Amazon on Tuesday launched its Appstore for Android and the effort may hint at a bigger strategy for tablets.

Launching an Amazon Android store is an interesting trial balloon on the way to a broader strategy. The promise with Amazon’s Appstore for Android is that the software is vetted. The store is launching with 3,800 apps and the major categories are well covered.

It’s likely that other developers will take Amazon’s store more seriously now that it has launched.

I haven’t had a chance to take the store for a spin due to download issues. My Android device is set up to download the app, but it won’t take when I go to the URL. Other folks such as James Kendrick haven’t had any issues.

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Amazon to Open Android App Store as Apple Sues

The Amazon Appstore, which will be accessible at Amazon.com/appstore and through a mobile app, will sell applications for Android phones and tablets. It will also encroach on Google’s territory by providing Android users with a new way to buy apps that cuts Google out of the equation.

The store, which Amazon initially announced in January, prompted a trademark infringement suit on Friday from Apple, which claims ownership of the App Store name. “We’ve asked Amazon not to copy the App Store name because it will confuse and mislead customers,” Apple said in a statement late Monday. Amazon said it had a policy of not commenting on litigation.

Because Android is an open platform, unlike Apple’s, other companies can open stores that sell Android apps. But Amazon is perhaps a more formidable competitor than others because people are used to buying things through the site and its mobile apps — and many have stored their credit card numbers on Amazon for years.

Amazon will provide a few things that Google’s Android Market does not, said Aaron Rubenson, category leader for the Appstore at Amazon, by throwing its marketing and e-commerce expertise behind the new service.

“We spent years building shopping features that help customers find the products that are relevant to them from amidst a massive selection,” Mr. Rubenson said, “and we’re excited to apply those capabilities to the apps market.”

For instance, it will use the recommendation algorithm that Amazon uses on its Web site to suggest certain apps, so if someone shops for March Madness gear on Amazon.com, the Appstore would recommend basketball apps. It will also offer a paid app for free every day, beginning with Angry Birds Rio. And users can test apps on the Web site before buying them.

The recommendation engine may be most important. There are so many apps that Apple, Google and others have struggled to suggest the right ones to users. For a long time, Google’s Android Market was quite difficult to search, but Google recently introduced a new and improved Android Market. A Google spokesman declined to comment on Amazon’s Android app store.

For app developers, the biggest difference between Amazon’s app store and others is that Amazon will set the prices the apps will sell for. Developers will suggest a price, but Amazon could sell them for a different price — potentially less than the sale price on the Android Market. Amazon will pay developers the greater of either 70 percent of the sale price, which is the standard revenue-share percentage for app stores, or 20 percent of the price the developer suggests the app sells for.

Unlike Google, Amazon will review apps before they are sold, but will only block them if they don’t work or if they put the customer’s data at risk, Mr. Rubenson said. That is somewhere in between the policies of Apple, which has blocked apps for other reasons, and Google, which doesn’t review them and faced the consequences this month when malware snuck into the Android Market.

As for whether the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, could eventually run the Android operating system, Mr. Rubenson said there is “nothing that we’ve announced.” Amazon is, however, considering selling apps for platforms other than Android.

Amazon.com is entering the mobile app business with an Android app store that is scheduled to open Tuesday. The store’s name has already prompted a lawsuit from Apple.

The cast of Big Love on the set of their season finale

In its final episode, Big Love pushes the Henrickson clan to their breaking point, as Bill faces both a lengthy prison sentence for statutory rape charges and the loss of the family's business. But Bill also receives his true testimony in his church—a nod from Mormon founder Joseph Smith's wife Emma (Rebecca Wisocky)—and he restores the true balance that had been thwarted at Juniper Creek. Bill can now lead his flock of believers into the light.

Or he would have—if his life hadn't been so brutally taken from him by a former friend. But Bill's death accomplishes something that Barb, Nicki, and Margene had struggled with for the past five seasons: it finally unifies the three sister wives in an unbreakable bond. In the final minutes of the show—11 months after Bill's shooting—these three find the common ground they've been fighting for throughout the entire series. And Barb, who struggled with her questions of faith, gains the priesthood she's long sought after and leads the righteous into a new beginning.

For a show that, at its core, has been about families and faith, it was a perfect way to end the remarkable series, as heartbreaking as it was. The 12 scenes selected below from Big Love's five seasons exemplify the way that the show shifted effortlessly from domestic drama to faith-based vision quest, and from the mundane to the divine.

The shocking Sunday series finale of HBO's polygamist family drama found the Henricksons coming together just as everything fell apart. Jace Lacob has the best moments from the last five seasons, but be forewarned: SPOILER ALERT AHEAD!

When Big Love began in 2006, the Henrickson family's problems were at first limited to the challenges facing four adults in a plural marriage: questions of sharing, solidarity, and personal secrets. They were an ordinary family in some extraordinary circumstances and creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer opened a window into a world that few of us will ever see: one of compounds, fundamentalists, intense faith, and vengeful adversaries.

Big Love, American Style

This all came to a head in the controversial fourth season, which tried to cram an incredible amount of craziness into only nine episodes. Bill Paxton, who defends the season for its ambition (though ambition, as always, doesn’t equal achievement), seems to think that the negative reactions cost the show the chance to have a longer run:

I grant you that last season may have tried to put too big a foot in too big a shoe, but they were cramming those episodes chock full of great stuff. I was surprised that we were so taken to task for it. And it did not help us keep the show going. If [people] would just watch it again, they’d realize that we put too many ingredients in the stew, but the show’s always been so ambitious and so well written and so full of stuff. I personally grew to resent that whole brouhaha and I think that it ultimately killed the show. Again, I don’t know the political ins and outs of that, but I know that it didn’t help us going into Season 5.

Of course it could be that the show was simply unlucky that there wasn’t a polygamy craze in pop culture to compare with the vampire craze that helped lift True Blood to smash hit status. In any case, in preparation for tonight’s finale, Jace Lacob collects together 10 memorable moments from the run of Big Love, most of them from the third season.

Tonight is the series finale of Big Love, one of the key shows of what we might call the HBO interregnum — the period after the first generation of drama hits went away (it was a year after the end of Six Feet Under and a year before the end of The Sopranos) and it seemed unable to come up with new shows of the same impact. Big Love is sort of a transitional show. It follows the pattern of those HBO successes: a stylish melodrama with a sense of humour and a commitment to showing the dark side of a typical TV genre (in this case, the family drama). But it got broader and soapier than they did, and seemed to use stories as metaphors for topical issues almost in the way that science fiction shows do. That’s a format that True Blood would eventually use, but Big Love arguably got caught in the middle of that transition, never quite sure if it wanted to be a serious drama or a crazy soap.

Dave Wolf

WEAC has sent an e-mail to hundreds of businesses belonging to the Fox Valley Chamber of Commerce offering to put a sign in a window for those businesses that support the union goals. That is not sitting well with many members, according Shannon Meyer, president and CEO of the Fox Cities Chamber:

In the email, WEAC asks Chamber members to show their support for the union in its battle to save its ability to collectively bargain.

In exchange for signing a pledge that says they oppose limiting collective bargaining, businesses will receive a poster they can put in their window so union members with “substantially less discretionary money to spend” can support those businesses which support them.

[snip]

“There is veiled threat within the email that’s stating, put this poster in your window and we’ll make sure your business isn’t boycotted, but if you don’t it’s very clear that if you don’t those businesses are going to be boycotted in the future,” Meyer said.

In Wisconsin last week, it was the police and firefighters unions threatening local business* with boycotts should they not support the union efforts to turn back the clock on their so-called collective bargaining rights. Now, like a pack of wolves, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) has jumped into the age-old racket of shaking-down businesses.

Familiar sight: Gonzaga beats a higher seed - College basketball ...

Marquise Carter scored a career-high 24 points, lifting Gonzaga to an 86-71 victory over sixth-seeded St. John's on Thursday night to cap a stellar day for the double-digit seeds at the Pepsi Center in the NCAA tournament.

DENVER - That "11" on the bracket is only a number. The name that goes with it — "Gonzaga" — means a whole lot more.

The Bulldogs have become too good to be considered an underdog anymore, even if the seeding may say so.

McDonald’s Shamrock Shake Gallery: Add to the Minty Madness

Even though I‘m not feeling my Sham as strongly this year, I admit that I still have a soft spot for this limited-menu item at McDonald’s. (Note: See Mickey D’s response to my Sham complaint here in a past RedEye column.)

Check out my Sham gallery so far. Many minty thanks to all the wonderful readers who are helping to populate it with green images.



Update: I will be talking Shamrock shakes on PRI at 5:45 a.m. on St. Patty’s Day (March 17). You can check me out one of a number of ways. So wake up early with me and show some Sham solidarity.

Update 2: Some radio station in Dallas made an indirect mention of our humble Sham shrine on the Kyles Files. Check it out and see if you can guess when.

Update 3: Operation ShamSub is hitting later this week, and will involve my Chicagonow sister Maya Henderson of Breath, Body and Balance. No spoilers, so you have to keep your eye on the blog.

Update 4: Keep sending me Sham photos. Let’s keep the mo-mint-um going.

McDonald’s Shamrock Shake Gallery: Add to the Minty Madness