Amazon informed Californian users of the Amazon Associates programearlier todaythat they’d no longer be permitting Californians to participate by the end of September if the online retailer sales tax bill was made law. The governor today passed the bill, and Amazon says it has been forced to move the deadline up. They aren’t wasting any time. As of today, June 29, 2011, Amazon says, Associates contracts with Californian residents are terminated....

Ever since Amazon introduced Alexa to the world and invested heavily in its personal assistant AI, it seemed we all knew where the company was eventually heading: personal robots. That moment has finally arrived. The company today announcedAstro, its oft-rumored home robot. Although it’s pricey at an initial cost of $999.99, it has the potential of being the first real mainstream home assistant robot (as opposed to, say, a robot vacuum)....

Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s Cloud-based storage and service platform, today received Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Moderate Authorization and Accreditation from the U.S. General Services Administration, certifying it as a government approved infrastructure capable of meeting security requirements for government entities and agencies. With its FISMA accreditation, Amazon canhelp federal agencies develop, document and implement data security systems for their data, extending its protection to its Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon VPC products and the infrastructure that underpins them....

Amazon may have been publishing books for several years, but it’s starting to crank up its credentials in that particular field as news emerges the self-help guru Tim Ferriss hassignedup to Amazon Publishing. A few months back, Amazonrevealedit had brought on boardLaurence Kirshbaumas Vice President and Publisher of Amazon Publishing’s New York office, in what was a big move for the publishing arm of Amazon. And with news that Tim Ferriss has also signed up, it seems that Amazon is looking beyond making minor ripples in the publishing industry....

Amazon has purchased a 240,000 square foot building in Dublin, formerly occupied by Tesco, intending to convert the space into a new data center which will expand the company’s cloud computing operations. Whilst the purchase price is not known, agents for Tesco had been quoting €7.5m for the property which is a site of over 13 acres. According toDataCenterKnowledge, Amazon has also leased space in two other Dublin locations, adding to the existing data center that the company opened in the area in December 2008....