Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos, and Shel Kaphan met at their local Barnes and Noble in Amazon's early days. Before choosing "Amazon" as the name of the e-commerce giant, creator Jeff Bezos considered "Cadabra" and "Relentless."
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1. Amazon Held Its Meetings at Barnes and Noble
Amazon developed an auction platform to compete with e-commerce rivals in its early public days. The day Amazon launched the auction site in 1999, its shares rose over 8%.
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2. Amazon Launched as an Auction Site
Amazon search engine created in 2004, introduced Block View before Google (GOOG) launched "Street View" on their map app.
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3. It Was Also an Early Competitor of Yahoo! and Google
Customers who shop at smile.amazon.com can help their favorite charity. The AmazonSmile Foundation donates 0.5% of qualified product purchases.
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4. Amazon Users Can Donate to Charities When they Buy
Amazon Flow was an AR phone app that identified millions of goods, from tissue boxes to book covers. Amazon Flow let consumers take images of their shopping lists, so they didn't have to remember them.
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5. Amazon Piloted an Augmented Reality App
Amazon Go stores have hundreds of self-driving car-like cameras. This system preserves a virtual shopping cart so clients can leave after shopping. Amazon immediately bills them.
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6. Amazon Has Convenience Stores With No Checkout
According to Quora response by former Amazon employee Ian McAllister, Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies was Amazon's first book. John Wainwright claimed to have bought the book on April 3, 1995.
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7. It Sold Its First Book in 1995