apple says it sold 37 million iPhones in the last quarter, as holiday gift buyers gobbled up the new version of the smartphone. Apple says the sales of the iPhone were up 128 percent from the same quarter a year ago.

The sales figures were part of Apple’s earnings report released Tuesday afternoon, marking Apple's continued success in the first quarter since CEO Steve Jobs died.

Apple said it saw record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share. Apple blew away expectations with a 73 percent increase in revenue and a 118 percent increase in profits.

Apple's quarterly revenue was more than double Microsoft's revenue from the same quarter.

Apple also said it sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent increase. The company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent increase.

Seattle tech salary levels with percentage changes (Dice chart)

Here are some numbers that put the local tech hiring frenzy into perspective:

The average tech salary in the greater Seattle area is now $90,362 a year, up 5 percent from a year ago. One in three Seattle-based tech professionals said they had received a bonus. The average for 2011 was $9,892.

On any given day, there are 2,500 openings for tech jobs posted in the greater Seattle area. And tech job postings have grown each month for the past two years.

That's all according to a survey conducted for the tech career site Dice.

The survey bolsters earlier reports about tech hiring. We already know that software engineers and other tech workers are in big demand, with companies like Facebook, Google, eBay and Zynga setting up shop here to tap into our talent pool.