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NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon, a company of seemingly boundless ambition, appears to be venturing into yet another market: smartphones.

The corporate juggernaut that started out with books and soon moved into music, video, cloud computing and Kindle e-readers is hosting a launch event Wednesday in Seattle, and media reports indicate the product will be an Amazon phone — perhaps one with multiple cameras that can produce 3-D photos.

Amazon declined to comment, but analysts said the goal is almost certainly a device designed to get customers to buy more things from Amazon. It might include an Amazon shopping app or other features tied in tightly to the products the company sells.

"It's Amazon. That says to me the core value proposition is going to be about shopping," said Ramon Llamas of the research firm International Data Corp.

Amazon's phone comes at a time when the nation's largest e-commerce company is at a crossroads.

Its stock, which surged for years despite narrow profits, has dropped 18 percent in 2014 to about $326, in part because investors have been losing patience with its habit of plowing revenue back into new ventures.

Analysts said the move into smartphones is a bit of a head-scratcher, since the company is a late entrant into the highly competitive market.

For all its success with other products, Amazon will be hard-pressed to compete with Samsung and Apple, the No. 1 and 2 mobile phone companies in the world.

Globally, Samsung led mobile phone manufacturers with 31 percent of the 288 million units shipped in the first quarter, followed by Apple at 15 percent. In the U.S., Apple dominates with more than 37 percent of the 34 million units shipped, with Samsung at close to 29 percent.

Some analysts have speculated that the 3-D feature might tie into an Amazon shopping app. Shoppers might be able to use the phone to take a 3-D picture of a product in a store, then search for the object on Amazon and buy it online.

Analysts said the phone could also come with a data plan that could let owners use Amazon services without using up any data.

"Anything that generates more repeat orders and more frequent purchases is probably part of what they intend to do with this," said R.W. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian.

To compete, Amazon needs more than an expected 3-D viewing feature, which has been tried before by smartphone makers like HTC and LG, Llamas said.

Competing on price won't help if it leaves people with the impression that the device is cheaply built, and getting customers to buy a phone without being about to touch it first could prove difficult, he said.

"If they sell it only online, as Amazon sells many of its goods and products, that could be a challenge," Llamas said.

Here's a look at the impact Amazon has had in music, video and other markets it has entered:

BOOKS

Amazon.com Inc. started as an online bookstore in 1995 in CEO Jeff Bezos' garage in Bellevue, Washington. As more and more bookstores have closed, Amazon is now believed to be the nation's largest bookseller, with an estimated 30 percent of a total book market that PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates hit $34.9 billion last year, and 60 percent of an e-book market that PwC pegged at $7.9 billion.

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of book industry consultancy The Idea Logical Co., said book publishers view Amazon with "a mixture of dependence and fear."

"They can't live without Amazon's sales, and they can't live with Amazon's market power," he said.

MUSIC

Amazon is a major player in music. It has sold compact discs by mail since 1998 and digital downloads since 2007.

Russ Crupnick, managing partner of consulting company MusicWatch, pegs Amazon's share at 18 percent of the $2.8 billion digital download market in the U.S. last year and 23 percent of the $2.1 billion market for CDs. In comparison, Apple's iTunes commands about 67 percent of digital downloads and doesn't sell CDs. Amazon is the only competitor to Apple of any real size.

Amazon last week launched a music streaming service that makes more than 1 million tracks available to members of its $99-a-year Amazon Prime subscription plan.

TABLETS

Amazon took over the e-book market soon after its first Kindle was launched in 2007. It took a big step by introducing its full-color Kindle Fire tablet in 2011, with a price starting at $199 and a screen just 7 inches diagonally.

"At the time, none of the other vendors had something similar," said Jitesh Ubrani, an IDC analyst.

But since then, others have matched the size and price, especially Samsung, which has made big gains. Amazon's share of global shipments has slid from more than 7 percent in 2012 to 2 percent in the first quarter of the year.

"Other vendors have cheaper, better products," Ubrani said.

MOVIES AND TV SHOWS

Amazon is a large retailer of DVDs and Blu-ray discs and also offers online rentals and purchases of digital video products.

Amazon has 15 percent of the $1.8 billion U.S. market for movie and TV show rentals and downloads, trailing Apple's 58 percent, according to Dan Cryan, an analyst with market research firm IHS.

As for subscription video streaming, Cryan estimates Amazon accounted for 15 percent of the 43.6 million active U.S. subscribers of streaming video plans through its Prime Instant Video service. Netflix accounted for 73 percent of active streaming subscribers, while Hulu Plus had 12 percent.

CLOUD SERVICES

Amazon essentially created the marketplace for what is known as cloud infrastructure as a service in 2006 with Amazon Web Services. That is where it allows its servers to be used by third parties to host the data and applications they need to run mobile apps, websites and other services.

As the overwhelming market leader, Amazon maintains five times the computing capacity of the next 14 service providers combined, according to Gartner analyst Lydia Leong. Amazon is aggressive with price cuts and innovation, which will probably keep competitors like Microsoft from catching up for years, Leong said.

OVERALL RETAIL

Amazon sold $40.8 billion worth of goods in North America last year. That's 17 percent of all e-commerce, according to Anne Zybowski, vice president of retail insights at research firm Kantar Retail.

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Online:

Amazon's teaser video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=erUZQ9GK0sE

Nakashima reported on this story from Los Angeles.

Stewart Butterfield has a problem the rest of us can only dream of. His business has turned into a runaway train. Daily users of his product, Slack — aimed at helping corporate teams communicate better — have grown from 10,000 to 90,000 in just five months.

How'd he do it? Not with a marketing or sales team — because he doesn't have one. It's all been word of mouth.

"We're hiring as fast as we can right now. We've got 34 people. A month ago we had 20. And six months ago we had eight," he says.

Not that he's complaining.

Before honing in on the business that took off after Butterfield pretty much stumbled into it — more on that later — it's worth looking at his backstory. Butterfield, 41, is a serial entrepreneur, which in his case means serial success and failure. He repeatedly puts his heart and soul into projects that fail, and from the ruins pulls something out that really works.

Which in a way makes him a poster child for Silicon Valley, where dozens of startups go all out on compelling ideas that ultimately don't pan out, but from the rubble emerges one major success that makes the struggle worthwhile.

If Butterfield looks familiar, it's because his photo graced the cover of Newsweek in 2006, together with his business partner and then-spouse, Caterina Fake. They got their 15 minutes of fame for breaking the logjam after the dot-com bust of 2000 with the first big sale of a tech company — when they sold their photo-sharing site Flickr to Yahoo in 2005.

Turns out that sharing is a theme that runs through his portfolio of ideas. It's how he sees the Internet: a place for sharing and creating communities. It's how Butterfield, a Canadian who studied philosophy at Cambridge University, says he experienced the Web in the early days, through the early online discussion system known as Usenet.

Game Neverending Was A Game Never Launching

In 2002, with Fake and Jason Classon, Butterfield founded Ludicorp and began working on an ambitious online role-playing game called Game Neverending. It never got off the ground, but the idea for photo sharing emerged more or less spontaneously from Ludicorp's staff at a time when online photo sites were used merely to send digital photos for printing.

Yahoo didn't divulge what it paid for Flickr, but Butterfield suggests that the estimates, ranging from $25 million to $35 million, are too high. Which seems surprising when those numbers are small change in today's world of multibillion-dollar sales of startups that have yet to earn a dime, let alone turn a profit. Flickr, by contrast, was already profitable by the time Yahoo came courting.

After leaving Yahoo in 2008, Butterfield took a year to raise $17.5 million for a company called Tiny Speck, intending once again to develop a massive online game but with a new name, Glitch. This time it launched, in September 2011, but one year later, with tears rolling down his face, Butterfield told his staff it was game over.

Glitch had dedicated fans and an income stream, but Butterfield found that most new users were bailing too soon, unwilling to spend the 15 or so minutes it took to figure out the game.

From A Tiny Speck, A New Success

And so Tiny Speck's Glitch turned into Slack. "All these silly names," Butterfield admits. (He's changing the corporate name from Tiny Speck to the product name Slack.)

Game developers who worked on Glitch found that, like everybody they knew, they were suffering from information overload — email, instant messages, Google Docs, Twitter and Facebook, plus reports coming from SalesForce, Quicken or ZenDesk, the online help service. So they devised an in-house software solution by collecting the flow of information in a single place, organizing it by "channels" and making everything searchable.

Convinced their situation wasn't unique, the team looked around to see if anyone had come up with a better solution for team communication — and couldn't find one. "If it was something that none of us ... would work without, a system like this, then there would definitely be other people who felt the same," he says.

Indeed: Users for Slack showed up in droves, revenue grew rapidly, and a recent round of funding valued the company at $250 million.

Butterfield, who presents as relaxed and friendly but also seems tightly wound inside, admits that Slack won't solve the modern problem of data overload. "We hope that we ameliorate it a little bit."

He also recognizes that, with the potential for millions of paying users, Slack is bigger than anything he's been involved with. Is he up to steering his runaway train?

"I think I was a terrible boss 10 years ago," he says, explaining that he was fussy and controlling but also avoided conflict, which often made him appear passive aggressive.

But he says he has learned a lot since then, in particular from a vice president of search at Yahoo. "Everyone who worked for him was great. They were attentive, reliable. They did what they said they were going to do [and] were never too stressed out or busy to help you with something. I asked him how he got such good people, and he said, 'I don't get any better people than you do. I just fire them really quick if they don't work out.' "

Margit Wennmachers, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in Slack, points out that the biggest tech successes — Facebook, Microsoft, Apple — haven't grown under professional managers.

"The product is what you can't teach," she says. "Everything else is learnable."

And the product? Well, that's Butterfield's strength ... and weakness.

"He keeps trying to work the game and fails," she says, "but then something magical comes out of it."

U.S. special operations forces have captured one of the men suspected of playing a key role in the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi. Ahmed Abu Khatallah has been associated with one of the militias involved in the attack that killed four Americans. Currently being held outside Libya, he will face trial in a U.S. federal court.

NORWALK, Conn. (AP) — Prosecutors on Tuesday said they were dropping a disorderly conduct case against Paul Simon and his wife, Edie Brickell, that stemmed from a fight at the couple's home.

Simon, 72, and Brickell, 48, did not appear in Norwalk Superior Court, where prosecutors told a judge they were declining to pursue the case, meaning the charges will be dropped and eventually erased after 13 months.

Prosecutors declined to comment outside court. A telephone message left for the couple's attorney, Andrew Bowman, was not immediately returned.

The couple fought April 26 inside a cottage on their property in New Canaan, police said.

Brickell told officers she confronted her husband after he did something to "break her heart," according to police, but she did not provide any details. She told police Simon shoved her and she slapped him. The police report said Simon suffered a superficial cut to his ear and Brickell, who smelled of alcohol, had a bruise on her wrist.

Both said in court on April 28 that they did not consider the other a threat, and no protective order was issued.

Simon is a 12-time Grammy winner and member of The Songwriters Hall of Fame and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — as half of the duo of Simon and Garfunkel and as a solo artist.

Brickell is perhaps best known for the song "What I Am," recorded with her band the New Bohemians and released in 1988. She collaborated last year with comedian Steve Martin, who has an acclaimed career as a folk musician, for the roots album "Love Has Come For You."

The singers were married in 1992. They have three children.