Prime is a $79-per-year program that offers two-day shipping on all orders, as well as streaming digital video. Analysts thought it had 10 million or more subscribers, but Bloomberg's sources say it's more like 3 to 5 million.

What started as a convenient plan for shipping physical products has just in the past week become a competitive digital TV offering. Don't count out Amazon Prime yet. It's too important.

Digital & Analog Convenience

Amazon is all about convenience. It makes buying things so convenient that we do it more often. It's certainly more convenient than getting off our lazy butts and going all the way to a store. That was the first appeal of Amazon Prime; for $79 a year, you could add instant gratification to the convenience of shipping your purchases straight to your home.

But packing and shipping things is still expensive. It's dragging on Amazon's operating costs. Even though Amazon's fulfillment and distribution of its brown boxes are amazingly efficient, it's still working to shake up the way it ships physical products, including the possibility of opening its own stores.

Prime makes shipping more expensive for Amazon. But Amazon is building new digital businesses - with insignificant operating costs - and it's adding those benefits to Prime membership to make it more enticing.

Kindle As A Service

Kindle devices are Amazon's portable digital content stores. In addition to being a place to watch, read, listen and play, the Kindle Fire is a store where Amazon users can buy books, magazines, games, movies and TV shows (and anything else from Amazon.com, for that matter).

Prime membership has huge benefits for Kindle Fire owners, because they can stream its digital media straight to their devices. Last week, Amazon announced a deal with Viacom, adding 10,000 new videos to Amazon Prime from MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, BET, Nickelodeon and more. Amazon needs enticing content offerings to sell more Fires, and Fire owners buy more digital content (with no shipping costs). The Fire's Silk browser will load Amazon.com's whole store at blazing speeds, too, so Fire users can buy physical stuff from their couches as well.

That's why it makes sense for Amazon to add digital benefits to Prime membership. If it works out, as more Kindle Fires are sold, more Prime memberships will be sold, too.

Amazon's Poker Face

How many Kindle Fires have been sold? Amazon doesn't say. We know it ordered 5 million Fires from manufacturers, but it won't say how many of those have left the warehouse and arrived in the living room.

The annoying thing for us spectators is that Amazon is notoriously cagey about giving away real numbers. Bloomberg says its sources are anonymous because the numbers about Amazon Prime are private. No kidding. Amazon doesn't even admit how many Kindles it sells, even for the quarter that introduced the Kindle Fire and a whole new line of Kindle e-readers.

Instead, it gives us growth percentages. Kindle sales were up 177% over... well, whatever they were last year... over the 2011 holiday season. But Amazon is just getting busy disrupting the way products are bought and sold. As long as it's growing, no one should write it off.

Do you have a Kindle device? Which one(s)?

In total, Amazon Prime will have over 15,000 videos available for streaming, including some very popular television shows. Amazon launched its video streaming service about a year ago with 5,000 videos. With today's announcement, that number is now tripled.

Wired's Tim Carmody argued recently that Amazon is particularly well-positioned to emerge as a such a competitor, not only to Netflix but to cable television as well.

Amazon Prime still has some growing to do, and for now the service is tied to Amazon's free shipping service of the same name. GigaOm's Ryan Lawler argues that unbundling the two and launching a stand-alone streaming service could make the service an even stronger contender for Netflix's throne as king of this space.

It's worth keeping in mind that Amazon Prime Instant Video only launched in February of last year. Netflix has been around since 1997 and launched its Watch Instantly streaming feature in 2007. Amazon is rising fast, and its clear that digital content is a growing priority for the company, especially now that its also sells its own media tablet.

It's not a new rumor (it dates as far back as 2009), and it would be a departure from Amazon's strategy thus far. In December, LAUNCH reported the retail store rumor, adding that Amazon plans to sell its own branded merchandise. Amazon is better known for threatening real-world retail than for promoting it. But Amazon's moves in the past few months make the strategy seem more sensible.

Amazon's key competitor, Barnes & Noble, already has hundreds of its own stores, and they have their own showroom for the Nook readers and tablets, so the boutique model reported by Good E-Reader sounds reasonable.

Did the retail boost work for Amazon? Who knows? As usual, Amazon did not disclose how many Kindles it sold last quarter with any kind of specificity. Amazon typically spins statistics that sound good, but it won't provide hard numbers about devices.

Devices are not Amazon's core business; content is. Kindles are sold at a loss, and Amazon makes the money back on books, movies, apps and other media. The Kindle is a delivery mechanism, and putting the devices in stores would give customers a chance to try out the interface.

Amazon has avoided sales taxes by remaining a purely online retailer, giving its customers the incentive of the lowest price. But lately, sales taxes on online purchases have started to seem inevitable, as Amazon's deal with the state of California shows. Once Amazon resigns itself to sales taxes, that's one fewer reason not to bring its retail might into physical stores.

Amazon just reported its fourth quarter financial results, and, shocking no one, it doesn't disclose how many Kindle Fire tablets it sold. Or even how many total Kindles it sold.

Instead, Amazon just shared a few statistics designed to make it seem like the Kindle business is doing really well, without actually proving it.

So, the new Kindles helped Amazon more than double, and almost triple, its device sales. But unless Amazon makes a bold move and discloses more on its earnings call tonight, that's about all we'll know officially.

Apple, meanwhile, announced last week that iPad sales during the fourth quarter grew 111% year-over-year to 15.4 million units.

Of course, Amazon doesn't have to disclose how many Kindles it sells. It's actually probably to its benefit to keep that information secret. Still, it would be interesting for those of us who keep score to have real data and not just estimates. It could also be useful for mobile app developers to know what the potential market size for Kindle Fire apps is versus iOS apps.

Overall, Amazon's fourth quarter sales actually came in below expectations, a bit of a surprise, actually, given all the recent talk from retailers about pricing pressure.

For the first quarter, Amazon now says it may even lose money. It didn't specify why, but giving away millions of Kindle Fire tablets near cost, or at a loss, can't help.

The problem most visible to users will be missing cover images. Goodreads is in the process of uploading replacements. One percent of Goodreads books will appear blank, listed as "Unknown Title" and "Unknown Author," while Goodreads looks for a new data source for them. There's a great lesson here about building a business on top of a competitor's API, but Goodreads has made the switch in the nick of time.

Goodreads has risen farther and faster than its competitors, LibraryThing and Shelfari, except by one measure: Amazon bought Shelfari. This happened over three years ago, and Amazon has yet to do much with Shelfari. It launched Kindle Profiles last year without a Shelfari in sight. But to the extent that Amazon has invested in a social network for readers, it and Goodreads are competitors.

But at the end of the day, Amazon is a retailer and Goodreads is not. Goodreads built its business on Amazon's product advertising API, so there was no problem on Amazon's end. That API required Goodreads to link books back to Amazon, so Amazon made money and Goodreads got a cut, as well as a wealth of images and data about its millions of books.

But the usage requirements of the API are picky. The most troublesome requirement is that clients cannot, "without our express prior written approval, use any Product Advertising Content on or in connection with any site or application designed or intended for use with a mobile phone or other handheld device." That's no good. Goodreads has mobile apps, and those are more convenient for checking in while reading a book than a desktop site is.

The other key restriction is that Goodreads couldn't link to competing bookstores while using Amazon's API. Users will notice that Barnes & Noble is now the most prominently displayed book seller on Goodreads, and Amazon sits in a drop-down menu with a bunch of other sites.

Why Goodreads Will Be Fine

Shelfari may have the benefit of using Amazon book data to its heart's content. But Goodreads has built a thriving social network on top of its book data, and it offers much more to users than the competitors. In addition to original content, like interviews with authors, Goodreads makes for a great Facebook Timeline app, so Facebook users can turn the books they read into life events.

But even within Goodreads itself, there are great book recommendations using true reader sentiments, not just purchase and browsing history like Amazon uses. Goodreads acquired Discovereads last year to build a "taste engine" on top of its users' data.

Goodreads also offers a social reading API of its own, so developers can access social data, reviews and discussions. For Goodreads, the books themselves are just the backend. While Amazon is surely a wealth of book data, Goodreads can repair its library on its own. It will pay license fees to Ingram, the largest U.S. wholesaler of books, and it will fill the gaps from libraries and other open data sources.

This teaches a lesson about building a service on top of another company's data, especially one that might want to compete with you. But for the long term, these growing pains will be well worth it as Goodreads makes its way independently.

Do you use Goodreads or another social reading service?

Lead photo courtesy of Tatiana Popova/Shutterstock.

45º views act as a transition between the standard top-down view and Google's new Google MapsGL, a full-3D Maps experience powered by WebGL in the browser. That part won't work on certain low-end graphics cards, but for those who can run it, Google Maps gets pretty magical. Google has good reason to push the envelope on 3D maps. Its competitors are working on magical maps of their own.

In addition to the full-3D WebGL views, desktop Google Maps also got a flyover feature for travel routes last year. When you put in travel directions, the map viewer gets a "Play" button that switches to a Google Earth 3D view and flies you from point A to point B. It's not the most useful feature in the world, but it's a nice way to check out the terrain on your route.

Google is even taking 3D mapping indoors. It's sending people with backpack-mounted Street View cameras inside local businesses, so Google can put a panoramic interior view into Google Places results. Google is also building mobile 2D maps inside buildings, including malls, airports, hotels and convention centers. When all these maps combine, Google can take you from a desktop or mobile search, down the street, into the mall, to the store, inside the store, and eventually, it wants to be the way you pay, too.

Sounds like Google has this whole business locked up, right? Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Google has competitors to worry about. There's Microsoft, whose Bing Maps got interior mapping first, but it's still a distant second in terms of market share. Amazon may not have the maps, but it has unparalleled reach into shopping. And Apple has Siri, a mobile assistant that already routes around Google when able, and it has made some intriguing mapping acquisitions.

The missing piece in Google's end-to-end mobile shopping chain is the shopping part, and no Web company does shopping like Amazon. Amazon has released an augmented reality iPhone app that lets customers scan products in a store and buy them (or cheaper alternatives) on Amazon. That's a pretty serious diss to local businesses, but it makes Amazon customers happy. Also, if they're buying through Amazon Flow, they aren't paying with Google Wallet. Amazon also bought a voice recognition company last year, sparking comparisons to Apple's Siri.

For Apple's part, Siri is the piece that threatens Google. Currently, Siri searches the Web using Google when it can't find the answer itself. Apple's iOS Maps app also uses Google for now. But certain features of the Siri beta are telling. When you use Siri to search for a local business, it uses Yelp, not Google. What can we expect from later versions of Siri and iOS? Here's a hint: In November 2011, Apple bought C3 Technologies, a 3D street view and interior mapping company.

What apps, maps and Web services do you use to find your way around?

Files sent with Send to Kindle go to the user's Kindle Library, and they can be downloaded on the e-ink Kindle models as well as the iOS Kindle app. The last-read page, bookmarks, notes and highlights are synchronized automatically, except for PDFs. The Kindle Fire is not listed. Support for Mac is "coming soon."

This is actually a major feature. It makes sending Word documents, PDFs or text snippets to Kindle almost effortless. It turns Kindle into a powerful content-shifting service. It was relatively easy to send devices to Kindle via email before, and that feature still works, but now any file can be sent with two clicks, and any thing that can be printed can be sent to Kindle instead.

Content shifting was one of our top trends of 2011 because many impressive solutions for reading later popped up this year on different platforms. The Kindle service was already noteworthy for content shifting due to its whisper-syncing of books and other content, but now it's easy to send virtually any document to the Kindle.

Do you have a Kindle device? Which one(s) do you use?

Amazon increased its monthly funding for KDP Select from $500,000 to $700,000 this month after the strong showing. KDP authors earned $1.70 per borrow. The top 10 KDP Select authors saw a 30% increase from lending on top of the royalties they earned from sales of the same titles. Amazon's end-run around Big Publishing shows promise for authors.

The Kindle Lending Library itself launched on November 2. It's available to Amazon Prime members. It has tight restrictions - users can only borrow one book per month - so 295,000 titles in one month means 295,000 people.

For authors in the KDP Select lending program, the numbers are great, but Amazon is characteristically cagey about other specifics. It won't share the exact size of the sales bump KDP Select authors got over non-lending KDP authors. It doesn't disclose how many books were lent in the Lending Library program overall.

The biggest bugbear of them all for Amazon reporters is the specific number of Kindles sold. Amazon will report percentage growth in Kindle sales, but they never disclose exactly how many devices are in people's hands. Still, we know this: 295,000 or so people borrowed Kindle books from independent authors last month, and some of those authors made lots of money.

Do you have an e-reader? Which one? Do you read on it often?

Apple's in-app purchasing rules prevent e-book sellers from offering stores in their native apps (without giving Apple a 30% cut). The route around that was to include a link to the Web store inside the native reader app. Last July, Apple forced Amazon and other e-reader apps to remove this link, so users of e-book platforms other than Apple's iBooks must buy their books in the browser, in a separate place from where they read.

Amazon's first strike against this rule was to launch the Web-based Kindle Cloud Reader, so that users could read and buy books from the browser on any device, not just the iPad. It's a nice experience, but the native Kindle app's performs better and is more useful offline, even though it doesn't offer direct access to the bookstore.

In December, Amazon brought the Kindle Fire Newsstand to the iOS app, so iPad users could receive subscription publications from Amazon in the Kindle app, in competition with Apple's own Newsstand. After beefing up the Kindle app, the new standalone Kindle Store Web app better serves Kindle users who want to use the native reader instead of the browser-based one.

Apple and Amazon come at each other head-on in this market. Their approaches are basically opposite. Apple wants controls over the media available on its devices, because content is an inclusive service it provides to make its profitable devices more attractive. Apple breaks even on content, but it wants to lock users into its devices with the convenience of that service.

Amazon's business is selling content on razor-thin margins. Its Kindle devices are the service, while the content is the product. That's why Amazon offers so much support for iOS devices, even though it just launched its own Kindle Fire tablet. Amazon loses $2.70 on each Kindle Fire, but it's sure to make up the loss in media purchases. Sales to iOS users are pure profit for Amazon. The new iPad Kindle Store is its best possible solution for its customers allowed on Apple's devices.

Do you read e-books? What's your set-up?

HopStop is a metropolitan navigation app that gives door-to-door directions for pedestrians, cyclists, taxis and mass transit in over 200 cities in the United States and Canada. Without location services on a device, HopStop's app is basically useless. Enter location provider Skyhook with a simple fix to a complex problem.

What the Skyhook SDK does is provide an external pipe for location-based services into the hardware of a device. This works perfectly for a device like the Fire that does not have any native functionality nor cellular data connectivity that would be an easy away to implement location.

Skyhook does not have a business relationship with Amazon. The company focuses its attention on the developer ecosystem as a means of growth and an alternative located-based services option.

"We have no business relationship with Amazon, merely with the app developers. They add our location engine to their app and submit it to Amazon for approval," Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan said in an email to ReadWriteWeb. "As long as the app meets their guidelines, then it is approved and published. With HopStop, we now have 2 app partners live in their store and fully approved."

For developers looking to publish apps to the Amazon Appstore, the technical requirements of the Fire force many apps to change certain aspects of the codebase, mostly concerning native device access. Amazon has no qualms with pushing Web apps or sites instead of native Android apps in its Appstore. For instance, the native Facebook and Twitter apps are not represented. Amazon uses a shortcut to the mobile websites of each. Part of the reason for that has to do with the permissions that each of those apps require, such as location.

It is not likely that behemoths like Facebook and Twitter will change how they handle location specifically for the Fire. But that does not mean that smaller companies with individual apps cannot take advantage of Skyhook's SDK to reach the Fire. That is what HopStop is doing.

It has been well documented that Skyhook is fighting and ongoing legal battle with Google over being excluded as a location services provider on Android devices. Morgan and Skyhook have been forced to find a different route to get Skyhook onto Android devices without Google's official support.

"We don't have a great relationship with Google because of them banning our device partners (Motorola and Samsung) from baking us into their Android phones," Morgan said. "So we work with app developers to help them directly get better location using Skyhook. It takes longer but we aim to get on every Android device one way or the other. As of today we are on over 25 million Android phones thru app developers."

Currently, the Android SDK only supports versions 2.1 Eclair and 2.2 Froyo in addition to the Kindle Fire. Since the Fire is built off of Android 2.3 Gingerbread, official support should roll out fairly soon. Morgan said that Skyhook plans on supporting all versions of Android for developers.

"We have about a hundred of the top Android developers who use our Android Location SDK, but we are just getting started with targeting the Fire," Morgan said. "Most developers are just waking up to that platform and are rushing to get their apps into the amazon store overall. We are reaching out to all the location based app developers and letting them know they can launch for the Fire if they add the Skyhook Location SDK. We have gotten tremendous response on that and expect to announce about a dozen app partners in the next couple of months."

Are you excited for actual, functional location on the Kindle Fire? Do location-based services make a device more attractive or is it something that you do not miss until it is gone? Let us know in the comments.

Kindles flew off Amazon's digital shelves at a rate of over 1 million per week during the month of December and occupied the top three slots on the company's site-wide bestseller list. The #1 position was held by the Kindle Fire, which was also the most gifted and wished-for item on the entire site, according to data released today by Amazon.

Indie Authors on the Rise

Found amidst the company's holiday sales stats are a few clues about what the future of publishing might entail. In addition to obvious choices like Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, readers have been downloading books by independent authors at a growing pace.

In 2011, the first and fourth best-selling ebooks were by indie authors who published their work via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. No longer are readers limited to offerings from big publishing houses. Thanks to the explosion in e-books and the devices they're best read on, unknown authors can become best-sellers like never before.

2012: Another Huge Year For Tablets

It was no mistake that Amazon released its media tablet just in time for the holiday season, and at less than half the cost of the iPad. The device is the fastest-growing tablet since the first generation iPad, and that growth shows no signs of stopping.

The early success of the Kindle Fire closes out another big year for tablets and precedes what is sure to be yet another one. Apple is expected to unveil the next generation of the iPad at some point in 2012, possibly in multiple sizes and almost certainly with a smaller price tag. Android is pushing its own platform forward with Ice Cream Sandwich and we'll undoubtedly see a host of new ICS-friendly devices next year.

We'll also see the launch of Windows 8 next year, a new generation of Microsoft's operating system that will offer a seamless experience across dekstops, tablets and smartphones. How well it will catch on remains to be seen, but for Windows users, an affordable Windows 8-based tablet could be hard to resist.

For Amazon, this is an "of course they would" moment. The company loses money on the hardware for the Kindle Fire and basically breaks even on other Kindle products. Amazon then must push consumers to its digital products. What better way to do so then by highlighting some of its best paid apps and expensive books?

The top recommended Kindle book is "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, the official biography of Apple's founder. "The Social Network," about Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, is the top movie.

What really of interest to us are the apps. ESPN Score Center is the top recommended Android app, followed by LinkedIn, QuickOffice Pro, The Weather Channel, EasyTether, Exchange by Touchdown, Pandora, Urbanspoon, MapQuest and Zillow Real Estate. Those seem like some strange choices for a best of list. LinkedIn's Android app has been thoroughly lambasted by the tech media while MapQuest is distinctly NOT Google Maps.

The regular suspects dominate the list for Android games. Angry Birds takes the top spot, Words With Friends second and Bejeweled 2 in third.

Software has two Office products in the top listings, with Microsoft Office: Home & Student 2010 the top and Office Mac Home & Student 2011 second.

Of course, Amazon is touting its own apps as well with Kindle for (pick your platform), Amazon Mobile, MP3, Price Check, Deals and Windowshop all on the list.

What is your "best of" for 2011? Did Amazon's editors get it right? Let us know in the comments.

In addition to the 400 magazines and newspapers, the iPad app can also now display "print replica textbooks," which are more like giant PDFs than interactive applications. All iOS devices, not just the iPad, now support the Send-to-Kindle feature, allowing users to send documents to the device by email. They can also open PDFs from email or the browser in the Kindle app.

The Kindle Fire itself is off to a good start, at least in terms of sales. It's the fastest growing tablet since the iPad. Amazon has also released the first over-the-air update for that device, fixing some of the performance problems.

The Verge has a nice hands-on review of the new Kindle Fire update with photos and video.

It's a compromised device, and it's positioned as a service, not a dedicated hardware product like the iPad. Rather than making money off the device, Amazon wants to put the device into as many hands as possible in order to make money on the content.

The Kindle app for iOS is Amazon's extension of that service onto Apple's platform. Apple's own Newsstand has given publishers a major bump since the launch of iOS 5 in October. The Kindle app is popular on the iPad for e-books, though, and Amazon hopes to divert some attention away from Apple's Newsstand with today's update.

Download Kindle for iOS from the iTunes Store.

Do you read on a tablet? Which one do you use?

This year we're pleased to etch a fifth name onto the Best BigCo trophy (although like our own little company, the trophy is virtual). Our Best BigCo of 2011 has been around since the Dot Com era, but what's most impressive is how it has disrupted entirely new markets over the past year. Our Best BigCo for 2011 is...

Founded in 1994 by the impressive Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com launched in 1995 as an online bookstore. It took a good decade for it to fully establish its e-commerce operations. The diversification of Amazon.com essentially started in March 2006, with the launch of an online storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Later that year it launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a set of server farms that could be used by other businesses. These moves turned out to be prescient, as cloud computing has since turned into a huge market. More importantly, it gave Amazon.com the infrastructure and technical nous to become a direct competitor to Google, Apple and Microsoft.

We've chosen Amazon.com as our Best BigCo this year because, simply put, it lived up to its hype. It launched a number initiatives this year and all of them have worked out. Here are some of Amazon.com's biggest achievements in 2011:

1. Its Kindle product (first launched in 2007) evolved and continues to dominate the eReader market. It also launched an eBook lending service.
2. It took on Apple by launching a low-priced tablet called Kindle Fire (including a new browser called Silk). The Kindle Fire is significant to Amazon.com because it's a media platform - for the books, apps, videos and over-content that it sells.
3. It consistently added to the Prime video catalog, making it a very competitive offering compared to market leaders Netflix and Hulu.
4. It furthered the cause of HTML5 in publishing, by becoming the first major company to challenge Apple's stranglehold over the iOS App Store. It did this by releasing an HTML5 version of Kindle, to try to get around Apple's 30% cut of all revenue from iOS apps.
5. Its Amazon Cloud Drive is a competitive consumer cloud offering, at least on a par with Apple's iCloud (which launched months after Amazon) and Microsoft's SkyDrive.
6. It has gone from strength to strength with the aforementioned business cloud platforms, S3 and EC2. Collectively known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), that division is closing in on $1 billion a year in revenue. AWS did have some downtime this year, however.
7. It launched Appstore For Android this year, an important step forward for both Android users and developers.
8. It even got a bit fancy, with the November launch of an augmented reality shopping app for the iPhone called Flow.

As you can see, Amazon.com has had a stellar product year. Although it should be noted that the Kindle Fire and other developments have made a dent in its profits. That won't worry Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos though, who has proven himself this year to be one of the Web's leading visionaries. He has pushed Amazon.com into areas that nobody would've predicted back in 1995.

The Runners-up

Apple undeniably had a great year too and is a close runner-up to Amazon.com for Best BigCo. Apple released iPhone 5 and iPad 2, both well-regarded and innovative (Siri in particular caught peoples imagination). Apple also continued to dominate the mobile app market and launched iCloud.

Google and Facebook both had strong years too. Google+ and Chrome are two big mainstream products that Google launched or rapidly evolved this year. In the end though, we felt that Google still has a lot to prove with those two platforms (social and browser, respectively). Likewise with Facebook, although it innovated impressively this year with Timeline, smart lists and frictionless sharing (to name just a few of its iterations in 2011), it remains to be seen how its huge user base reacts to the new-look Facebook. Most of its users don't have Timeline yet, for example.

Honorable Mentions

Although Microsoft didn't have any breakthrough hit products in 2011, it continued to at least keep pace with its competitors on the Web. For example, Bing made solid progress as a search engine alternative to Google.com. Twitter had another strong growth year and its various redesigns have been brave and largely successful. Although eBay dropped the ball with the Skype acquisition, it had a good year in its core e-commerce market. In the enterprise space, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce.com all had good years.

Also Rans

The once mighty Yahoo had a terrible year, as did HP. AOL has been trying to turn itself around, but hasn't been helped by power struggles and public in-fighting amongst its media properties. Adobe and Mozilla both continue gamely on, but they're struggling to keep up with the pace of change.

Your Thoughts?

To end on a positive note, there's no doubt in our minds that Amazon.com is a worthy Best BigCo. Its innovation and determination to challenge the likes of Apple and Google has been fascinating to watch. Do you agree with our choice? Let us know in the comments.

The Kindle Fire has been released to great fanfare, mixed reviews and millions of devices sold. The device's growth trajectory has already outpaced that of any other tablet introduced to the market. Secondary statistics show that the growth of the Kindle Fire rivals even that of the original iPad when it was unleashed on the world in the beginning of 2010.

Advertising network Millennial Media notes in its monthly report MobileMix device index report that ad impressions on the Fire have grown at a daily rate of 19% since its launch in the middle of November. Millennial is seeing run rates of hundreds of millions of impressions from the Fire, putting it in the upper echelon of devices on the market.

MobileMix shows that smartphones are talking up 70% of connected device impressions, ahead of feature phones (14%) and "connected devices" (tablets, television etc.) at 16%. Of the major mobile platforms, Android gobbles up 50% of impressions, followed by iOS with 30% and Research In Motion at 17%. Symbian, Windows Phone and "other" all had 1% of impressions, respectively.

For individual devices in November 2011, the iPhone had the most ad impressions. The MobileMix report has not historically broken down the iPhone by different devices, like the 3GS, 4 or 4S. The iPhone had 13.5% of impressions followed by the BlackBerry Curve at 5.8%, Motorola DroidX at 5.2%. All 20 devices listed in the top impressions column were smartphones with 14 Android devices and five using BlackBerry OS.

While it is interesting to note how many ad impressions were served, the mobile advertising market is still up to debate as to its usefulness. There are a variety of ways that advertisers can use mobile strategies to break through the clutter and drive users to brands. Apps and the mobile Web can add a social layer that engage users with ads, try gamification tactics, use "re-engagement" methods to track users across apps and lure them towards apps or favorable ads.

British company YouGov pointed out earlier this year, 86% of people are ignoring mobile ads in the first place. The click-through rate in mobile is nearly as atrocious as it is on the Web. The Web solved this problem by pure volume of ads an increasing the relevancy of such ads. If ad networks and app publishers want to make money from the explosion of mobile use, a similar strategy will have to unfold.