Jeff Bezos introduced the latest Amazon hardware device yesterday, the Fire, an entry into the smartphone category. I’m only half finished reading Brad Stone’s biography of Bezos, The Everything Store, but one thing has been made clear: Jeff Bezos is a long-term thinker who makes no small plans.
And so what seems to be Amazon’s long term goal here? Basically, to sell more items at Amazon.com. The Fire is a hand-held cash register customized to selling you more things. Uhh, yay? Are there people out there who are irritated that it takes 10 seconds to order replacement razor blades at Amazon.com? Not to mention there already is an iOS Amazon app that scans either a bar code or the text on a package. I’ve found it occasionally useful, but frequently the scan yields zero results.
The Fire is not really a phone, per say:
Although he did not show the feature onstage, Mr. Bezos confirmed that his expensive new phone does makes calls. “I haven’t made a phone call on my phone in a long time,” he said. “But I know people still make phone calls.”
(click here to continue reading Amazon Fire Phone’s Missed Opportunities – NYTimes.com.)
and skeptics abound:
At the outset, Fire looks to be an attempt to rope Amazon shoppers deeper into its world — the phone is, above all, an enhanced shopping tool. It’s not a realistic shot at the smartphone market.
(click here to continue reading Amazon Phone Is An Enhanced Shopping Tool | Digital – Advertising Age.)
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and my second, nearly immediate thought about the Amazon Fire – it seems like an NSA dream! So while the Fire encourages you to purchase more consumer goods, it will allow Amazon.com to collect more meta data about your house, your office, your car, your friends, your neighbors, and so on.
The WSJ notes:
Amazon squeezed a number of new technologies into the Fire, but it seems its biggest innovation may be new uses it found for an old technology: cameras. The Fire doesn’t just take nice photos–it watches you, and what’s around you, to customize what you see and how you interact with the world.
(click here to continue reading First Look: Amazon’s Fire Phone Is Watching You – Personal Tech News – WSJ.)
John Koetsier agrees with me that this sounds a bit creepy, and writes:
How do you think it recognizes those things, including text on images, which Amazon says it will offer language translation features for later this year?
Well, the Firefly button and the camera button are one and the same. Meaning that whenever you use the camera, you’re using Firefly. And whenever you’re using Firefly, you’re using the camera. Plus, of course, you’re turning on audio sensors that capture ambient sound.
And then you’re transmitting all those pictures and sound files to the grandaddy and still global leader in connected cloud technology, the company that pretty much invented what we now call big data analytics for customer insights, and the largest online retailer in the wild wild west.
Amazon.com, of course.
All of those pictures require processing, analysis, and matching, presumably at a level — if they can identify 100 million objects — that can only be done in the cloud, and not on a small handheld device with 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of on-board storage.
Fortunately for you, dear consumer, Amazon has kindly consented to storing all your photos, forever, in its vast cloudy server farms. How gracious Amazon is, providing that massive service for free! How lucky are you, getting all that for free!
Probably not as lucky as Amazon.
(click here to continue reading Amazon’s Fire Phone might be the biggest privacy invasion ever (and no-one’s noticed) | VentureBeat | Marketing | by John Koetsier.)
I think I’ll pass…