• Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Friday, May 30, 2008 10:30 AM

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has simplified the business of Amazon.com -- which has ventured into a whole new arena of computing services -- by breaking down its customers into three groups: consumers, third-party sellers and developers. Speaking at the company's annual meeting of shareholders Thursday, Bezos says that third-party sellers account for 30% of the units sold on Amazon.

The amount of bandwidth used by Amazon Web Services, which includes cloud computing and server storage space, recently surpassed the bandwidth used for its retail business, according to Bezos. Cloud computing allows companies to outsource part of their computing and pay only for what they need.

Bezos also spoke at length about the Kindle, the company's new portable book reader that uses cell-phone technology to download digital copies of books. While acknowledging "you can't 'outbook' the book," he points out that the Kindle can hold 200 books at a time and download any book from 125,000 titles in under a minute. Kindle sales represent 6% of the 125,000 titles available, he says.

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