Amazon announced FOUR new Kindles today, including the first-ever plausible iPad competitor. Pretty awesome stuff. Enough to get me excited, even though I probably won’t be springing for one given that I already own an iPad and a recent-generation Kindle. At $200 though, the Kindle Fire tablet is dangerously close to impulse buy territory.
In addition to the new hardware, Amazon also announced Amazon Silk, a cloud browser that has the ability to deliver blazing fast speeds. But the technology behind Silk gives Amazon a major advantage in the consumer retail and media space. Chris Espinosa breaks it down:
[W]hat this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there.