Amazon.com said Tuesday it will begin offering magazine subscriptions through a new online store, where customers will be able to order newsstand staples such as Rolling Stone, Time or Sports Illustrated at discount prices.
Amazon's (AMZN) new store comes just as the company readies for the holiday shopping season amid Wall Street concerns of decelerating revenue growth.
The magazine subscriptions store will offer a wide range of national and regional publications, Amazon said.
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Snapfish snapped up: Becoming the latest online photography firm to succumb to a fading financial picture, Snapfish.com announced its sale to a mail-order company that processes film for the website's 2 million registered users.
Privately held District Photo is paying an undisclosed amount for cash-starved Snapfish, which will stay in San Francisco and retain its 35-employee work force, including president and co-founder Raj Kapoor.
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EBay remains optimistic: Shares of eBay fell on Wall Street, even though the trading website's executives affirmed their aggressive long-term growth targets at their annual meeting with financial analysts.
Chief executive Meg Whitman told the analysts Monday that she was even more confident than she was last year that eBay's revenue can reach $3 billion by 2005. One reason is that the company's 24 international sites are not yet as profitable as eBay (EBAY) expects they will be.
"We are really proud of the foundation we have built," Whitman said. "It was in 2001 that eBay really hit its stride."
The chief financial officer, Rajiv Dutta, said he expects revenue to grow about 50 percent next year, to between $1.05 billion and $1.10 billion, with earnings per share of 70 cents to 73 cents.
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New handheld: Pogo Technology, a startup that has developed a handheld device for surfing the Web, listening to music and making phone calls, has signed a distribution deal aimed at putting it on store shelves of select Carphone Warehouse stores in time for Christmas.
Pogo, a spinoff from the now defunct London office of Web consultancy Razorfish, (RAZF) has raised 5 million pounds ($7.28 million), enough to fund a modest initial supply of 5,000 units, the company said.
Run on the GSM mobile communications standard, the chunky device -- which, at 230 grams, weighs a bit more than a typical personal digital assistant -- surfs the Web at a maximum speed of 56.6 kilobytes per second.
The Pogo, which will sell for 299 pounds ($435.40), can also be used to retrieve e-mail, send text or SMS messages and can play music in the MP3 digital format.
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Ford shake-up: Ford Motor chief executive Jacques Nasser, whose future at the slumping automaker has been in doubt for months, is out. He will be replaced by chairman William Clay Ford Jr., making it the first time since 1982 that a Ford has been in control of day-to-day operations.
AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
