Matt McGee says, “Amazon has filed a lawsuit accusing more than 1,100 members of the freelance marketplace Fiverr of offering to post phony product reviews on Amazon.com. As Geekwire first reported, today’s lawsuit comes on the heels of an Amazon sting operation in which the company paid some of the Fiverr members named in the suit. Posting phony reviews goes against Amazon’s terms of service, and Fiverr’s rules also ban its members from performing work that violates a third party’s terms of service. The lawsuit isn’t targeting the merchants who may have hired these defendants... [...]

Victor Luckerson says, “Amazon is closing its hotel-booking service Amazon Destinations, the company disclosed Wednesday. Bloomberg reports that the travel site had only been in operation for six months. Amazon Destinations was a play at the $960 billion tourism market, where lodging bookings are currently dominated by sites like Expedia, Priceline and Airbnb. Amazon’s service included maps, deals on hotels and user reviews of restaurants in the area. The site listed locales near New York, Seattle and Los Angeles. Customers who have already made reservations through Amazon Destinations... [...]

Paul Miller says, “The hordes gathered in Las Vegas this week, for Amazon’s latest re:Invent show. Over 18,000 individuals queued to get into sessions, jostled to reach the Oreo Cookie Popcorn (yes, really), and dodged casino-goers to hear from AWS, its partners and its customers. Las Vegas may figure nowhere on my list of favourite places, but the programme of Analyst sessions AWS laid on for earlier in the week definitely justified this trip. The headline items (the Internet of Things, Business Intelligence, and a Snowball chucked straight at the ‘hell’ that is the enterprise... [...]

David Nield says, “Once our homes are kitted out with all manner of smart devices and sensors, where does the growing mass of collected data go to? Enter Kinesis Firehose, one of several services announced by Amazon at its AWS Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week. The Firehose lets device makers stream data straight to the cloud—the Amazon Web Services cloud, to be exact. It builds on the existing Kinesis framework but makes life even easier for developers and engineers: All of the monitoring, scaling and data management is taken care of by Amazon. That means anyone with a home security... [...]

Matt Asay says, “To every big-business tech vendor of pretty much any kind, Amazon Web Services has a message for you: Goodbye. At its annual Re:Invent conference, AWS dismantled pretty much every comfortable fallacy that legacy vendors have used to battle the public cloud generally and AWS specifically. “Security!” “Performance!” and other myths all crumbled, one by one, with customer testimonials and new product announcements. And while some complain that AWS is becoming the Mother of All Lock-in, customers don’t seem to care. Developer Jeff Waugh declares that new AWS services... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “In a survey of 2,000 US consumers, 44 percent of respondents said they go directly to Amazon to start their product searches. That compares to 34 percent who said they use search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to search for products. Just 21 percent of searchers said they start on a retailer site, according to the study conducted by Survata for e-commerce personalization startup BloomReach. For a look at how these search trends have shifted among Amazon and search engines, the press release about the BloomReach study pointed to a 2013 Forrester report found that 30... [...]

Amy Gesenhues says, “Less than two months after rolling out its Text Ads Program as an alternative to Product Ads, Amazon is already alerting advertisers that it will be discontinuing the Text Ads as of October 31, 2015. According to a report from RKG’s blog, the e-commerce giant sent out the following email to advertisers, confirming performance reports for the Text Ads would be available up until February 16, 2016: Amazon’s Text Ads were positioned as an alternative to its Product Ads when it was announced in August that the company would be discontinuing Product Ads as of October 31.... [...]

Nina Zipkin says, “If you’re starting a new company, you want to make sure that your product gets in front of as many interested potential customers as you can. One way to make that possible is to make it available on Amazon, which gets an influx of about 75,000 new products each day. The process, as outlined in an infographic from new product development firm Idea Buyer, takes 10 simple steps. Start by figuring out how many units of your product you intend to sell, and connect with with GS1, an organization that provides barcodes to retailers and businesses, to get a UAN or EPC barcode.... [...]

Suchitra Mulpuru says, “In late March, Amazon cracked up the Twittosphere with an  announcement that it would release a Dash button (not to be confused with the Amazon Dash device which is a wand for your kitchen).  It is a button that you put in your home (like your laundry room) and program to order a single packaged good (say a specific SKU of Tide detergent).  You press the button and that item gets ordered through your Amazon Prime account.  On September 2,  Amazon made the buttons available to the general public for $5 each. My esteemed colleague James McQuivey just published... [...]

David Nield says, “Amazon has announced that ads on its network (including the Amazon.com portal) will no longer be able to use Flash from September 1. It’s another nail in the coffin for the ailing interactive Web technology, which became the go-to tool for displaying videos, animations, games and other types of content online in the 2000s. “This change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience across Amazon and its affiliates, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance,” reads the Amazon statement, hinting at... [...]