Their first big announcement came in the form of a video content partnership with Fox.  The deal will offer access to some of Fox’s movies and TV shows to Amazon Prime members.  The change will be a huge value-add for existing Prime customers (like me), but will also create a large incentive for people to sign up for the content and get the free 2-day shipping  as a byproduct.  As a video source, it certainly seems like encroachment on services like Netflix (post-Qwikster), Hulu, and Apple.

To continue with the PR blitz, Amazon then announced the “Amazon Kindle Fire” – a $199, 7-inch color touch-screen tablet running Android OS to be launched mid-November.  They also highlight features like “100,000 movies and TV shows, your favorite apps and games, web browsing [with Flash-supported Amazon Silk], millions of books, free cloud storage, 17 million songs, and email.”

It would seem, to me, that Apple Amazon’s next lay is to own all media – not simply books.  The move makes a lot of sense given their huge push, and amazing success, of e-books with the Kindle.  My wife owns, and loves, her Kindle while I own, and like (not love), my iPad 1.  The Kindle Fire certainly seems like it has nailed a product that offers everything the iPad is used for while saving cost by excluding the items it’s not (for me, the camera, even if I had an iPad 2).

You guys are the experts – Does it sound like an iPad competitor?  Do you think it will be a race between Apple and Amazon?  Who else will be in the race (Hulu, NetFlix, other)?

The two-day conference, which precedes the annual G8 economic forum, had many noteworthy moments all tracked to the max via twitter (see the infographic here courtesy of Mashable and Synthesio). Many of the 25,000 tweets were in response to comments from Sarkozy who called for tighter regulation of the internet. Speakers such as Eric Schmidt cautioned against regulating things before fully understanding them, saying that “we’ll move faster than any government.”

Most notable was the release of research done by the McKinsey Global Institute (highlights of the 50+ page report were published by Business Insider here), which shows the internet as being responsible for 20 percent of the economic growth for the 13 countries included in the study and for an estimated 2.9 percent of total worldwide GDP. These numbers put the internet at a more powerful driver of economic growth than agriculture or utilities.

All in all the eG8 was a great way to try and bridge the gap between the technology industry and policymakers, who often have a very hard time understanding each other. Only time will tell whether this open forum was a lot of gum flapping, or a positive sign that government wants advice from the world’s tech leaders on internet policy.

Apple iPhone Tracking – First up, we learned last week that iPhones store their location in a file that never gets deleted, and then backup that file to iTunes each time the phone syncs. That means that anyone with access to a laptop belonging to an iPhone owner could see where they had been as long as they had owned their phone. (For the record, my iPhone says I spend a lot of time in Southborough, MA at the uTest headquarters.)

After a few days of silence on the issue, Apple announced that this was the result of a bug in iOS – three bugs actually. 1 – the iPhone keeps the location data for too long and should instead periodically purge it. 2 – this data is backed up to iTunes and should not be. 3 – the data is not deleted if a user disables location services. Apple has plans to fix all three bugs and to also begin encrypting the location file on the iPhone.

Why were they tracking this data at all? Apple uses this information (anonymously) to improve their location services and make it easier for iPhones to determine their location without having to resort to GPS (which is slow). But they only need a small amount of data at a time rather than the entire location history the iPhone was storing.

Do you have an iPhone? Are you curious to see where you’ve been? Here’s a clever app that will plot your location history on a map. If you’re into fancy statistical analysis, you can also use this add-on to plot your location using R.

Amazon EBS Outage – I don’t think anyone will deny that last weekend’s Amazon outage sucked for everyone involved. On April 21, cloud services in Amazon’s East Coast data center were dramatically impaired, halting operations for dozens of internet companies who use Amazon for hosting. The outage was long, and Amazon took several days to bring their data center back online.

Today, Amazon released a fascinating and detailed post-mortem explaining what happened during the outage and why. This document should be required reading for any software tester interested in root cause analysis. Amazon not only identifies what specifically triggered the event (an accidental network misconfiguration) but also how that single event could cause such a massive loss of service. It turns out that many of their well planned redundancies could, in the right circumstances, all execute at once and bring an entire data center to a grinding halt. They concluded that the real issue was software that incorrectly handled data replication during a failure – something they will correct with a bug-fix and update.

Kudos to Amazon for their transparency and for such a well documented failure analysis. We can all learn something from this.

$23 Million Books – Another Amazon story, but one for which they’re entirely blameless. Recently you could buy a copy of The Making of a Fly (a biology text) for a whopping $23,698,655.93 from their used book section. These books were not for sale by Amazon but rather by affiliates who use Amazon as an e-commerce platform. It turns out that two of those affiliates were locked in a very silly battle involving buggy pricing software that just didn’t know when to quit.

Bordeebook and Profnath are two independent book sellers who appear to use computer based pricing for their books. Bordeebook always set their price at 1.270589 times that of Profnath, and then Profnath would raise its price to be 0.9983 of Bordeebook. This cycle would continue over and over again until the top price of the book reached a whopping $23 million. The trend was originally noticed by Michael Eisen – a biology researcher at UC Berkeley. Eventually the issue was caught, and Profnath lowered their price to a more reasonable $106.23.

Lesson learned: when dealing with random data you should set checks, caps, and limits to prevent chaos.

Bugs Thwart Pirates – Not every bug is unplanned or undesirable. Would you believe that some game designers are even including bugs as a mechanism to identify and thwart software pirates? A recent article describes how one developer intentionally included a bug that would cause pirated versions of his game to crash with a very specific error message. When any pirates eventually posted a request for help on a software forum (along with the error message), moderators immediately knew they were dealing with a pirate and would instead ban them from the forum entirely.

This isn’t the first time game developers have used this trick. The always irreverent Cracked recently described six more examples in a recent posting. They range from the subtle (Batman is a klutz in pirated versions of Arkham Asylum) to the overt (the game music in Michael Jackson: The Experience is replaced with vuvuzelas).

Lesson learned: pay for your video games.

Below, three of the leading minds in crowdsourcing, including uTest CEO Doron Reuveni, LiveOps CEO Maynard Webb and Amazon VP Sharon Chiarella, discuss how an elastic workforce can be utilized, and what managers should understand when considering such solutions (GigaOM Net:Work Conference).

CROWDSOURCING… VIRTUAL WORKFORCE… HUMAN CLOUD... You’ve all heard the buzz around the future of work (especially if you’re lucky enough to be a uTester ), but what does it all mean? Next week, on December 9 in San Francisco, we will be at an exciting conference dedicated to discussing and empowering the new workforce: Net:Work 2010, GigaOM’s newest event.

At Net:Work 2010, GigaOM editors, research analysts and technology business leaders will explore just how “user demand” is propelling leading CIOs, CTOs, and top technology execs to shift their thinking and IT purchases.

And what a line-up! At Noon, LiveOps CEO Maynard Webb, Amazon VP Sharon Chiarella, and CloudCrowd CEO Alex Edelstein will join uTest CEO Doron Reuveni on the panel, “The Human Cloud: Elastic Workforce in the Enterprise,” with Trada CEO Niel Robertson as moderator. Click here for full schedule. With all the crowdsourcing companies and thought leaders collaborating in one place, I can’t wait to see what great ideas will come out of it.

BTW: All friends of uTest save 25% when you register using this link. Let us know if you plan on going!

Update 2: Michelle comments again with an explanation of what went wrong.

Update 3: Check out our full interview with Michelle Sullivan about SORBS, blacklisting, the tech running behind the scenes, and their recent database problem.

Did you send an email today that got bounced because of something called SORBS? You’re not alone. Last night, the SORBS anti-spam blacklist (their site is slammed right now) accidentally updated their databases to include an enormous number of the Internet’s mail servers and networks. (The complaining on Twitter is intense.) Large portions of IP addresses owned by Amazon, Google, Rackspace, and others were included in this blacklist and marked as unacceptable for email.

If your mail server happens to live within those IP ranges, then you can’t send emails today to anyone else using the SORBS blacklist. Since tons of companies and people use those ISPs for hosting mail servers, you can imagine the pain and suffering this is causing.

So how does this all work? Anti-spam networks like SORBS were created as a way to reduce the amount of spam sent and received around the world. Spammers, like most email users, tend to send their emails from one or two mail servers. If you can locate the originating mail server for a piece of spam, then it can be put into a “blacklist” of known spammers. Those blacklists are compiled and shared by independent groups, like SORBS.

When an ISP receives a piece of email, it will check with the blacklist to see if that email came from a known spam server. If it did, then the ISP will simply reject the email entirely. It works pretty well – unless the blacklist becomes corrupted.

And that’s the problem with an “off or on” system like this that everyone uses. One corrupted database, accidental data entry, or misconfiguration is all it takes to create mayhem around the world for millions of innocent users.

By the way, if you run an email server that uses SORBS for blacklisting, you might want to disable the SORBS checking until this gets resolved.

Updated: More details from SANS ISC.

But despite the fact that hundreds of testers were scouring their site for flaws, at least one MAJOR software bug went unnoticed: a $3 billion validation error, as recently reported by NetworkWorld.

Apparently, a Californian software engineer in the market for a Discovery Channel ‘Cells’ CD-ROM was able to find an edition on Amazon. No surprises here. The only problem (aside from the fact it only runs on Windows 98), was that the price tag for the item was about $3 billion. Plus $3.99 shipping and handling, of course. Seeing the price, and knowing full well that Amazon would settle the issue in a fair and timely manner, he decided to purchase the item on a lark. Here’s his first hand account:

I mentioned I was an engineer, so we talked for a few minutes about e-commerce validation routines and such. He described a number of measures they had in place to make sure orders with erroneous too-low prices would get caught; but nothing like that existed for the other extreme.

The best part: He explained that Amazon would be implementing such limits ASAP — and therefore my transaction would be the largest Amazon purchase ever!

Amazon was very professional about the whole situation. The caller acknowledged there was some humorous aspect to it, but made it clear they treat the shopper’s experience with the highest regard and they wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. I felt the message was sincere — it was really nice to get the call.

If there’s a better example of how to handle your customers (as well as your own reputation) when an issue arises, I’d love to hear it.

Curious about the results? Check out the articles below:

• Study: Amazon Most User Friendly by Byron Acohido (@lastwatchdog)
  

• Amazon Trumps Target, Walmart in Bug Battle by Kate Rockwood (@katerockin)

• Holiday Shopping: Amazon FTW! [STUDY] by Christina Warren (@film_girl)

• Amazon Is Least-Buggy Retail Site, Says Report by Nicholas Kolakowski (@eWEEKNews)

So, the battle begs the question: Which e-tailer do you trust the most?

While millions of shoppers were making leisurely holiday purchases, our global community of testers were hard at work – reporting a wide range of functional, usability and GUI bugs, as well as providing  user feedback. In doing so, you’ve once again demonstrated the value of comprehensive testing performed by skilled professionals. Well done!

The media, by the way, are all over this story, so we’ll be sure to provide a wrap-up of all the news coverage later this week.

To the Victors Go the Spoils
The prize for Top Tester went to Brad Sellick of Canada, while Tuyen Tran of Vietnam took home the new Judge’s Choice Award. Other cash-prize winners included Gaurang Joshi and Ranchhod Prajapati (both of India) for Best Bugs, as well as Gizem Sahin (Turkey) and Jaya Dinu (US) in the Best Feedback category. There were over 30 winners in this quarter’s competition, so be sure to check out the results page for the complete list.

And now, a few more top-line findings:

*Amazon ranked highest in most categories (pricing, ease of use, product reviews), while Walmart ranked highest in product search tools and also earned good marks for pricing.

*Target.com ranked lowest in all five categories and accounted for 261 bugs, more than half of all bugs reported in the competition.

*67% of testers did not choose “lowest prices” when asked to identify their most important category. In fact, only 1 in 3 chose lowest prices as their primary decision making criteria.

*Nearly 75% of all survey respondents said they trust Amazon most for their holiday shopping.

The Final Bug Results:

Amazon.com:

• 94 bugs reported
• 11% classified as “showstoppers”
• 21% Technical, 67% Functional and 12% GUI

Walmart.com:

• 150 bugs reported
• 9% classified as “showstoppers”
• 23% Technical, 54% Functional and 23% GUI

Target.com:

• 261 bugs reported
• 7 percent classified as “showstoppers”
• 20% Technical, 56% Functional and 25% GUI

Thanks again to all of the testers who participated in this Bug Battle. Remember, we’re just getting started with this competition, and so if you have ideas for what we should test next, drop us a comment or shoot us an email!

As this post is being written, 100+ testers from around the world have already submitted more than 500 bugs in Walmart.com, Amazon.com and Target.com – another remarkable display of talent from our testing community.

But it’s not over yet. There’s still time to complete your last-minute holiday bug hunting, so be sure to sign in to the uTest platform and get cracking. Remember, our judges are more interested in quality over quantity when it comes to the bugs. In other words, one great bug is all it takes, as evidenced by our past winners.

If you can’t find any bugs to submit – but still want a chance to win cash for the usability survey – then raise your hand in this uTest Forums thread. After all, there’s nearly $4,000 in prize money at stake, so what do you have to lose?

Thanks to all those who have submitted bugs for the competition, and good luck to the remaining participants.