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Longtime Microsoft veteran Charlie Kindel, who left the software giant a year and a half ago to launch a startup, just joined Amazon to work on a "secret" project.

Kindel held several jobs in his 21 years at Microsoft, including general manager in charge of rallying independent software developers to its Windows Phone platform. His hire at Amazon could stoke more speculation that the online retail giant is readying a mobile phone of its own. Kindel isn't saying, noting on his recently updated LinkedIn page only that he's working on "something wonderful."

The news … Read more

AT&T today announced the upcoming availability of the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 LTE.

The connected tablet will sell for $399.99, and can be added onto Mobile Share plans, starting at $10 per month.

For those planning to hold onto the tablet for long-term, AT&T is knocking $150 off the price just so long as you commit to a two-year service agreement. Specifically, you get a $100 discount for signing the two-year contract, while an additional $50 comes back to you as a credit activation for tablets purchased in a retail store. The $249.… Read more

Amazon agreed today to buy book-recommendation site Goodreads for an undisclosed amount.

The San Francisco-based company should provide Amazon with another way to get readers to buy books from it, both digitally and from its warehouses. Amazon said it also plans to use Goodreads to help authors find readers who might not otherwise know about them.

"Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world," Russ Grandinetti, Amazon vice president of Kindle Content, said in a statement. "In addition, both Amazon and Goodreads have helped … Read more

New York state's highest court today ruled that out-of-state online retailers must charge state tax on New York State customers. Now it gets interesting since the 4-1 judgment by the New York State Court of Appeals makes it all the more likely that the question will get an airing, sooner rather than later, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Along with New York, eight other states have similar laws on the books ending the hidden tax break people got when buying products from companies on the Internet. Those statutes require the states in question to collect sales tax … Read more

Amazon has added another comedy TV show pilot to its original programming lineup -- and this time it's about Silicon Valley startups.

The series, called "Betas," centers on four computer geeks and "their quest for nerd fame as they attempt to crack the ultimate code." This brings the total number of pilots slated for production on Amazon's Prime video service to 14. The episodes will air on Amazon Prime Instant for free so customers can offer feedback on which pilots Amazon's production group, Amazon Studios, should make into a season-long series.

The creatives … Read more

Late next year, as we're glued to our screens watching Netflix's newest original TV series, will the online-movie powerhouse somehow be tapping our bodies' electrical energy and selling it to evil machines?

If the credentials of the show's creators are any indication, that's a distinct possibility.

"Sense8," a sci-fi show Netflix describes as a "global tale of minds linked and souls hunted," is the brainchild of the Wachowskis -- aka sibling duo Andy and Lana Wachowski, the masterminds behind "The Matrix" movies. The 10-episode first season of "Sense8" will be available for streaming in late 2014, Netflix announced today.… Read more

Here's one that can't come as a surprise to the legal team at Amazon.com: Pinterest is fighting Amazon's bid to win the contract to control the .pin generic top-level-domain, or gTLD.

Among the reasons for Pinterest's objections: Domain names on .pin -- clothes.pin, say, or whatever Amazon has in mind -- would cause confusion and violate the trademarks that Pinterest holds on the term "pin." Those trademarks include "the standalone PIN trademark and a family of PIN-formative marks, including Pinterest, PIN It, P, and others," according to the complaint -- … Read more