Online retailer Woot has built up a huge and passionate fanbase like few other retailers ever could. The site started out by selling one item per day at a steep discount, often some sort of electronic gadget. (Today's Woot item is a current-gen 8GB iPod Nano, the one with the video camera, for $100.) The company later expanded to a few other sites, including Shirt.Woot (which sells $10 American Apparel shirts with user-submitted designs), Wine.Woot (which sells fancypants wine), Kids.Woot (kids' stuff), and Sellout.Woot (sort of a forum of many different deals on other sites).

Amazon doesn't really care if the Kindle hardware dies. They'd rather it didn't, of course, but Kindle is much more than a couple of e-ink ebook readers. Kindle is much more important (and more profitable) as a store, available from tons of different devices--so just because its Kindle 2 and Kindle DX can't handle audio or video (or, um, color), that doesn't mean Amazon can't keep pushing the medium forward.

While this isn’t quite on the level of Amazon’s 1984 nonsense, Google did just demonstrate their willingness to remotely detonate apps they deem malicious. In this case, it was a couple dummy apps put up by a researcher — probably trying to figure out why people download what they download. At any rate, he took them off the market after a while, and the Android security team decided to nuke the remaining installs.

The wonderful thing about all these e-readers is that so long as you buy one that has honest-to-goodness E-Ink (Kindle, nook, Kobo, etc.) you’re basically using the same device. The most important part of an e-reader is the screen, so when all the big guys use the exact same technology, well, you should be just fine. Then it comes down to store quality: does Amazon have the books you want to read or does Barnes & Noble or Borders? That’s the most “research” you’ll have to conduct.

Quick quiz: Who are the three largest Internet companies in the world by market capitalization? If you guessed Google and Amazon you got two right, but I’m betting few of our American readers guessed the third. I certainly wouldn’t have a year ago. It’s not eBay or Yahoo; it’s Tencent. If you are in the Web space and haven’t heard of them, read this post, because Tencent’s cutesy penguin mascot is only going to cast a larger shadow in the global Web world in coming years.

There’s Amazon.com’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad and a bevy of iPad and Kindle clones. Still, Ray Kurzweil, the famed inventor, thinks people deserve yet another option when it comes to reading books and magazines with an electronic device.

Good news Sony fans, turns out that it’s time to start warming up that credit card and ordering your PS3 Move controller. It’s starting to show up as being available for pre-order (along with a few other tasty bits). Remember it’ll be officially available in the US on September 19th, but you might want to pre-order since Sony kind of has a habit of running out of product when they first come out.

Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist of Amazon, spoke to audiences Tuesday at the World Innovation Forum about how to bring your business into Web 3.0 marketing. Weigend, who teaches at Stanford and is an expert in data mining, argues that we’ve moved from “eBusiness” (essentially, getting businesses online in Web 1.0) to “MeBusiness” (customer focus in Web 2.0) to “WeBusiness,” which realigned marketing with a community focus. Weigend used his time as Amazon to teach lessons on how marketing has evolved into a combination of communication between the customer and businesses, the customer and other customers, and the customer and the world.

There was e-book news on Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference: Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said that big publishers had told him that sales of e-books for the iPad now accounted for 22 percent of all e-book sales.