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| Jeff
Bezos founder Amazon.com |
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Amazon.com,
Inc.
is an American electronic commerce
company based in Seattle, Washington,
USA. It was one of the first major
companies to sell goods over the
Internet and was one of the iconic
stocks of the late 1990s dot-com
bubble. After the bubble burst Amazon
faced skepticism about its business
model, but it made its first annual
profit in 2003. Amazon.com also
owns
Alexa Internet, A9.com, and the
Internet Movie Database.
Amazon.com was founded as Cadabra
by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and launched
in 1995, Amazon.com began as an
online bookstore, though it soon
diversified its product lines, music
CDs,
computer software, adding
DVDs, video games, electronics,
apparel, furniture,
toys,
food
and more. Amazon.com has established
separate websites
in Canada, the United
Kingdom, Germany,
France,
China, and Japan and it ships globally
on selected products. |
Amazon.com offers web services for access
to its catalog as well as for integration
with retailers like Target and Marks &
Spencer. A9.com provides search engine
services directly on the Amazon.com site.
Since November 2005, the company has been
testing Amazon Mechanical Turk, an application
programming interface (API) allowing programs
to dispatch tasks to human processors.
A
brief history of Jeff Bezos: Jeff Bezos
was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His
mother's ancestors were early settlers
in Texas, and over the generations had
acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or
39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos's
maternal grandfather was a regional director
of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in
Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch,
where Jeff Bezos spent most summers of
his youth, working with his grandfather
at the enormously varied tasks essential
to the operation. At an early age, he
displayed a striking mechanical aptitude.
Even as a toddler, he asserted himself
by dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.
Jeff Bezos was born when his mother, Jackie
Bezos, was still in her teens, and her
marriage to his father lasted little more
than a year. She remarried when Bezos
was five. Bezos's stepfather, Miguel Bezos,
was born in Cuba, he migrated to the United
States alone at age 15 and worked his
way through the University of Albuquerque.
When he married Bezos's mother, the family
moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel Bezos
became an engineer for Exxon. Bezos attended
River Oaks Elementary in Houston from
the 4th to 6th grades.
Jeff
Bezos showed intense and varied scientific
interests at an early age. He rigged an
electric alarm to keep his younger siblings
out of his room and maintain his secrecy.
He converted his parents' garage into
a laboratory for his science projects.
The family moved to Miami, Florida, where
Jeff Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior
High School. In high school, Jeff Bezos
fell in love with computers and was valedictorian
of his class. He entered Princeton University
planning to study physics, but soon returned
to his love of computers, and graduated
with a degree in computer science and
electrical engineering.
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