amzn

Normally we think of revolutionary products created by start-ups or entrepreneurial minds just out of college, but the most talked about new projects of 2009 are being produced by some of the best known companies in the world.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN): With its massive online presence and a truly efficient business model, Amazon has become the largest online retailer in the world. It is now taking on a new business, web services, namely cloud computing (learn more HERE), called the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). While hosting this infrastructure and presenting e-commerce with a reasonably affordable alternative with no up-front costs, Amazon has taken an early lead in this space, with some believing its cloud computing business will one day overtake retailing. "Amazon will be like a book store that sells cocaine out the back door. Books will be just a front to sell storage and cloud computing." says Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic.

It's far from easy selling enterprise software today. But some companies are finding ways to grow. Just look at Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which is a leader in open source solutions.

The company's applications, which help to reduce costs and increase productivity, have shown lots of resilience during the recession. For example, according to Red Hat's latest earnings report, the top 25 deals that were up for renewal got renewed. Actually, theses customers increased the commitments by 120%.

While Washington considers a uniform national sales tax on internet sales, many struggling states aren't waiting, instead pushing forward their own legislation. One of the major companies that stands to lose business from such a tax, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), has begun to send messages to these states threatening to quit doing business with partners based in these states rather than accept the responsibility for collecting and distributing these taxes.

North Carolina and Hawaii have already received such notices. According to the Wall Street Journal linked above, these states are considering new laws that would required companies that have "online marketing affiliates" in the state to collect and return tax to the state. Amazon has thousands of such affiliates, web-based vendors who display links to Amazon products and receive a commission for each sale.

Cloud computing is a type of on-demand hosting services on the internet. Not only a necessity for mainstream e-commerce sites, it also increases efficiency, is scalable, and lowers expenses. The monetary savings may be misleading to consumers and businesses who do not fully understand the potential risks involved.

With a pay-as-you-go type structure, users are only charged for the amount of traffic, bandwidth, and memory used. Online businesses become more efficient by only utilizing the storage and space needed, while also being assured capacity for any usage increases. The buzz has been building for years, so cloud computing has attracted a diverse customer base, ranging from popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, to educational websites of Arizona State and Northwestern University.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK), the Finnish provider of mobile telephones and networking equipment, recently hit some rough seas. The company's sales and market share tanked, due mostly to recession woes. And in the first quarter of this year, Nokia posted its first ever pre-tax loss of 12 million euros.

Now, as the world's largest cellphone manufacturer tries to compete with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) and Samsung in the market for smart phones (see my article about this on DailyFinance, "Nokia's smartphone gets deadpan debut as carriers skip subsidies"), a number of analysts have downgraded its stock.

There's been some news on the Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle, the company's electronic substitute for real paper books. According to this source, everything is coming along fine for the product from a statistical point of view. An estimate of Kindle sales from Citigroup Global Markets puts the number of units sold last year at 500,000. By 2010, it's said that the Kindle may lead to $1.2 billion of derivative sales. I was surprised to learn that this sales number would possibly represent 4% of Amazon's top line.

A recent Time magazine cover story described it as, "The New Frugality." The "it" here is the change in behavior, attitudes and even values Americans are embracing as a byproduct of the "Great Recession." It's just a fact that most of us have in some way or another altered our spending habits to a more frugal lifestyle as a direct result of the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.

One company feeling the sting of the country's new frugality is high-end retailer Williams-Sonoma (NYSE: WSM). Today the company reported a Q1 loss of $18.7 million, or 18 cents a share, compared with a profit of $10.4 million, or 10 cents a share, a year earlier. A performance not uncommon for retail stocks these days.

The losses were actually smaller than the company had projected, but those previous projections included a slashed advertising budget, a cut in capital spending and lowered merchandise inventories. More importantly, the company said that revenue in the quarter ended May 3 fell 22% to $611.6 million. Yikes!

Of course, Wall Street rewarded the anemic results with a near-10% drop in Wednesday's trade. So, what does the Williams-Sonoma miss tell us?

Amazon.com's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle shows that there is a clear business opportunity in the e-book market. And Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is taking notice.

According to the New York Times, the search-engine giant indicated at the BookExpo convention that it wants to make a grab for this market.

OK, Google won't launch a handheld device. Instead, the company wants to make it easy to sell e-books via its own website. With Google's current infrastructure, it should be relatively easy to pull this off. In fact, over the years the company has been scanning millions of books (although, this has raised concerns with the U.S. Justice Department).

For the first quarter, Live Nation said that revenues dipped by over 6%. Currency translations affected the top line, so if you strip them out, you get an increase of nearly 3%. The loss from continuing operations expanded by an earsplitting 40% to $1.29 per share. According to this news article, analysts were looking for a loss of only $0.82 per share.

Here are some highlights from this past week's earnings coverage from BloggingStocks:

• Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) reported strong Q1 results easily beat expectations.
• Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) posted better-than-expected Q1 earnings, helped by home refinancing.
• Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) reported its first quarterly loss since 1992 and cut its revenue outlook.
• Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO) posted Q1 earnings that were in line with expectations, but shares fell.
• eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) posted better-than-expected Q1 earnings despite a decline in sales.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) seemed to be the poster child for the dot-com bubble. The company had a slightly goofy leader and a business plan that seemed to be created out of thin air. During the peak of the net rally, Amazon exploded in value. When the market crashed, so did AMZN.

But behind the hype was a real business that has been slowly flexing its muscles out of those ashes.