From instagram's departure from a check-in model (ala Foursquare), to YouTube's online video dating histories, this infographic should remind you that no matter what you are building, be ready to change directions if necessary.

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.

iOS and Android: Already Disrupting the Video Game Market

In fact, this disruption is already well underway. Android and iOS have collectively begun to devour the lunch of established video game hardware manufacturers like Sony and Nintendo, according to a new report from Flurry Analytics.

Smartphones and tablets running iOS and Android will together account for nearly 60% of video game industry revenue in 2011. That percentage has in the last two years and the growth shows no sign of slowing down.

Evidently, the proliferation of tablets, smartphones and iPods, coupled with the growth of inexpensive mobile games is chiseling away at the old model of consumers spending $40 or $50 for a new game on a system from Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.

Nintendo has already felt the heat from these trends. After it launched its much-hyped 3D handheld gaming system earlier this year, lukewarm sales forced the company to slash its price. They've also dropped prices on many of the games that were initially available for their Wii console.

Enter Amazon and, probably to a lesser extent, Barnes and Noble. The two companies are about to start shipping multi-purpose, Android-powered, touchscreen tablet devices that are priced competitively. Amazon's offering will be available in over 16,000 U.S. retail stores. Neither device will single-handedly knock the iPad from its dominant position, but the availability of two entry-level tablets at half the iPad's cost is sure to propel the growth of the tablet market overall. Analysts have predicted that Amazon could sell anywhere from 2-5 million Kindle Fires before 2011 is over.

If you think mobile games are doing well now, just wait until tablets reach 80 million U.S. consumers, something Forrester expects to happen by 2015. By then we can reasonably expect smartphone penetration to much higher than it is today as well.

Meanwhile, if these new devices from Amazon and Barnes and Noble do particularly well, Apple may be forced to reconsider its $500 starting price tag when it launches the iPad 3 in early-to-mid 2012.

No matter how you slice it, we're going to see huge growth in tablet adoption a year from now. In addition to reading, social networking and watching plenty of video, the devices are going to continue to be used quite heavily for gaming, something Sony and Nintendo are surely aware of.

The latest company thought to be readying its own Internet TV set-top box plans is Blockbuster, according to Hollywood Reporter. The new “set-top device for streaming films directly to TV sets” could be announced as early as this month, and would utilize the company’s recent acquisition of online movie service Movielink, giving users access to over 3,000 film titles from major Hollywood studios Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros. and MGM.

BBC iPlayer lands on Wii - who said Nintendo doesn’t do media center?

A version of the BBC’s iPlayer will be made available on Nintendo’s Wii, announced the UK public broadcaster’s Future Media and Technology chief Erik Huggers during a keynote speech at the MipTV-Milia conference in Cannes. The move marks the first time the iPlayer will be available on a games console, and perhaps surprisingly, not one designed specifically to be a media center. So much for the ‘trojan horse into the living room’ strategies of Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s XBox 360.

Babelgum commissions feature-length environmental documentary

Internet TV platform Babelgum has always pitched itself as serving the interests of independent video producers who want to find and connect with niche audiences. By tapping into the Long Tail, the company maintains it’s possible to “find an audience that rivals or exceeds the mainstream TV audience in any local market.” However, Babelgum has now crossed a line, moving away from being purely a content distributor to also commissioning original and exclusive content of its own. Last month, the company announced plans to set up a $10+ million production fund, telling Variety that Babelgum was “transforming into a digital media studio.” The first of those commissions is thought to be a feature-length environmental documentary about the threatened Athabasca Oil Sands region in Alberta, Canada.