Quantcast
Channel: Portland Mercury
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 33025

Amazon's Been Very BusyAmazon's Been Very Busy

$
0
0

1285694748-images-1.jpg
Minutes after RIM unveiled the Blackberry tablet, the Playbook, Amazon announced they were bringing a Kindle app to the business-friendly device.

Almost immediately after that announcement, a rumor broke that Amazon was preparing to launch their own Android app marketplace. Speculation about what Amazon will do with this marketplace varies: Some think they're just gopening a curated Android app store that isn't full of horrible spamware (I defy you to try to find something of value in the Android app store without first scrolling through a monotonous list of poorly translated useless apps,) and others think they're going to try to make the first universal app store, with apps that would work on every device (while this theory has a very nice, utopian ring to it, it doesn't seem probable.)

Immediately after publishing that rumor, TechCrunch ran another rumor that Amazon is, in fact, working on an Amazon-branded tablet computer to rival the iPad. That would explain the Amazon App store for sure. (Hopefully, the apps for the tablet would look better than the Scrabble for Kindle app, which looks like one of those really lame handheld LCD games from the early 90s.)

And then this morning, Amazon announced that they're integrating their "Look Inside" feature—in which customers can read the first few pages of a book online to see if they'd like it—with the Kindle and calling it "Kindle for the Web." It's a really smart way to introduce non-e-book-savvy people to the Kindle platform, and it incorporates some details that other e-book services like Google and Scribd already have, like the ability to embed a book onto a site or a blog and other sharing features.

That's all in less than 24 hours. What else is Amazon working on?

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 33025

Trending Articles



<script src="https://jsc.adskeeper.com/r/s/rssing.com.1596347.js" async> </script>