Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: Amazon, Wal-Mart Face Off

Written by Erin Barker

Monday, October 19. 2009 at 10:25 AM EDT Post a comment

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The battle between Wal-Mart and Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) is heating up as the 2009 holiday season approaches.

A piece in today's Wall Street Journal shows how the two retailers are going head-to-head as they expand into each other's territory.

Wal-Mart, which has recently begun offering products online for delivery, plans to challenge competitors like Amazon with hard discounts this holiday season.

"We intend to establish the price leadership we have in stores in the online world," Walmart.com CEO Raul Vazquez said.

Wal-Mart has also imitated Amazon's marketplace program by announcing it will sell other retailers' merchandise on its site as well.

Amazon, on the other hand, has moved into Wal-Mart's territory through its acquisition of Zappos.com and by "adding private label electronic accessories like blank DVDs to its virtual shelves." And soon, the e-retailer will begin TV advertising for the first time in several years.

In other news:

Plastic Logic Ltd. has revealed more details on its upcoming e-book reader. The device, called the Que, sports a large, 8.5x11-inch touch screen and is less than a third of an inch thick. But it isn't aiming to compete with the Amazon Kindle, AllThingsD reports. Instead, the Que, which supports PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents, will be targeted toward professionals. Other details, like specs and pricing, will be announced on Jan. 7 at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Twenty-four CEOs and Internet company founders have written to FCC chairman Julian Genachowski in support of net neutrality. The letter, to be delivered today, was signed by the likes of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Ev Williams, Digg's Kevin Rose, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Eric Schmidt, and IAC/InteractiveCorp's Barry Diller, who happens to be Genachowski's former boss. They wrote:

An open Internet fuels a competitive and efficient marketplace, where consumers make the ultimate choices about which products succeed and which fail. This allows businesses of all sizes, from the smallest start-up to larger corporations, to compete, yielding maximum economic growth and opportunity.

Tags: Amazon, Business, E-books, Kindle

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