On Wednesday, California governor Jerry Brown signed a law that requires online retailers to collect sales tax from CA residents even if the companies have no brick-and-mortar presence in the state. It’s another example of the so-called “Amazon Tax,” which circumvents the brick-and-mortar statute of federal law by declaring CA-based affiliates–say, a personal blog linking out to Amazon or Drugstore.com products for a small slice of any sale action–as a physical presence. READ MORE
Anyone with their eye on an ultra-portable MacBook Air–or a number of them for staff use–is advised to sit tight for a few weeks, at least: Ars Technica is reporting that dwindling availability of the notebook is fueling yet more speculation that a refreshed version will be unveiled in July. READ MORE
Following the success of Pandora’s IPO last week, London-based music streaming service Spotify hopes to achieve similar success when it debuts in the U.S. later this summer. Spotify, which allows users to listen to any artist, album, or genre on-demand, has just closed its latest funding round with $100 million and working on deals with the four major U.S. record labels and Facebook. READ MORE
Hosting giant GoDaddy announced its own cloud computing service called Data Center On Demand, but don’t expect another Amazon Web Services or Rackspace clone. Unlike many other user-friendly cloud services, GigaOM reports GoDaddy’s offering “requires technical expertise,” so GoDaddy suggests customers have a professional IT staff already in place. READ MORE
First, Square revolutionized how we send and receive credit card payments; now, the mobile payments start-up based in San Francisco is looking to replace the cash register altogether. GigaOM reports that Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter and co-founder of Square, has released his two latest creations—the Square Register for merchants, and the Square Card Holder for consumers. READ MORE
Amazon now joins Walmart, Target, Best Buy and eBay which all give instant trade-in quotes for used electronics. Its new Electronics Trade-In Store offers customers a way to trade in things like tablets, cell phones, MP3 players, cameras, and GPS devices for an Amazon.com gift card, regardless of where the device was originally purchased. READ MORE
Cloud computing single-handedly invented the concept of on-demand, programmable infrastructure that could be accessed over the Internet. Over the last five years, companies like Amazon are tirelessly innovating to provide better security and faster, more efficient networking to meet the demands of start-ups, consumers, and enterprises. READ MORE
As new details emerge surrounding Amazon’s still-unconfirmed run at the tablet industry, an unnamed source reveals that the popular online retail store plans to release not one, but two tablets. According to PaidContent.org, Amazon’s lower-range model, codenamed “Coyote,” will run on a Tegra 2 chip from NVIDIA, while its higher-range “Hollywood” model will be built on a quad-core, NVIDIA T30 Kal-El processor. READ MORE
How did Amazon, which started by selling books online, morph into a diversified online giant boasting $34 billion in annual revenue? Erick Schonfeld with TechCrunch posted a fantastic slideshow created by global consulting boutique faberNovel that brings to light a myriad of fast facts you might not have known about Amazon, which is now responsible for one-third of e-commerce transactions in the United States. READ MORE
Last week’s blackout of Amazon’s Web Services caused expensive and exasperating traffic halts to many prominent sites such as Reddit, Foursquare, and Hootsuite. However, according to Mashable, Amazon has finally issued a formal apology and lengthy explanation of how the outage occurred, why the system failed, and what Amazon plans to do to prevent similar issues in the future. READ MORE
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