• Amazon’s EC2 cloud service crashed and continues to be problematic for some companies and services that rely on it. Affected businesses included Foursquare, Quora, HootSuite, SCVNGR, and Reddit, the last of which is still in “emergency read-only mode” due to what it’s calling a”degradation” with Amazon. Company engineers are still working to completely fix the problem. (All Things D)
• The device tracking controversy continues. The Wall Street Journal has learned that Apple and Google’s smartphones regularly send user locations back to the companies as part of their strategy to build databases that take advantage of such info. According to one security analyst, an HTC Android phone collected data like location, a unique phone identifier, and info about nearby Wi-Fi networks, every few seconds and transmitted it over to Google several times each hour. (Wall Street Journal)
• Reuters reports that Apple’s cloud-based music storage, which will let iTunes customers store songs on a remote server and access them anywhere they have an Internet connection, is already done and will launch ahead of Google’s offering, though no word on when that might be. (Reuters)
• AMD’s first quarter profits beat analyst estimates, coming in at $510 million, nearly double its earnings the same time last year. (Bloomberg)
• Remember when we said that Samsung would respond to Apple’s recent patent lawsuit in kind? Well, it did — with a lawsuit of its own over company patents filed in South Korea, Japan, and Germany. (9 to 5 Mac)
• Microsoft named Frank Holland its new corporate vice president of Microsoft’s advertising sales business. (CNET)
• Meanwhile, Groupon hired Margo Geogiadis, Google’s VP of global sales planning and technology, to serve as COO. (Chicago Business)
• Mobile gaming start-up OpenFeint was bought by Japanese mobile gaming company GREE for $104 million. (Spark PR)

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