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Bezos and O'Reilly 2.0

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun Jan 28, 2007 11:05 AM
from the it's-sweet-that-they-found-each-other dept.
theodp writes "Looks like Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly are investing together again, and this time it has nothing to do with patent reform. In Bezos Goes Web 2.0 Wild, Private Equity Week's Alexander Haislip reports that Explore Holdings, which as of late has been doing business as Bezos Expeditions, is one of 19 investors that have pumped $34.3M into O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures."
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[+] Your Rights Online: Amazon Using Patent Reform to Strengthen 1-Click 71 comments
theodp writes "As some predicted, lawyers for Amazon.com have recently submitted 1-Click prior art solicited by Tim O'Reilly under the auspices of Jeff Bezos' patent reform effort to the USPTO, soliciting a 'favorable action' that would help bulletproof the patent. Last June, an Amazon lobbyist referred to deficiencies with the same prior art as he tried to convince Congress that 1-Click was novel, prompting Rep. Howard Berman to call BS."
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    • by William_Lee (834197) on Sunday January 28 2007, @11:16AM (#17790160)
      Perhaps Mr. Bezos should spend more time working for Amazon.com. They used to be the best, but now they are a barely maintained database of discontinued products with bad specs and irrelevant search results.

      Care to provide evidence of this before you're modded down by someone else into the depths of troll hell?
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Fine, mod me into obscurity for my opinions.

        My point is that I wouldn't trust Jeff Bezos to find the best tech investments, because his own company is doing a such a poor job of maintaining their own database, even in their core business. Do a search on something as simple as a book title (say, "War of the Worlds") then try and wade through the bizarre results. Of the top 5, one of them is actually a paperback copy of H. G. Wells' _The War of the Worlds_. Two of them are peripherally related (an illustrated
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          > I don't think that Mr. Bezos would
          > recognize a Web 2.0 application

          On the other hand, Amazon is doing a bunch of innovative things, like the Simple Storage Service (S3). We're using S3 for indi [getindi.com] (with encryption, of course), and it's very, very handy; it keeps us from having to build out a big storage infrastructure.

          There's also the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) they're doing. I was at a Rails Edge conference last week and James Duncan Davidson [duncandavidson.com] did a nifty presentation on deploying Rails apps. The
    • by CRCulver (715279) <crculver@christopherculver.com> on Sunday January 28 2007, @11:42AM (#17790282) Homepage

      Perhaps Mr. Bezos should spend more time working for Amazon.com. They used to be the best, but now they are a barely maintained database of discontinued products with bad specs and irrelevant search results.

      Amazon is still the best bookstore for in-print books. Since books don't have "specs" (except things like page number and dimensions, which I've never seen screwed up), I suppose you are bitching about electronics. Well, Amazon's core mission is books. Just because they branched out into other areas which weren't as successful doesn't mean that they suck entirely.

      As for out of print books, often one can still order them through the "Used and new..." listings of third-party sellers. But even with a product is not available through any avenue on the site, I'd still prefer that Amazon list them. Why? Because people can review them, and give you an idea of whether you want to search for the book in more obscure venues. To take one example, I've recently discovered that Amazon lists the original Danish publications of Pia Tafdrup's poetry. A book like Tusindfoedt [amazon.com] isn't available for order in the U.S., but I'm currently writing a review that will tell people this book is so good that it's well worth ordering it from Tafdrup's publishers Gyldendal in Denmark

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2007, @11:16AM (#17790162)
    The no spin zone with AJAX and semantic tags.
  • Hype 2.0 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The really advanced stuff is really obscure and really subtle. Not something cool hunters are likely to pick up on. Move along. Nothing to see here.
  • by dangitman (862676) on Sunday January 28 2007, @08:15PM (#17793898)
    Dang it, isn't one Bill O'Reilly already too many?
  • Unperson 2.0 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BillGatesLoveChild (1046184) on Monday January 29 2007, @01:38AM (#17796338) Journal
    Jeff Bezos won't care, but what about Tim O'Reilly when he discovers a story about him on Slashdot only got 14 posts?
  • If it matters to you, Bezos is clearly a "Red" (i.e. Republican)... (I find that most Amazon customers don't seem to know this).

    If you examine the buyblue.org data for political contributions by bookstores [buyblue.org], you'll see that Amazon is a solidly republican company, as opposed to Barnes and Nobels, which is solidly Democratic.

    Notably, Borders makes no political contributions at all.

    And myself, I try to shop at Stacey's [staceysbooks.com], an independant San Francisco store that, while a rather large place, appears to be too