VatorNews - #Amazon is retail king, reaching 1 in 5 Web users

I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but while Borders is scrambling to shed its dead weight of inventory by September, its clearance prices are still higher than Amazon’s. It’s sad, really. Sure, I can go grab a book from borders for 30% off the retail price, or I can just order it from Amazon for a dollar less and save myself the hassle of pushing my way through throngs of suburban yuppies in fanny packs.

And this, my friends, is why Amazon is the indomitable king of retail—both online and off. One in five Internet users worldwide visited an Amazon site in the month of June, making Amazon the most visited retail property on the Web with 282 million visitors, according to new data released by comScore.

#Amazon releases secure #cloud for government

Cloud service provider Amazon Web Services ( #AWS ) today announced AWS GovCloud, a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Amazon's move reflects the ongoing adoption of public cloud services by government entities, including the U.S. Treasury's Recovery Accountability and Transparency board, which hosts Recovery.gov and Treasury.gov on AWS, as well as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which processes telemetry data and high-resolution images on an array of EC2 cluster compute instances.

On #Amazon CEO's curious 'airbag phone' #patent

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has personally attached his name to a most intriguing patent for a phone that has a half dozen tiny airbags.

The idea, as presented in the patent, is that if someone accidentally drops his or her phone, the always-on accelerometer will detect that it's falling too quickly and will deploy the miniature airbags to cushion a potential impact with the ground or floor.

That's the craziest of the ideas mentioned in the patent application. Other possibilities suggest puffing out streams of gas to slow down the fall, or using springs instead of airbags.