Word: amazon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...former Microsoft executive Peter Neupert, launched its virtual pharmacy and a selection of 15,000 health and beauty products to a rousing chorus of approval. A crush of visitors overwhelmed the site. Another admirer is online bookseller Amazon.com which said it had acquired 40% of the fledgling company. For Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the investment made sense. He has been on the prowl for other retail businesses that fit Amazon's amazing model, and the health-and-beauty sector is six times as large as the book market. "Nobody likes going to the drugstore," Bezos jokes. This week PlanetRx, headed...
Neupert and Bezos, though, are still convinced that the kind of convenience and shopping experience the Web affords will attract consumers the way Amazon has done. If they're only half right, they've still got a healthy business...
RETURN THE PAGE Online book buyers were in an uproar last week when Amazon.com admitted it had been selling publishers prominent placement for their books in sections such as "Destined for Greatness" and "What We're Reading." Amazon denies it ever spotlighted a book without editors' approval, but it will let customers return any book it ever recommended, no matter how beaten up. Amazon will also now disclose to customers which digital displays are paid...
After graduating in 1979, he headed for the Amazon and began visiting shamans, some of whom let him stay for a while as a student medicine man. He slept in thatched huts, ate delicacies like boiled rat, suffered vampire-bat bites and was nearly electrocuted by a giant eel. And he collected, as fast as he could, hundreds of plants that supplied ingredients for the shamans' medical arsenal...
...Western influences seeped into native villages. Thatch roofs were giving way to tin, while shorts and T shirts were replacing breechcloths and feathers. The shamanistic tradition was fading because missionaries brought in modern medicine's pills--many developed from rain-forest plants in the first place. Most ominously, the Amazon rain forest was dying around the edges, torched and slashed by farmers and loggers. Somewhere in the jungle might be a cure for AIDS or cancer that would be lost forever before it could even be discovered...