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Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce company based in Seattle, Washington. It was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet and was one of the iconic stocks of the late 1990s dot-com bubble. After the bubble burst Amazon faced skepticism about its business model, but it made its first annual profit in 2003. Amazon also owns Alexa Internet, A9.com, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
Founded as Cadabra.com by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and launched in 1995, Amazon.com began as an online bookstore, though it soon diversified its product lines, adding DVDs, music CDs, computer software, video games, electronics, like mp3 players, apparel, furniture, food, and more. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, China and Japan and it ships globally on selected products.
Amazon offers web services for access to its catalog as well as for integration with retailers like Target and Marks & Spencer. A9.com provides search engine services directly on the Amazon.com site. Since November 2005, the company has been testing Amazon Mechanical Turk, an application programming interface (API) allowing programs to dispatch tasks to human processors.
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