Online retailing giant Amazon likes to do things a little differently. So when it found it had $775m burning a hole in its pockets, it realised that the best way to spend it was – on what else – a laser-guided robot drone army to man its vast warehouses.

Amazon has agreed to stump up the cash for warehouse picking and transport robot maker Kiva Systems – the brainchild of a former employee at dotcom poster child, Webvan.

Kiva chief executive Mick Mountz saw first-hand how Webvan's inability to get orders out of the doors quickly enough hamstrung the company. The MIT-trained engineer put his mind to devising a more forward-thinking approach to fulfilment.

And what better way, than through the use of robots?

Over the past 10 years, Kiva has landed a string a high-profile customers, including high street fashion retailer GAP.

The Kiva system relies on custom-designed facilities, so that its open floor space can be transformed into a information grid for its robots, which use a combination of 2D barcode stickers and a wireless network to navigate around a warehouse.

Amazon's aim is clear: Kiva's rack-shifting robots should help it reduce the cost of operating its warehouses.

“Amazon has long used automation in its fulfilment centres, said David Clark, vice president of global customer fulfilment, at Amazon.

But if that doesn't prove a fulfilling strategy, it can always just make the robots dance around its warehouses, which would look pretty good.

Like most of the technology world, V3 was eager to get its hands on a copy of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs and, thanks to the nifty powers of Amazon's Kindle system, we've been enjoying the biography since yesterday afternoon.

The opening chapters provide a swift but thorough overview of Jobs' early life as he discovers that he was adopted, meets tech whiz Steve Wozniak, and eventually founds Apple, all while accidentally getting his on/off girlfriend pregnant and doing a lot of acid.

Jobs' voice comes through little but often in the opening chapters, Isaacson instead setting the scene and using information from those who knew him at the time to paint the background of his life, with hints at how these formative years would shape the success of Apple.

This involved Jobs' fascination with Buddhism that fed his desire for clean, intuitive technologies, to the ethos instilled in him by his father of ensuring that each and every component of a product is designed with love and care.

What also comes through a lot in the early chapters is just how pivotal Wozniak was to the early success of Apple, and how well the two Steves worked together. Woz's enduring love for HP for its research philosophy also shines through, something he told V3 about last week.

Yet the book is about Jobs and from the opening chapters there's a clear sense of destiny around him: the way he was able to bend those around him to his will, landing jobs at Atari, securing funding for Apple, making deals with resellers.

Isaacson admits that he tried hard to avoid the influence of Jobs' famous "reality distortion field", and perhaps here and there he succumbs. But it's impossible not to imagine a wiry, manic Jobs aged 22 acting in the manner described and getting his way.

This, of course, also means that there was an ugly, ruthless side to Jobs, and many recall being insulted, dismissed and overlooked by Jobs even at that young age, traits well known throughout his distinguished career.

For those interested in Apple and Jobs the book is clearly going to be something of a must-read. The early chapters suggest that it will live up to the hype, magnified by Jobs' death on 5 October and the access to the Apple founder and those around him granted to Isaacson.

We'll have a full review on V3 when we've finished the 600-page epic.

Until 2006 the word 'tweet' was the noise a bird made, and no more. Now, though, a 'tweet' refers to a message written on the 100 million-strong micro-blogging site Twitter and the company is laying claim to the word under trademark.

However, Twitter has run into a problem as the word 'tweet' is already owned by an advertising firm called Twittad in the slightly jarring phrase 'Let Your Ad Meet Tweets'.

So, like any self-respecting US company, Twitter is suing Twittad. Specifically, it is going after the firm for a violation of a trademark that Twitter argues it should own as it is clearly the reason the term is popular, citing 'retweet' and 'tweetdeck' as evidence.

"This action arises from the registration of the mark 'Let Your Ad Meet Tweets' by Twittad in connection with online advertising services for use on Twitter," the suit reads.

"Defendant's registration unfairly exploits the widespread association by the consuming public of the mark 'tweet' with Twitter, and threatens to block Twitter from its registration and legitimate uses of its own mark."

Such litigiousness over a word previously associated with twitchers such as Bill Oddie is not the first time that tech firms have gone at it over some words. Apple famously lost a preliminary injunction case against Amazon over the term 'app store'.

Sky Broadcasting also tried to take on Skype over the use of the word 'Sky' in its name.

It appears that the lawyers of Silicon Valley are prepared to scour the dictionary from morning to night looking for more words over which they can suggest their client has dominion.

Amazon's Kindle store is the latest online service to gain the attention of spammers after it was flooded with thousands of cheap books filled with pointless information, according to a report on Reuters.

The books are sold for next to nothing - usually around $0.99 (79p) - but clog up the store and mean that customers have to wade through pages of spam books to find legitimate novels and non-fiction titles, and may even download a fake book in the process.

Part of the problem is that anyone can publish to the Kindle store through self-publishing channels, which makes it easy for genuine authors to add their works but can overwhelm the store with unknown items, legitimate or otherwise.

V3.co.uk contacted Amazon for information on the scale of the problem and how it could be resolved, but had received no reply at the time of publication.

A spokesperson for Amazon told V3.co.uk the online retailer is working on the issue to ensure that customers do not suffer when using the Kindle service.

"Undifferentiated or barely differentiated versions of the same book don't improve the customer experience. We have processes to detect and remove undifferentiated versions of books with the goal of eliminating such content from our store," they said.

Nevertheless, the problem highlights some naivety on Amazon's part, as any new platform that involves financial transactions is always going to appeal to unscrupulous characters.

Furthermore, the e-book format is growing rapidly. A recent KPMG report found that UK citizens spend almost the same amount on book downloads as music files, as devices like the Kindle, Sony eReader and smartphones drive access to digital books.

It would seem that this spam flood will take advantage of the millions of people joining the e-book bandwagon who will be unaware of the threats and susceptible to fraud.