Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The word around the traps is that Amazon is about to announce a free
application for the iPhone that will enable the same e-books available
on Kindle to be read on the popular Apple device, as well as the iPod
Touch. What's more, we may have announcements of Kindle being available
on other platforms in the future.
The move suggests that Amazon has far bigger
ambitions than trying to slowly build a global market for its niche
e-book device.
The iPhone, fast becoming the most widely used smartphone globally,
while not as reader friendly as the Kindle, and the iPod Touch, are
both mass market devices which are selling by the millions each month.
In addition, the iPhone and the Touch are excellent mobile Internet
devices with relatively large and readable displays which can easily
handle the Kindle e-reader application. Unlike the Kindle they are also
pocket-sized devices.
According to a number of reports, the Kindle application for iPhone
will include Whisper Sync that enables a user to bookmark a page on one
device and pick up reading from the same page on another device with
the Kindle application. That would presumably mean that users could
read an e-book across a variety of Kindle compatible devices.
The Kindle will be downloaded from the Apple App Store. Some have
postulated that Amazon is hoping to spark increased interest in the
Kindle by making its application on the iPhone. However, the move could
just as easily be viewed as the beginning of spreading the Kindle
application to other platforms such as netbooks and tablet computers.
After all, while Amazon is in the business of selling anything it can
online, content in the form of books and now e-books is still its
primary business. If Amazon can make Kindle a defacto e-reader standard
on a billion devices worldwide the company will have gained the sort of
dominance it could never achieve trying to selling a nice but expensive
niche product.
Look for more announcements about the Kindle application being available on other hardware platforms soon.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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