On Thursday, February 14, German public broadcaster ARD telecast a 30-minute documentary in which it highlighted the deplorable labour conditions at inline retail giant Amazon's subsidiaries in Germany.

In response to the Wednesday-aired documentary, on German TV Channel ARD, which highlighted the plight of temporary employees hired by agencies on Amazon's behalf, the online retail giant said in a Thursday statement that it would initiate investigations into German worker abuse claims.

Rumors about Amazon’s reported Kindle smartphone have started gaining momentum. The most recent volley of rumors about the potential kindle phone the online retailer has started testing the phone.

According to a recent report by Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Amazon is working with its Asian hardware suppliers to test a smartphone which may hit store shelves towards the end of 2012 or in early next year.

Nokia's Symbian OS-based Lumia 808 PureView smartphone will soon be available in the U. S. also, The Finish handset maker announced.

Without declaring a precise release date for the 808 PureView, Nokia said that it was working together with online retail Amazon to launch the smartphone in the U. S.

The 808 PureView will be available unlocked and unsubsidized via Amazon. com for $699. Potential owners will be able to use it with a compatible SIM card from AT&T. The phone will also work on the airwaves of T-Mobile, but only at second generation (2G) speeds.

Both Amazon and Microsoft recently slashed prices of their cloud computing services, apparently to attract more customers.

Market pioneer Amazon Web Services slashed prices on its core EC2 service and also dropped the hourly rate for its long-term service contracts. Just two days later, Redmond-based Microsoft responded by slashing prices of its Windows Azure compute & storage services. The software giant announced a whopping 50 per cent cut for entry-level servers.

The Amazon Instant Video app – which was launched on the PlayStation 3 earlier this year – has now been added to Xbox Live for its online entertainment section, giving the US users of Xbox 360 gaming console an instant access to Amazon's collection movies and TV shows.

The launch of the Amazon Instant Video app will allow the Xbox Live for Gold subscribers in the US to gain instantaneous access not only to the library of movies and TV shows which they have already bought from the online retailer, but also to the entire span of streaming videos that are available to Amazon Prime members.

Online retailer Amazon. com sold millions of Kindle Fire tablets this holiday season but may miss fourth-quarter sales estimates, Goldman Sachs Group analyst Heather Bellini believes.

According to Bellini, Amazon's fourth-quarter revenue may jump 38 per cent from the year-ago period to settle at $17.9 billion, which is less than the analysts' average growth projection of $18.2 billion.

The analyst based her prediction on data compiled by research firm ComScore Inc., which found the online retailer saw slower-than-expected e-commerce growth over the holiday-shopping period.

After the lawsuit that was made by Apple against the Android application store submissions in Germany, Amazon has now stopped their submissions. It was revealed according to a blog post by the firm that it has stopped its submissions in wake of the pending lawsuit.