Online Shopping - World No.1 ... Amazon

Second stop: The biggest online shopping company:

Homepage is fresh, uncluttered, easy to use. Slightly concerned about the high degree of contents customization: it shows contents related to the past products or searches I browsed or executed on the site. ... Wish that they can further customize to cater to different customers' degree of acceptance to this kind of customization.

Take a look at this very cool "Amazon Acquisitions and Investments" chart (by Meet the Boss). We see that Amazon did many strategic purchases to make their inventory list covers everything other than just books.

At the same time, Amazon is also growing their arsenal of web and mobile technologies to provide more value and services to their customers. The most recent developments:

• Mobile comparison shopping: Amazon will use the iPhone as a vehicle for snagging more business from brick-and-mortar stores this holiday season (MediaPost)
• Quantity discount & sales promotion: Amazon And Groupon Partner In France As Acquisition Rumors Swirl (SFGate)
  
• Cloud computing & Web services: Nvidia makes big gains in supercomputing in deal with Amazon Web Services (VentureBeat)

Even though Amazon does not have a local online store for Singapore or Australia unlike Japan and China, it has recently launched its Asia-Pacific Amazon Web Services; based in Singapore.

Asia Pacific-focused businesses can leverage on AWS’s cloud infrastructure platform to build their businesses and run their applications. The central and most valuable of these services are reportedly Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Thinking of hosting your web site in the cloud? Here is a one-year free program from Amazon AWS.