As a part of its deckchair reshuffling, Yahoo created a new Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, led by newish CTO Ari Balogh. For now the group will focus on internal projects, but Balogh told News.com it could eventually offer cloud computing services for startups to compete with Amazon and Google. We recommend Yahoo do this, if only because unlike everyone else at Yahoo, its sounds as though Balogh might understand product marketing. For example, Balogh actually told News.com why Yahoo's service — which runs Hadoop and benefits from ""loosening ACID requirements" — is newer and therefore better than Google's. But Balogh didn't use the phrase "starting point" even once, so we're not optimistic about his tenure under CEO-in-waiting-but-not-very-patiently Sue Decker. (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

Powerset never quite managed to launch with their natural language parsing search product. But they did give everyone a glimpse with a preview of search for Wikipedia. Not quite game-changing enough for Yahoo to buy or Amazon's Jeff Bezos to invest in, but just enough to get Microsoft to pay $100 million. Which is considerably less what Team Redmond would have paid for Yahoo's search business. Not bad for a company running on borrowed hopes and dreams. (By Intern Alaska, photo from Powerset)

Are you an author obsessed with tracking your Amazon.com ranking? Heh. [LA Times]

The favorite downtime-riddled platform for sharing the lumps life gives you in 140 characters or less, Twitter, has received a hot investment infusion of an undisclosed amount from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital. Spokesperson Biz Stone promises everyone that "Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model," though they must have been a bit more specific when pitching to Bezos and Sabet. Sabet, for his part, earned himself a seat on Twitter's board with the deal. [Twitter Blog]

Our own Alex Pareene was so money when he called bullshit on that supposedly unknown tribe photographed in the Amazon. It was all a ruse by a concerned environmentalist! "[I]t has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe's existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that 'uncontacted' tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry. The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles, 61, one of the handful of sertanistas- experts on indigenous tribes-working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, which is dedicated to searching out remote tribes and protecting them."

The Google Street View car was Spotted in Microsoft Country last week after launching in many smaller markets around the country first. Apparently the drivers, rather than use some fancy, newfangled Internet doohickey, simply burn the data captured by the rooftop camera array onto a CD and mail it back to Mountain View. The fact that Portland, Oregon and Juneau, Alaska were added to the list of Street View cities before Seattle inspired an April Fools article in local publication Naked Loon quoting a fictional Google spokesmonkey as saying the addition of Seattle was "extremely unlikely, save for some kind of highly localized disaster centered somewhere in Redmond."

Amazon.com is broken!!! But I have a shopping cart full of ill-fitting gloves, ladies' stretch pants, and copies of Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire that I need to buy!!!

Attention, Amazon.com shareholders! Your money is not, repeat not in the hands of a sexless technomonk. Jeff Bezos took a moment to share some evidence of this at his annual shareholders meeting in Seattle. He reprised an anecdote about The Joy of Sex and its pivotal role in the early days of Amazon, lifted from his turn as Carnegie Mellon's commencement speaker last month: "I have a whole mess of children," then demurred, "I have to be a little delicate here because my parents are in the audience."

When you're irrelevant and have lost most of your audience and you say something stupid just so people will talk about you, are you pulling a "Rush Limbaugh" or is that an "Anne Coulter"? Anyway, the fat-headed drug addict radio host, Limbaugh, got a look at those Amazonian tribesman the other day and declared, "[T]hese savages are body painted in red and they're trying to shoot the airplane down with bows and arrows." What else did he say?

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos may not be a sexless monk, but what about owners of the Kindle e-book reader? Hoping to ignite the flame of consumer desire across America, Amazon has set up a page for people to "See a Kindle in Your City."

Nearly a quarter of business school graduates surveyed said the number one company they want to land a job at is, unsurprisingly, Google — what with the pools, hair cuts, massages, legendary cafeteria and valuable stock. Other tech companies included Apple in fourth, Microsoft in twelfth and Amazon in 23rd place. For you managers of the future looking to get an interview with Steve Jobs, the school Apple recruits most heavily at is Stanford, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. [Fortune] (Photo by Sam Pullara)

BookLocker, one of many print-on-demand (POD) publishers who are threatened by Amazon's move to vertically integrate POD with online sales by priveleging authors who publish with Amazon subsidiary BookSurge, has brought a lawsuit against the Web retailing giant in the United States District Court of Maine. According to the allegations, Amazon and BookSurge have done everything in their power to keep this under the radar — by notifying publishers and authors over the phone instead of in writing, and demanding confidentiality agreements in the proposed contracts. But the case really hinges on the power of the "Buy now with 1-Click™" button. Why should you care?

Everyone has a little online jackass in them; some of us add people on Facebook too soon, some of us beg for votes on Digg, some make white whines on Twitter. But these behaviors can lead to more annoying habits, like constantly bugging people to blog you, getting hooked on Yelp, or writing drug metaphors. Thank god online jackassery can be summed up in a condescending online quiz. Take it below! Maybe you're a Carrie.

Thanks to an intrepid Dallas Morning News reporter, Amazon.com shoppers in Texas may soon have to pay sales tax on goods purchased from the site. Maria Halkias asked Robin Corrigan, a sales-tax policy expert in the Texas comptroller's office, why the state doesn't collect sales tax from Amazon. Corrigan said it's because Amazon.com "told me they don't have a distribution center in Texas." That's incorrect. Go ahead and apply to be a senior operations manager at Amazon's Irving, Texas facility.

Now that the announcement of Google's App Engine is official, it's opening up the company's cloud computing infrastructure as an API platform for Web application developers. Basically, it binds computing power, storage and database tools — much like Amazon.com's EC2, S3 and SimpleDB, respectively, but all tied together into one package. Plus, for the first 10,000 beta users at least, it'll be completely free up to a certain level of usage. What's in it for Google?

Rick Astley's greatest hits collection is back in print thanks to the Rickroll phenomenon. When YouTube used the video for their April Fool's Day prank, they linked to an mp3 version of the album on Amazon. And Pepsi bought an ad on the Amazon page for the album. Winners: BMG, Astley, YouTube, Pepsi. Losers: You.

Team Hillary must be working overtime to also start this discussion on Amazon.

YouTube's profitability or lack thereof has long been debated in the absence of facts. In announcing a mildy high six-figure deal for YouTube, VentureBeat's MG Siegler quotes Forbes numbers that aren't much higher than previous arbitrary estimates. From what I hear, Google has sent engineer after engineer to solve a problem that seems intractible — how to guarantee the site's content is kosher. It's become a point of fail in Google business culture, and the solution lays beyond the company's algorithm-worshipping, individualist ken: aggregating human effort.

The development kit for the iPhone has been released to the wild and Apple's servers are getting slammed by people looking to download it. I can barely get through to the info page and am having no luck actually downloading the SDK. I guess Steve Jobs should have gotten Amazon's S3 storage service.

Not three hours after I got married earlier this month, my wife's grandfather pulled her aside. "By this time next year," he said, "I'll hope you'll bring a new baby to visit us." It's the kind of pressure you might expect from grandparents. But Jeff Bezos, too? Get off our backs, Amazon dude, wouldya? We most certainly did not set up a baby registry. And you too, Mark Zuckerberg. I'm sure she matches some sort of ad-triggering demographic criteria being under-30 and married, but Anna would like you to relax with the maternity-clothing ads.