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If you're looking for new, but obvious, ways to cut government waste, try this: According to a cloud computing strategy report last February by U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, government information systems today may be using less than 30% of their available server capacity. And while trying to take inventory of the various information assets that may be under-utilized, Kundra and government researchers are discovering that agencies presently lack the tools to make any kind of thorough inventory of what assets they already have.

This is the environment that Amazon Web Services is trying to address, with today's announcement of a new special administrative district, if you will, of its cloud. Called AWS GovCloud, it's designed to handle the specific requirements laid out by Kundra last February, including compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA).

As anybody who's had to purchase college textbooks in the last several years knows, they can be quite the hassle. Not only do their already-steep prices keep rising, but getting rid of them at the end of the semester isn't always easy.

Amazon Student, a new iPhone app that launched today, aims to help ease some of that pain by giving students a way to shop for textbooks and other items and sell them back via their smartphone.

Amazon posted its financial results for the second quarter of 2011 today. The big news was that sales hit $9.91 billion, a 51% increase from the same period last year. But there were few details about Kindle or e-book sales, although the company did note, unsurprisingly, that Kindle sales were up compared to first quarter 2011.

The word "tablet," which has been murmured excitedly by Amazon followers for some time, came up only once during a conference call with company CFO Thomas Szkutak after the earning announcement. The question received this non-response from Szkutak:

Amazon unveiled a Kindle Textbook Rental, giving students the ability to rent instead of buy digital textbooks. Amazon says that, "tens of thousands" of titles from some of the major textbook publishers - including John WIley & Sons, Wlsevier, and Taylor & Francis - will be available for this school year.

It's not just the selection that the company is touting, of course, it's the savings: "now students can save up to 80% off its textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store." Amazon's boasted savings for students has put the company at odds with brick-and-mortar college bookstores, and the National Association of College Stores has accused the online retailer of misleading students about the potential for savings when buying textbooks from Amazon.

In April, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) warned its members to stay away from the Amazon Appstore because of "significant concerns" it had about the pricing, terms and policies Amazon had in place. And this week, the Appstore was once again in the news after an independent game developer called the store a "disaster" in a scathing blog post filled with complaints.

But are his issues the result of one bad experience or more indicative of an overall broken system? Let us know what you think in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

We have written before about a little-known facet of AWS, the ability to ship your physical hard drive off to that Big Cloud in Seattle and have them make a copy of all your precious data and put it in their cloud.

Apple may lose its claim to the term "app store" in its trademark suit against Amazon, makers of the Amazon Appstore for Android. According to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton is not convinced that Apple has proved consumers would confuse the two services.

Although the ruling is not yet final - Judge Hamilton says she will reread some of the supporting papers - she did say that she is "probably" going to deny Apple's motion. Does this mean "app store" will now officially be a generic term?

Since the Kindle's launch, Amazon has heralded each new arrival into what it calls the "Kindle Million Club," the group of authors who have sold over 1 million Kindle e-books. There have been seven authors in this club up 'til now - some of the big names in publishing: Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts for example.

But the admission today of the eighth member of this club is really quite extraordinary. Not because John Locke is a 60 year old former insurance salesman from Kentucky with no writing or publishing background. But because John Locke has accomplished the feat of selling one million e-books as a completely self-published author.

There was a lot of buzz prior to today's announcements at WWDC about the deals that Apple had reportedly struck with the major record labels. Even before any Apple executives took the stage, many industry observers had crowned Apple the heir apparent to music in the cloud, decreeing that its offerings would surely trump those recently announced by Google and Amazon.

But now that the dust has settled and the glimmer has faded from today's keynote at WWDC, we have to ask, has Apple really triumphed here? Did we see the future of digital music unveiled onstage?

Having recently opened an App Store for Android to compete with Google's App Marketplace, Amazon is now taking on Apple with a launch today of a Mac Download Store. Amazon says that the store currently contains about 250 software and game titles.

That number is far fewer than the thousands of titles that were available at the launch of Apple's App Store in January. But Amazon is already offering titles that you can't find in Apple's store - most importantly perhaps, Microsoft Office.