Amazon

Amazon Inc., is an American multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington that focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Google, Apple and Facebook.

About
Amazon is known for its ability to disrupt well-established industries through technological innovation and mass scale. It is the world's largest e-commerce marketplace, AI assistant provider, and cloud computing platform  as measured by revenue and market capitalization. Amazon is the largest Internet company by revenue in the world. It is the second largest employer in the United States  and one of the world's most valuable companies. Amazon is the second largest technology company by revenue.

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994 in Bellevue, Washington. The company initially started as an online marketplace for books but later expanded to sell electronics, software, video games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization. In 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.4 billion, which vastly increased Amazon's presence as a brick-and-mortar retailer. In 2018, Bezos announced that its two-day delivery service, Amazon Prime, had surpassed 100 million subscribers worldwide.

Amazon distributes downloads and streaming of video, music, audiobook through its Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, and Audible subsidiaries. Amazon also has a publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, a film and television studio, Amazon Studios and a cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services. It produces consumer electronics including Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo devices. In addition, Amazon subsidiaries also include Ring, Twitch.tv, Whole Foods Market, and iMDb. Amazon has separate retail websites for some countries and also offers international shipping of some of its products to certain other countries.

Various Channels

 * 1) amazon
 * 2) Amazon News
 * 3) Inside Amazon Videos
 * 4) Amazon Fire TV
 * 5) Kindle
 * 6) amazonfashion
 * 7) Amazon Web Services

History
In 1994, Jeff Bezos incorporated Amazon. In May 1997, the organization went public. The company began selling music and videos in 1998, at which time it began operations internationally by acquiring online sellers of books in United Kingdom and Germany. The following year, the organization also sold video games, consumer electronics, home-improvement items, software, games, and toys in addition to other items.

In 2002, the corporation started Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provided data on Web site popularity, Internet traffic patterns and other statistics for marketers and developers. In 2006, the organization grew its AWS portfolio when Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which rents computer processing power as well as Simple Storage Service (S3), that rents data storage via the Internet, were made available. That same year, the company started Fulfillment by Amazon which managed the inventory of individuals and small companies selling their belongings through the company internet site. In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems to automate its inventory-management business, purchasing Whole Foods Market supermarket chain five years later in 2017.

Board of Directors
As of March 2019, the board of directors is:[23]
 * Jeff Bezos, President, CEO, and Chairman
 * Tom Alberg, Managing partner, Madrona Venture Group
 * Rosalind Brewer, Group President, and COO, Starbucks
 * Jamie Gorelick, partner, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale, and Dorr
 * Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Dean and Vice Provost, Cornell University
 * Judy McGrath, former CEO, MTV Networks
 * Indra Nooyi, former CEO, PepsiCo
 * Jon Rubinstein, former Chairman, and CEO, Palm, Inc.
 * Thomas O. Ryder, former Chairman, and CEO, Reader's Digest Association
 * Patty Stonesifer, President, and CEO, Martha's Table
 * Wendell P. Weeks, Chairman, President, and CEO, Corning Inc.

Merchant Partnerships
In 2000, U.S. toy retailer Toys "R" Us entered into a 10-year agreement with Amazon, valued at $50 million per year plus a cut of sales, under which Toys "R" Us would be the exclusive supplier of toys and baby products on the service, and the chain's website would redirect to Amazon's Toys & Games category. In 2004, Toys "R" Us sued Amazon, claiming that because of a perceived lack of variety in Toys "R" Us stock, Amazon had knowingly allowed third-party sellers to offer items on the service in categories that Toys "R" Us had been granted exclusivity. In 2006, a court ruled in favor of Toys "R" Us, giving it the right to unwind its agreement with Amazon and establish its own independent e-commerce website. The company was later awarded $51 million in damages.

In 2001, Amazon entered into a similar agreement with Borders Group, under which Amazon would co-manage Borders.com as a co-branded service,  Borders pulled out of the arrangement in 2007, with plans to also launch its own online store.

On October 18, 2011, Amazon.com announced a partnership with DC Comics for the exclusive digital rights to many popular comics, including Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, The Sandman, and Watchmen. The partnership has caused well-known bookstores like Barnes & Noble to remove these titles from their shelves.

In November 2013, Amazon announced a partnership with the United States Postal Service to begin delivering orders on Sundays. The service, included in Amazon's standard shipping rates, initiated in metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and New York because of the high-volume and inability to deliver in a timely way, with plans to expand into Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix by 2014.

In June 2017, Nike confirmed a "pilot" partnership with Amazon to sell goods directly on the platform.

As of October 11, 2017, AmazonFresh sells a range of Booths branded products for home delivery in selected areas.

In September 2017, Amazon ventured with one of its sellers JV Appario Retail owned by Patni Group which has recorded a total income of US$ 104.44 million (₹ 759 crore) in financial year 2017–18.

In November 2018, Amazon reached an agreement with Apple Inc. to sell selected products through the service, via the company and selected Apple Authorized Resellers. As a result of this partnership, only Apple Authorized Resellers may sell Apple products on Amazon effective January 4, 2019.

Products and Services
Amazon.com's product lines available at its website include several media (books, DVDs, music CDs, videotapes and software), apparel, baby products, consumer electronics, beauty products, gourmet food, groceries, health and personal-care items, industrial & scientific supplies, kitchen items, jewelry, watches, lawn and garden items, musical instruments, sporting goods, tools, automotive items and toys & games.

Amazon.com has a number of products and services available, including:


 * AmazonFresh
 * Amazon Prime
 * Amazon Web Services
 * Alexa
 * Appstore
 * Amazon Drive
 * Echo
 * Kindle
 * Fire tablets
 * Fire TV
 * Video
 * Kindle Store
 * Music
 * Music Unlimited
 * Amazon Digital Game Store
 * Amazon Studios
 * AmazonWireless

Subsidiaries
Amazon owns over 40 subsidiaries, including Zappos, Shopbop, Diapers.com, Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), Audible, Goodreads, Teachstreet, Twitch and IMDb.

A9.com
A9.com, a company focused on researching and building innovative technology, has been a subsidiary since 2003.

Amazon Maritime
Amazon Maritime, Inc. holds a Federal Maritime Commission license to operate as a non-vessel-owning common carrier (NVOCC), which enables the company to manage its own shipments from China into the United States.

Audible
Audible.com is a seller and producer of spoken audio entertainment, information and educational programming on the Internet. Audible sells digital audiobooks, radio and TV programs and audio versions of magazines and newspapers. Through its production arm, Audible Studios, Audible has also become the world's largest producer of downloadable audiobooks. On January 31, 2008, Amazon announced it would buy Audible for about $300 million. The deal closed in March 2008 and Audible became a subsidiary of Amazon.

Beijing Century Joyo Courier Services
Beijing Century Joyo Courier Services is a subsidiary of Amazon and it applied for a freight forwarding license with the US Maritime Commission. Amazon is also building out its logistics in trucking and air freight to potentially compete with UPS and FedEx.

Brilliance Audio
Brilliance Audio is an audiobook publisher founded in 1984 by Michael Snodgrass in Grand Haven, Michigan. The company produced its first 8 audio titles in 1985. The company was purchased by Amazon in 2007 for an undisclosed amount. At the time of the acquisition, Brilliance was producing 12–15 new titles a month. It operates as an independent company within Amazon. In 1984, Brilliance Audio invented a technique for recording twice as much on the same cassette. The technique involved recording on each of the two channels of each stereo track. It has been credited with revolutionizing the burgeoning audiobook market in the mid-1980s since it made unabridged books affordable.

ComiXology
ComiXology is a cloud-based digital comics platform with over 200 million comic downloads as of September 2013. It offers a selection of more than 40,000 comic books and graphic novels across Android, iOS, Fire OS and Windows 8 devices and over a web browser. Amazon bought the company in April 2014.

CreateSpace
CreateSpace, which offers self-publishing services for independent content creators, publishers, film studios, and music labels, became a subsidiary in 2009.

Eero
Eero is a company that manufactures mesh-capable routers. The company was founded in 2015 and is based in San Francisco. Amazon announced it would buy Eero in 2019.

Goodreads
Goodreads is a "social cataloging" website founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler, a software engineer, and entrepreneur, and Elizabeth Chandler. The website allows individuals to freely search Goodreads' extensive user-populated database of books, annotations, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions and discussions. In December 2007, the site had over 650,000 members and over 10 million books had been added. Amazon bought the company in March 2013.

Lab126
Lab126, developers of integrated consumer electronics such as the Kindle became a subsidiary in 2004.

Project Kuiper
Amazon announced that they would fund and deploy a large broadband internet satellite constellation in April 2019, something expected to take up to a decade to fully deploy all 3,236 satellites planned for the full constellation and operationalize them to provide internet to "tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet." Amazon calls this large satellite internet constellation "Project Kuiper." Kuiper will work in concert with Amazon's previously-announced large network of 12 satellite ground station facilities (the "AWS Ground Station unit") announced in November 2018.

Ring
Ring is a home automation company founded by Jamie Siminoff in 2013. It is primarily known for its WiFi powered smart doorbells, but manufactures other devices such as security cameras. Amazon bought Ring for $1 billion USD in 2018.

Shelfari
Shelfari was a social cataloging website for books. Shelfari users built virtual bookshelves of the titles which they owned or had read and they could rate, review, tag and discuss their books. Users could also create groups that other members could join, create discussions and talk about books, or other topics. Recommendations could be sent to friends on the site for what books to read. Amazon bought the company in August 2008.[51] Shelfari continued to function as an independent book social network within the Amazon until January 2016, when Amazon announced that it would be merging Shelfari with Goodreads and closing down Shelfari.