[Premium] More on my prediction of margin compression in the US and how Apple fits in

This weekly newsletter is a gold-level post and follows up on my prediction early last month about 2012 being a period of margin compression in US companies, threatening the rally in stocks and mandating a rotation in investment style or sector weighting

Welcome to Amazon Town

The Wall Street Journal’s Stu Woo reports on how Amazon ramps up for the Christmas selling season in a much-read write-up for the paper with a focus on the thoughts of holiday season workers like 75-year old Ray Williams and his wife Sarann. Is this what retirement looks like in the

Foreign news: Is Amazon employing unemployed in Germany without compensation?

Foreign news links for 27 November 2011. We have a variety of links here today with most focused on the European sovereign debt crisis. Protest and terrorism are two other topics of great interest

Walt Mossberg reviews the Kindle Fire

Walt Mossberg takes a look at Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet. How does it stack up against the iPad and the new Nook Color

Apple: Can it stop the Amazon menace?

For Amazon, they are always willing to introduce loss leaders to build volume. I anticipate they will be successful here yet again. That is a wonderful story for their Kindle book sales, music sales, video sales and for their App store sales as well

Cashmore on Technology’s Paradigm Shift

Here’s an interesting conversation about social media and Internet and technology companies’ adjustment to it

If Android is a mess, will it matter?

I say fragmentation doesn’t matter. Consumers are going to buy what is available and for offer. Distribution trumps ease of use. Ask Apple about Macintosh. And ask Microsoft about Windows. Market share trumps technological superiority too. Ask Sony about Betamax.

Yes, the pace of development of Android is faster than in the Windows days, creating a headache and causing fragmentation. But Google has decided to clamp down on this. Their decision certainly makes Android less ‘open’. But, fragmentation is a problem they need to solve. I think they will do.

Amazon: Privacy Concerns, Digital Music Lockers and Pandora’s Box

As I was thinking about the competitive landscape for e-Commerce and Amazon’s foray into the streaming music scene, it occurred to me that Amazon has a huge data mining opportunity here and that this will almost certainly raise privacy concerns.

At present, the story in the press is about the music industry’s concerns over licenses. Sony has said it is not happy that Amazon has launched its product without licensing agreements from the music industry given that Apple and Google are negotiating agreements. Ostensibly, this is what has given Amazon the jump on those competitors.

But I want to talk about something else: privacy

Amazon’s Cloud Music Killer App is a Game Changer in Storage, Backup, Music, and Mobile

Amazon just dropped a bomb on the technology world in the form of a cross-platform cloud music player. This is at once a game-changing move in the Internet storage and backup world dominated by players like EMC, in the Internet Music world dominated by Apple and in the mobile space where Amazon is concentrating on