Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN:NASDAQ)

Amazon.com Inc. announced two new enhancements to the latest generation Kindle--85% more battery life and a native PDF reader. Kindle now has battery life of up to seven days even with wireless turned on, a significant improvement from the previous battery life of four days. Battery life with wireless turned off remains at the previous level of up to two weeks. Amazon also announced that the 6-inch Kindle now has a built-in native PDF reader that enables Kindle customers to read professional and personal documents in their original PDF format without conversion. To read their personal or professional documents, Kindle customers simply email PDFs to their Kindle email address or move them over using a USB connection. Customers that prefer to have their PDF documents converted to the Kindle format simply type "Convert" in the subject of the e-mail when sending documents to their "@kindle.com" address. Amazon also announced that previous purchasers of the new Kindle will also receive the 85% battery life improvements with wireless on, and native PDF support via a firmware update automatically delivered via Whispernet wireless. Native PDF support will also be available for some earlier versions of Kindle via an automatic Whispernet wireless firmware update.

Amazon.com announced that the National Post is currently available on all Kindle devices. Kindle devices and newspaper subscriptions are available exclusively at The Kindle Store.

The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch a new scanning satellite to map the stars in galaxy in more precise form than ever before and researchers supporting the project, called Gaia, are evaluating whether Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud computing service can handle the mammoth processing task. ESA is now seeking to determine whether it would be feasible to rent about 4,000 application servers from Amazon to run the programs ESA has written for processing the star data. This would involve exporting the collected star data which the Gaia project plans to store in an Oracle database in a Madrid location to the Amazon cloud over the Internet. Some in Gaia's upper management have expressed uneasiness about cloud computing, especially if the cloud turns out to be an Amazon EC2 data center outside of Europe.