Ok, I’ll be honest. I’m pretty excited about the new Amazon Kindle Fire.
No, it’s not an iPad. It’s $199. It’s a glorified e-reader. It lets me plays games. It lets me e-mail. It lets me browse the Web. It lets me play videos.
Well, I’m not even exactly sure why you would need the power that an iPad offers. I don’t think I could ever justify a $499 iPad purchase when I could purchase a cheap $299 laptop. But, a $199 version that’s not a big joke?
It’s pretty game-changing exciting. Maybe it’s just me. But unless any big red flags come up, I’m getting one come Christmastime.
Living Social has done it again. Made Groupon look beatable. Similarly to when Living Social offered a $20 for $10 Amazon.com deal earlier this year, they had their next daily deals mass success with last week’s Whole Foods coupon. This $20 for $10 deal sold out, after 1,000,000 individuals took advantage of the offer. Plus, Whole Foods is donating 5% of the sale price to the Whole Food Foundation, aimed at improving children’s nutrition through school and parent programs.
Now, the deal alone may have been enough to cause the sellout. But again, Living Social offers an intrinsic incentive for shareability. You buy the deal. You share the link. 3 of your friends buy the deal. And yours is free.
Groupon offers nothing like this. Did you buy yours?
Book rental companies have existed for years, and no, we’re not talking about public libraries. But, what about a rental service for digital books? That hasn’t been done yet. And Amazon is rumored to be a possible pioneer.
Amazon currently offers digital movie and TV show rentals through their Amazon Primedigital streaming service, currently priced at $79 a year and also offers free 2-day shipping on every Amazon purchase. Digital e-book rentals may be added to this service.
Now, this addition would require mass buy-in from traditional book publishing companies. And this very well could be a stop-gap in this rumor. Think about it. When your public library starts offering you free e-book rentals, downloadable from home, are you buying books again? And this could essentially be what Amazon does. Of course, book publishers would get a part of that $79/year subscription fee. But agreeing on $/download could be a difficult conversation to agree on.
It is just me, or has Apple seemed a little bit behind in the online streaming wars?
Apple TV was/is a mainstream bust, with extraordinarily limited content. Yet, here come the rumors about Apple running with a Netflix competitor. Ok, but it’s a little late, isn’t it? You’re way behind Google and Amazon already – who are both light years behind Netflix.
Historically, Apple has created brand-new technology. So, if Apple creates a much much better Netflix, they might win. But, if it’s simply a limited version of the same? Or perhaps they’re simply trying to keep their own market from making the same leap they’ve been so great at convincing others to make over the years by offering what no one else does?
When LivingSocial came out with their $20 Amazon.com gift certificate for $10 a while back, it officially jumped in as a player within the daily deals game. Especially with the built-in incentive to share deals socially. If 3 of your friends buy the deal, yours is free. This is enormously more enticing than Groupon’s “the deal is on” minimum that need to sign up for it (which they seemingly haven’t fallen short of for months now.)
But if an Amazon gift card made Living Social a daily deals player, what if Amazon itself became one? What? THE online retailer? Yes, that one. AmazonLocal has now expanded, including in Windy City Strategies hometown of Chicago.
But, here’s the problem. It’s not integrated with Amazon’s site yet. People trust Amazon for online purchases more so than any other online retailer. And if Amazon can figure out how to integrate these local deals more elegantly than a daily push e-mail, it’s going to be unstoppable.
Netflix’s recent subscription price increases has streaming competitors whetting their lips. And latecomer to the game Amazon, with their Amazon Prime online streaming service, has steadily been growing their content.
Amazon Prime customers primarily become paying subscription customers for the free expedited shipping they’re then entitled to. But, they also get free access to a growing Amazon Prime streaming video library.
Just after Amazon’s deal with CBS content, they have announced a new licensing agreement with NBCUniversal, which will allow U.S. Amazon Prime customers to stream movies from Universal Pictures’ content library – bringing Amazon Prime’s instant library up to 9,000 total movies and television shows. This is still a ways away from Netflix’s 18,000 strong collection, but Amazon is getting there.
At this point, we shouldn’t even be calling them tablets. They’re iPads. Apple makes them. And everyone else makes copies.
So, we’re not going to try and get you overly excited about Amazon’s new venture into this space. Although, it is intriguing. Rumors are that Amazon will launch its own tablet as soon as this August, anticipating up to 4 million units sold by the end of the year.
Just like the Kindle is a natural product for Amazon as the world’s leading e-book seller, as Amazon ventures further into online streaming, a tablet PC makes sense. The question is, will Amazon become one of the leaders in online streaming purchasing? Perhaps that’s their real goal, and this product is just designed in support of that larger goal?
But, as long as the iPad stays awesome, it’s hard to see this Amazon tablet happening like Amazon hopes.
When the industry moves, it seems like everyone company moves together. While Amazon and Google are making giant steps forward in cloud computing, Apple is about to announce their upcoming iCloudcloud computing service.
What does iCloud mean for iTunes? What does it mean outside of iTunes? Well, the ability to stream your iTunes library from any device, wherever you are, would be a huge selling point – one that Apple users (who are predominantly more wealthy than the average citizen) would likely pay handsomely for.
But will the iCloud be bigger than that? Will the iCloud help eliminate the portable flash drive? The hard drive? A gateway into a more secure, off-loaded online storage future? Let’s wait and see what Steve Jobs says.
Would you lease a Web-only laptop for $20/month? That’s the student package price that Google looks to be aiming at with their new Chrome laptop lease promotion. This package includes both hardware and access to online services.
These Chromium notebooks aren’t just Web-based. They’re Web-only. It’s a browser. There’s no hard-drive. Everything you do happens on the cloud. Your documents. Your presentations. Your files. All saved in real-time, and stored on Google’s servers for everywhere access.
While Amazon’s cloud hiccup the other day which temporarily kept companies from accessing their cloud-hosted information, this sort of Cloud-only service may scare some people off. But, it’s probably the mainstream future.
And Google is probably looking to see how these student versions do, before going consumer- or business-side with it.
The idea of the cloud makes us feel a lot safer. If something happens to our hard drive, our network, our servers, the information is all still there. But, the recent outage at Amazon Web Services reminded cloud users that they’re still dependent on a physical server. The idea of an invincible, invisible cloud simply isn’t accurate.
That cloud still exists in the physical world somewhere. And when that place goes down, Amazon Cloud users, including Quora, Foursquare and more, went down with it.
Many of these users had no back-up plan. Because, frankly, the Amazon Cloud was their back-up plan, that they simply started using as their primary servers. Amazon has already started talking about how they are working to ensure this type of outage doesn’t happen again. But many, and rightly so, are going to slow down their faith in this invisible digital savior that is “cloud computing.”
