Amazon announced today that the Kindle Fire Newsstand will offer over 400 full-color subscription publications. Anyone who subscribes before March 1, 2012 will get a free three-month trial of Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired and 14 other Condé Nast magazines. Amazon's new tablet hits stores next week, and Amazon has boosted the initial shipment twice to keep up with demand.
This is one of the most anticipated tablet launches since Apple's iPad, and the comparison is inevitable. But there are lots of differences between the two devices for consumers. Still, Apple's Newsstand feature of iOS 5 has turned out to be a huge success for the publishing industry, thanks to the iPad. Amazon is using the Kindle Fire to confront that head on, right down to the name.
Amazon has added another million Kindle Fire tablets to its initial order, bringing the first shipment up to five million units. This is the second increase since the Fire was unveiled in September. The initial order was for 3.5 million units, but the Kindle Fire has seen strong pre-order numbers.
On November 8, Amazon announced that the Fire, along with the new Kindle Touch, will appear in 16,000 U.S. retail stores on November 15. Amazon's profits were down last quarter while it invested in these big moves, and it's now set for a big turnaround this holiday season.
With less than a week to go before Amazon starts shipping its Kindle Fire tablet, the company today announced the inclusion of several more Android apps. The list of new additions includes Netflix, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter and many other hugely popular apps.
Quite a few of the applications Amazon announced today are games. Apps from Zynga, EA, Rovio and a number of other mobile game makers are going to be included on the Kindle Fire, which substantially expands the catalog of games available on the device.
Charlotte-based CLT Blog connected the dots and found that Amazon has purchased a speech recognition startup called Yap, according to an SEC filing. While neither company has made a formal announcement - and the filing doesn't even mention Amazon by name - it says that Yap merged with a company called "Dion Acquisition Sub," which has the same address as an Amazon building.
With the Kindle Fire about to hit stores, it's tempting to compare this acquisition to Apple's purchase of Siri. But is that a fair comparison? Yap transcribed voicemail. Siri was based on a DARPA-funded military artificial intelligence project. With some consumers hesitating between the iPad and the Kindle Fire, there's bound to be a feature race. But speech-to-text input is one thing. The AI-powered future of search is another.
Amazon announced today that the new range of Kindles is coming to over 16,000 U.S. retail stores. The usual big-box and medium-box outlets will carry Amazon's whole family of media devices.
The basic new Kindle - which sells for $79 with ads and $109 without - has been available in stores since just after launch on September 28. Now the $99/139 Kindle Touch and the $199 Kindle Fire tablet will appear on physical shelves.
Kindle Cloud Reader, Amazon's HTML5-fueled Web app for reading e-books, is now available on Firefox, the company announced this morning. That brings the total number of compatible browsers for the product to four, if you count Safari separately for iPad and the desktop.
The app was first rolled out for Safari and Chrome in August. It not only makes one's Kindle e-book library more accessible, but allows Amazon to circumvent Apple's controversial in-app purchase fees.
Today the world's biggest bookseller is opening up shop as a lending library. That's right, Amazon is getting into the book lending business, albeit on a very small scale. This is good for Kindle owners, and a sign that Amazon is going to go to the mat to ensure that it puts a Kindle in as many hands as possible.
The company is announcing the Kindle Owner's Lending Library, which will feature thousands of books that Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership can download. This comes in addition to the Prime library of more than 13,000 movies and TV shows.
Amazon just announced the release of Flow an augmented reality shopping app for the iPhone. It uses both barcode and image recognition in a live camera view to help users shop. It recognizes books, DVDs, CDs, video games and all kinds of other packaged items "like a box of cereal," whether by scanning the image or the barcode.
Flow can show shoppers Amazon's reviews and ratings as they're holding a product in their hands. It also has Facebook and Twitter sharing options. Of course, users can also opt to buy the product from Amazon, even though they're holding it in their hands. The free app is available on the iTunes Store.
Amazon just released its third quarter sales, indicating that net income is at $63 million, or $0.14 a share, down from $231 million, or $0.51 a share a year ago. This is a 73% drop in quarterly profit from the third quarter of 2010. Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S reports that analysts expected Amazon's third-quarter earnings to land at 24 cents per share on a revenue of $10.95 billion.
With its latest update to the Kindle e-book format, Amazon is pushing electronic books closer to the look and feel of Web pages. Kindle Format 8 is the file format that will be used by the Kindle Fire for displaying e-books when the tablet device ships next month.
The new format moves away from the previous Mobi standard in favor of one that supports many of the rich layout and formatting features of HTML5 and CSS3.
