Well, actually, it’s a little unlike Netflix and Hulu. Rather than outsourcing production of original programming, Amazon is looking to create it in-house, as is indicated in Amazon’s job listings (via Ryan Lawler at GigaOm).

Recent listings include: Creative Executive, Kids, Creative Executive, Comedy, and Production Assistant.

The Job Description/Responsibilities section for Creative Executive, Comedy, says:

People’s Production Company is a movie and series production company. We are seeking a Creative Executive, Comedy to help develop half hour comedies for online and traditional distribution. Projects will primarily come from Amazon Studios. This position will report to the VP, Series Development.

Assess pilot proposals
Work with writers and artists to develop series ideas
Staff, cast and produce pilots in a cost-efficient way
Supervise series production when series are greenlit
People’s Production Company, part of the Amazon.com, Inc. group of companies, is an equal opportunity employer. This job will be located in Sherman Oaks, CA.

It looks like at the very least, Amazon is looking to offer comedies and children’s programming. My guess is that it won’t stop there. So far, Netflix is going the drama route. Hulu has gone with comedy and reality.

We may be poised to see some interesting new directions for Amazon between this and a rumored retail store.

Eolas Technologies may be the biggest patent troll the Internet has ever seen. The company, alongside the University of California, claimed patents that pertained to the “interactive web.” This includes moving images, music clips, maps, search features, etc. Essentially, they claimed to have a patent for the modern Internet according to Wired.

Eolas took over a dozen companies to court in 2009 over these ridiculous patent claims. Some of those companies included Google, Amazon.com, Adobe and others.

Some companies just settled after the initial lawsuit to avoid further court costs. Those companies included Apple, Playboy and EBay. Google and others kept on fighting the claims that Eolas had a patent on the “interactive web.”

Well, good news comes to those who wait as a federal jury in Tyler, Texas yesterday said that the two patents owned by Eolas were invalid. Those who settled back in 2009 must be feeling pretty silly right now.

If the jury found their patents valid, the case would have gone forward with each company being tried for infringement. The jury invalidated the need for those trials and Eolas will never get their dirty money.

What may have tipped the odds in the general Internet’s favor was that Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Internet, and Pei-Yuan Wei, developer of a Web browser before Eolas, testified on behalf of the companies still fighting.

If Eolas wants to keep fighting, they could appeal the decision. They probably won’t, however, as it would be too costly. They also would not be able to target any more companies during the appeal proceedings.

It just once again goes to show you that companies shouldn’t settle with patent trolls. Fighting them will usually expose just how fraudulent their patent claims are.

Then the focus shifts to the price. When the dorky iPad owner points out to the hot, bikini-clad Kindle owner that he can watch movies, she points out that her kids can do the same on their Kindle Fires, and that her Kindle and their Kindle Fires together cost less than his iPad.

Whatever your feelings about the iPad, the Kindle Fire, Amazon has taken pretty much the only option open to them from a marketing standpoint. A recent survey showed that the iPad ranked much higher than the Kindle Fire in terms of customer satisfaction. In fact, the feature Kindle Fire owners said they were most satisfied with about their device was its price tag.

What do you think of the commercial? Check it out below and let us know in the comments.

The Google store would sell, you guessed it, Google merchandise. What kind of Google merchandise? That has yet to be revealed, but you can bet Google t-shirts will be available.

The store will be located in the Montevetro office block on Dublin’s Barrow Street. The store would have about 1,323 square feet, or 123 square meters for those who will actually be shopping there, with an added mezzanine floor to attract street traffic.

Bloomberg figures that Google is moving to retail in light of the company’s plans to acquire Motorola. It would help the search giant compete with Apple in both the retail and smartphone space.

Google has been testing the concept of a retail store in London since last October. They opened a store inside PC World where they sold laptops running the company’s custom Chromebook operating system.

The company has a store at its California headquarters that sells merchandise, but that’s not open to the public. Of course, they also have an online store where they sell Google and YouTube merchandise.

Google’s Dublin office was a prime location as its the company’s second largest headquarters in the world. The company bought the two buildings that made up its current headquarters last March while leasing two other properties in the area. The Montevetro area that will house the retail store was bought last April for €100 million. Google will also expand its employee force to over 3,000 once everything is said and done.

It remains to be seen if Google will succeed in this venture, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

UPDATE: Google has told Marketing Land that they are not opening a public retail store in Dublin. Google said that the space within their Dublin office could be used as a retail space. It makes it similar to the Google employee-only store that is currently at their main headquarters in California.

In a statement from Amazon, Brad Beale, director of video content acquisition for Amazon, said, “Over the last year we have received fantastic customer feedback about Prime Instant Video. We are constantly working to improve the service by adding the shows that our customers enjoy the most. This deal with Viacom brings Prime customers and Kindle Fire users thousands of comedies, kids’ shows, reality TV and much more from some of the best cable networks available. We now offer more than 15,000 movies and TV shows in Prime Instant Videos and are working hard to add even more great content.”

Members of Amazon Prime will be able to enjoy Viacom’s offerings, which include such cultural fascinations like Jersey Shore and SpongeBob SquarePants, on a number of devices, including Amazon’s jewel, the Kindle Fire.

Amazingly, the statement released from Amazon did not recommend any suitable prophylactics required to safely stream Jersey Shore to your Kindle Fire.

I would be interested to see what employees make at these tech firms. It’s interesting that these few companies can generate so much revenue. I can’t help but wonder about the larger manufacturing and service based corporations. What does their per employee breakdown look like?

Citing “sources close to the situation” Michael Kozlowski of Good E Reader says that Amazon has contracted the design through a shell company in order to maintain secrecy. The Amazon store would specialize in higher-end items and books published through Amazon’s own recently launched publishing division.

If it works, Amazon’s entrance into the retail store business could significantly intensify the company’s ongoing rivalry with brick-and-mortar retailers, most notably Barnes & Noble. With the collapse of Borders last year, Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million stand as the last nationwide book retail chains. Competition with Amazon has severely impacted the traditional brick-and-mortar bookstore. Even as Barnes and Noble prepares a new Nook device to keep up with Amazon’s Kindle Fire, the company has also announced that it would shun books from Amazon’s publishing arm.

What do you think? Is a retail store the right direction for Amazon, or should they stick to the online model that has worked so well for them until now? Sound off in the comments.

According to the survey data, 46% of respondents in January 2012 said that they planned to make home entertainment purchases at Amazon in the next 90 days. That’s a 10% jump from January 2011, when only 36% said they planned to shop at Amazon in next 90 days.

The study also compared Amazon to other online retailers, and the results are surprising. Amazon beat Costco, eBay, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target by enormous margins. Twenty percent of respondents said they planned to spend more money at Amazon in the next 90 days than they had in the last 90 days, while 11% said they would spend less, 49% said they would spend the same, and only 20% said they would spend no money at all. Costco was in a far distant second: 3% said they would spend more, 4% said less, 16% said they would spend the same, and 77% of respondents said they would spend no money at all.

Interestingly, owning a Kindle fire seems to make customers more likely to spend money on Amazon. Of respondents who did not own a Kindle Fire, only 19% said they would spend more money at Amazon in the next 90 days, while 29% of Kindle Fire owners said they would do so.

Even so, it seems that all is not well in the land of Kindle Fire owners. When it came to customer satisfaction the Kindle Fire came in a distant second after Apple’s iPad tablet. When asked to rate their satisfaction with their tablet, 74% of iPad owners said that they were very satisfied with their tablet, compared to only 54% of Kindle Fire owners. The good news for Amazon, though, is that although the Kindle Fire falls well below the iPad, it beats other tablets by 5%. Only 49% of owners of other tablets said they were very satisfied with their device.

Another interesting aspect of the survey deals with what, specifically, Kindle Fire owners liked and disliked most about their devices. The most popular feature of the Kindle Fire by far is its price. Fifty-nine percent of respondents listed that as what they liked best about the device. In a distant second at 31% was the color screen, followed by ease of use at 27%. Kindle Fire owners’ dislikes, on the other hand, tended to center on features that the Kindle Fire lacks but that the iPad has. The chief complaint about the Kindle Fire was the lack of physical volume buttons (27%), followed by the lack of a camera (21%), poor battery life (15%), and lack of 3G/4G connectivity (12%). Interestingly, the 3G connectivity users miss in the Kindle Fire is a feature that has been present in previous e-ink versions of the Kindle.

The full report is available from ChangeWave here.

Amazon Sports Collectibles & Memorabilia beta launches today, bringing sports fans 2 million+ unique collectibles from all types of sports. We’re talking NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and FIFA.

Collectors will be able to browse the selection of cards, gear, pictures, balls, and jerseys by sport, year, specific team, and price. All of the focus is on authentic, unique memorabilia, with a premium placed on autographed items and other quirks like game-worn items.

“Our customers have told us that when purchasing sports collectibles they highly value authenticity, which is why we have teamed with some of the top sports collectibles sellers in the world to provide unique items with easy to find authentication and condition information,” said Peter Faricy, vice president of Amazon Marketplace. “The emphasis on authenticated selection, combined with our A-to-z Guarantee protection on purchases, allows customers to shop the new store with confidence.”

Every item page in the store will include information about authentication as well as condition:

As I said before, the store is launching just in time for the Super Bowl, and Amazon has a category just for Super Bowl-themed collectibles. For instance, you can get a signed Eli Manning collectible mini-helmet for $289.95. If you’re a Pats fan, a signed Tom Brady mini-helmet is going to run you $569.99.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos:

“We are grateful to the millions of customers who purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season, making Kindle our bestselling product across both the U.S. and Europe,”

Amazon doesn’t report exactly how many devices they sold but industry analyst approximate that nearly six million Kindle products moved this season.

Wednesday Amazon launched their new e-books lending library which is just what it sounds like, a lending library. Members of Amazon Prime, which costs about $80 a year, can borrow one free e-book a month.

Jeff Bezos comments on the new service:

“Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers — as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or ebook store offers such a service,”

Currently there are over 5,000 books available from the library. Amazon is hoping the introduction of the new service will drive Kindle sales up even further and contribute to the overall popularity of e-books.