General Info

A Fortune 500 company, Amazon.com opened its virtual doors on the World Wide Web in 1994 to offer one of the largest selections of books. The company and its affiliates operate various retail Web sites, and has organized its operations into two principal segments, North America and international. The North America segment includes the operating results of www.amazon.com and www.amazon.ca. The international segment includes the operating results of www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.co.jp, and www.joyo.com. In addition, it operates other Web sites, including www.a9.com and www.alexa.com that enable search and navigation, www.imdb.com, a comprehensive movie database, and Amazon Mechanical Turk at www.mturk.com that provides a Web service for computers to integrate a network of humans directly into their processes. Amazon.com also offers a variety of other goods, including music CDs, movie DVDs, apparel, jewelry and watches, shoes, computers and software, consumer electronics, groceries, toys and games, home and garden products, sports and fitness products and tools and hardware. The company also provides a Web services interface, Amazon S3, that lets businesses store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web, and this service is being used by many companies, including Microsoft Corporation and SmugMug.