Om Malik argues that Bezos is the inheritor to Steve Jobs’s crown. I agree. Not because Bezos has copied anything Jobs did, but because he has not. What he’s done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber • Offering his take on Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD, which does something interesting — it undercuts Apple’s prices by hundreds of dollars and offers an approach that’s unique in that it’s so doggedly focused on content consumption as its main driver. “Apple’s goal is to sell as many iPads as it can,” he says. “Amazon’s goal is to sell as many Kindle Fires as it can to a specific audience: active Amazon.com customers.” But then again, a series of reviews out tonight seem to suggest that the Fire HD is good, but not perfect. Then there are those ready to take out the daggers. Still though, watching the press conference from last week, you get the feeling that Jeff Bezos is onto something. Think Bezos lives up to Gruber’s billing above?
Kindle and Kindle Fire to have a lending library: The program, which launched today, allows readers to borrow one title at a time per month; when they rent a new title, the previous one will leave their device. Sounds like…not the best plan in the world. The library has over 5,000 titles for readers to choose from, so it’s a little limited. Also, the service is only available to users of Amazon’s Prime service, which costs $79 a year. Stock up! source
» Loss leader vs. straight-up leader: Amazon knows that the thing that was going to get the Kindle Fire to sell was the price, and it appears that even though the device is going to sell at a $10 loss per unit, they’ll make that back quickly through the sale of music and other stuff. This is a situation unlike that of Apple, which sells its devices at a profit and makes money through the sale of content. But that said, Jeff Bezos is looking particularly Jobsian these days.
usualchatter asks: As an additional quip about Amazon's Silk and privacy issues. Amazon's EC2 cloud services already host traffic for countless other websites. Netflix for example, serves up it's content thru Amazon. Many webhosts lease out space to customers that they themselves manage on Amazon's servers.
» SFB says: Yep, and Google hosts one of the most widely-used individual Javascript files on the Web, jQuery, as a service for Web users, meaning that millions of people touch that one file daily. This is not to undercut the point about privacy issues here (they exist), but to point out that it seems like the privacy issues are just an excuse to draw controversy and attention around a problem that already exists in numerous other forms, simply because it’s a shiny new thing. — Ernie @ SFB
This makes Amazon like your ISP. Every site, everything you do online [through Silk] will go through Amazon. That’s a new role for someone like them, and I don’t think it’s at all clear that Amazon can step into that, or that it will be apparent to consumers.Center for Democracy & Technology spokesperson Aaron Brauer-Rieke • Offering up this claim that Amazon will use Silk, which Amazon claims will help speed up Web sites on the Amazon Kindle Fire, as a tracking tool. To that, we say this: Are you guys familiar with this Web browser called Opera Mini? It’s not as common as it once was, but for people using old-school phones, it was a bit of a lifesaver. It made the Motorola Razr, for example, a far more usable phone for surfing the Web, due to the way it handles content — through the company’s own servers, which cleared out all the extra stuff and sped up the sites you were downloading. Sound familiar? It’s exactly what Amazon Silk claims to do. Not buying this whole privacy argument. source (via • follow)
The Kindle Fire launch today is big news. Amazon is putting out a game-changer: a low-priced tablet with an awesome user interface (UI). We’ve seen cheap tablets placed on the market before, we’ve seen well-designed tablets (cough iPad cough), but never a product that combined the two qualities.
This will be a real game changer. For my fellow journalists, a major question we’re dealing with right now is the multi-platform one. How do we simultaneously produce for print, web, mobile and tablet? For writers, this is a minor issue. For producers, designers and photographers, this is a major one.
Good analysis on what the Kindle Fire means for us content schlubs.
Amazon Web Services + Amazon Prime + Amazon Kindle + Amazon App Store + Amazon Instant Video + Amazon MP3= KINDLE FIRE
Live Blog from Amazon’s Tablet Press Event http://tnw.to/1B2HJ
We’ve read a lot of comments about the Kindle Fire’s seemingly-diminished book-reading abilities. To defend Amazon a bit, it doesn’t look like they’re aiming for their original Kindle target audience here. The original Kindle is still on the market at a far lower price than it was a week ago. This isn’t for the heavy readers, just as the iPad wasn’t for the heavy readers. This is for the people who want a little bit of everything, something which, by the way, Amazon is better-suited to give than most of the other companies out there with tablets. As far as infrastructure goes, Amazon’s got streaming video, it’s got music, it’s got shopping, it’s got a cloud accelerated browser (Editor’s note: !!!!!!!!!!!) and on top of all this, it has books. Barnes and Noble doesn’t have most of this stuff, so even if Amazon’s device itself is a bit thin on the innovation side, the content makes up for it. That’s why we need to take it seriously.
It’s good to see them up the technology quotient a bit on these things. They were pretty late on the touchscreen thing.
Just revealed: What the Amazon Kindle Fire looks like. Looks like a tablet. Dig the bookshelf metaphor. (EDIT: We’re also hearing Amazon’s coming out with a $79 version of the Kindle, which is a pretty big deal all its own.)
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Andy Rooney is a national treasure. May nobody take away his physical books and replace them with an Amazon Kindle. He thinks that they’re better than jelly donuts, even. And we all know how good jelly donuts are, guys. They’re about as good as hearing a curmudgeonly old kook do his thang. (Editor’s note: Sorry we haven’t done these lately! We’re making up for it tonight!)
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