NBA Jam backboard shattered on Droid SNES emulator.

Google Place Pages are pulling some interesting data from Mint nowadays.  I am not sure how long Mint has been sharing this data with Google but - but it’s pretty cool.

The above example shows one of my favorite local Mexican restaurants, and Google states that the average transaction at El Loro is $18.63… sounds about right.

On Monday and Thursday of this past week, Amazon made Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” album for sale to the public for only $0.99.  That’s 14 songs spanning 61 minutes for a buck.

This was a ballsy move for Amazon, and it’s too early to realize whether it was brilliant ballsy, or stupid ballsy… but ballsy it was.

Here is a quick breakdown of the numbers:

• Approximately 440,000 units sold on Amazon at the $0.99 price during these 2 days
• Amazon has to pay Interscope / Universal Music Group approximately $8.39 per sale

This means Amazon lost approximately $7.40 one each of the 440K album sales, for a total loss of around $3.25 million.

So why would Amazon do this?

The effort is essentially a loss leader to promote Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Cloud Player products that launched in late March.

Since the purchase of the Gaga album also gave purchasers 20gb of free space on the new Cloud Drive, it provided an opportunity to expose a large number of consumers (most of them young, tech savvy gadget users) to a new way of listening to music… music on the cloud.

This means users are no longer bound to having music on one physical device.  Users can access the cloud player on any device with an Internet browser, as well as with Android devices with the Amazon cloud player app.  Think about it… your music collection on your phone (if you want), on your laptop (if you feel like it), on your work computer (if you work on a computer).  Wherever you go, your music goes… and you don’t have to worry about backing it up or the medium becoming obsolete (until Internet version 2 rolls out).

It’s pretty kick-ass technology, but it’s up against a few big names.  There are rumors that Apple is coming out with a competitive offering soon, and Google has actually already launched Google Music - which is essentially the same (though Google’s will probably suck and fall into oblivion ala Google Wave).

Kudos to Amazon for going big on this one, it takes balls to go head to head with Apple and Google in this space. 

3.2 million is a lot of money… but it may have been a brilliant move.