News from Amazon is the expected iPad competitor, the color Amazon Kindle Fire. Funny name, but eh… Kindle a Fire… geddit? That has to be the naffest name for a corporate product since Chrysler car names – a small sporty car is called the Crossfire as in
“Chrysler’s hot new sports coupe, the Crossfire, has a name that does justice to the car’s edgy, explosive looks”
– in some parallel universe that is.
Amazon Kindle Fire ereader tablet
Anyway back to the Kindle Fire, it looks very good, is cheap, cheerful, and will knock a lot of iPad sales. The iPad is expensive and many people don’t buy in to the Apple DRM (digital rights management) experience. The Kindle Fire uses a custom Amazon browser, the Amazon Silk browser (is that to contrast with Google Chrome?). It uses Amazon’s cloud storage for backups, and Whispernet for delivery. In all these respects it can outperform Apple and also come in a lot cheaper. Will the Silk browser be available on the web as another browser? Don’t know yet.
The Fire will deliver color magazine content with news, sports, films, etc, plus advertising. It is a tablet rather than an ereader… so it will be interesting to see how that works out, given the current user base of the Kindle. One assumes a big take-up.
Amazon Silk
Silk browser
The Silk browser uses a lot of cloud computing concepts to prepare content for delivery (ie, caching, reducing file size by compression, and presumably custom content). This is creating another ‘walled garden‘. So does all this indicate the fracturing of the internet and web into many separate competing technologies and ecology?
We already have Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple producing app ecologies. These are all different as this is quite natural commercial activity, which tends towards segregation of core audiences. A lot of standards-based tech, but with a lot of proprietary tech mixed in – just enough to divide and rule.
This means developers have to produce for Apple OS, Android, HTML/CSS/JS etc Web OS (I mean the Web operating system, the ‘web as in HTTP’ rather than the defunct HP system) (for browsers) and Silk format; for desktop, Windows, Apple Universal and (possibly) Linux. This is going back to the old format wars. Software companies now have to develop many different versions of the same app, which is going against basic web internet principles. I suppose the argument is that tablets are not the web, it just uses the internet for delivery. For optimized apps, developers will have to use specific localized proprietary systems.
The use of HTML5 will be used to try and circumvent all this, but has a performance overhead.
Pricing and marketing
The Kindle Fire will retail at an amazing $199. There is also a Kindle Touch, with a touchscreen, so you page turn by tapping, which is easier than the little button it has now, and no keyboard, as with all this tech, the fewer button or keys the cheaper it is to manufacture. A lower price basic Kindle is also due out at 79$, and a sponsored with advertising version, at an even lower price. Eventually (sooner than you think) there will a free tablet ereader with live content, given away at train stations and malls. Compare this to Apple’s chase for the high end consumer and haute design.
We will be getting a Kindle Fire and testing it when they are available here in November.
Story Software
Here at Story Software, we are nearly launching our Story Live online version of the multiple box editor. This is in standard web technologies so we can deliver it anywhere. The Story Live system allows editing online, for saving in Story format (.sto), rtf and text. We are planning some sort of ebook publishing system off Story Turbo, the new upgrade version of the desktop application. All this is due November 2011.
See this Reuters Kindle Fire news item with video >
Apps and the web – trends
Research shows that app use is now greater than web surfing. This is calculated in minutes spent (consumed, wasted, gained!) on each.
There is a graph here:
Apps versus Web use >
Which I show here small size so you get the general idea.
Apps use versus web use
Wired magazine has announced this as the death of the web. But it is really that people now use apps to do things, play games, read ebooks, magazines, look at stocks, musical games like Biophilia by Bjork, and so on forever; rather than randomly search around the web.
Using an app has an extended and potentially unlimited time frame (Angry Birds, reading, music), unlike surfing which is usually doewn for a specific reason – research item Z – or to fill in ten minutes – have a look at the news, or Ebay, etc.
Web use is moving towards the ‘walled garden’ style of the old days – AOL etc – where people stay in comfort zones, rather than browsing the chaotic web, where all sorts of nasty things lurk, the least of which is viruses. Most time is within Facebook, then some apps, then a short bit of web research to Google a product, say.
So it is a kind of maturation of user habits, and the technology is there in smartphones and tablets. Chicken and egg?
Use of apps is moving away from a standards compliant web, as the apps conform to whichever platform and version they have to run on.
People used to make Macromedia Director games, Flash web modules; now it is a range of apps in many languages, this is a big boon for the developer (more work) but not so good for the company that pays up for them, especially as a lot are free.
With branded TLDs – the new dot coms for brands and also categories, such as .apple, .microsoft, .pizza etc, at high prices (175,000 UKP has been quoted), we are heading towards a ‘safe’ zone and an ‘outside’ for the rabble and the geeks… where all the free and interesting things are.
Incidentally, many of the new apps for the ipad, Android etc look like the 1990s multimedia CDROMs – remember all those DK learning multimedia books, even offbeat Arts Council funded things (yes I was on one called The Hub, with a multimedia game from the Nnn Goes Mobile novel)?
So perhaps the technology has caught up with the multimedia ideas at last.