Caterpillar Cowboy

shortformblog:

thenextweb:

Amazon Web Services + Amazon Prime + Amazon Kindle + Amazon App Store + Amazon Instant Video + Amazon MP3= KINDLE FIRE

Live Blog from Amazon’s Tablet Press Event http://tnw.to/1B2HJ 

We’ve read a lot of comments about the Kindle Fire’s seemingly-diminished book-reading abilities. To defend Amazon a bit, it doesn’t look like they’re aiming for their original Kindle target audience here. The original Kindle is still on the market at a far lower price than it was a week ago. This isn’t for the heavy readers, just as the iPad wasn’t for the heavy readers. This is for the people who want a little bit of everything, something which, by the way, Amazon is better-suited to give than most of the other companies out there with tablets. As far as infrastructure goes, Amazon’s got streaming video, it’s got music, it’s got shopping, it’s got a cloud accelerated browser (Editor’s note: !!!!!!!!!!!) and on top of all this, it has books. Barnes and Noble doesn’t have most of this stuff, so even if Amazon’s device itself is a bit thin on the innovation side, the content makes up for it. That’s why we need to take it seriously.

So excited about this. Here are some thoughts:

1. People will fall in love with over the air syncing. No longer worry about if you remembered to put that new album on your device before you left home. It’s there. 
2. Amazon really needs to buy Hulu. Free Amazon Video with purchase of Prime is a huge attack on Netflix, and adding Hulu’s shows would be a grenade to the face.
3. $199 is huge. People have talked about the razor + razor blades analogy a lot since the iPad came out. Is it possible Amazon can afford to subsidize their tablets even more than Apple and still turn a profit?
4. Publishing to the Amazon App Store will become a requirement for Android app developers if the Fire outsells all other Android tablets.
5. Free month of Amazon Prime included is smart. Once people get hooked on the free streaming video to the Fire, keeping that + free 2 day shipping for $6.67/mo ($80 per year) is a no-brainer for a lot of people, and another stab at Netflix. Again, would be smart to acquire Hulu here, because Hulu Plus is $7.99/mo by itself.
6. [UPDATED] I almost forgot about Silk. People can notice a 500ms speed improvement. I bet on some pages it may get up to 1000ms. That is huge. Amazon knows this, because they have done empirical tests that show that faster pages = more $$$. When “the internet is faster”, the product seems better / sexier / more awesome.

My only concern is whether or not 7” is big enough.

(For watching movies.)

(You know what I mean. Pervert.)