Key Information

The Fire features a 7-inch tablet with a backlit screen capable of displaying 16 million colors and has a 169 ppi (pixels per inch) resolution. Apple’s iPad 2, by comparison, has a screen resolution of 132 ppi. Amazon’s decision to utilize a backlit screen for the Fire signifies a key departure from the company’s previous e-ink–based Kindles.

The device weighs 14.6 ounces with 8 GB of on-device storage, contains a 1 GHz dual-core processor, offers a Wi-Fi-only connection, supports Adobe® Flash® Player and it has a continuous battery life of 8 hours. Fire does not have a camera or GPS, and is completely free of buttons, with a touch-screen as its control interface.

Amazon’s “Silk” Web Browser
One of the most talked-about features of Fire is its new Android-based browser. Silk is revolutionary because it diverts data-heavy browser processes from the tablet hardware to Amazon’s massive server fleet, the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (Amazon EC2); this division of labor is called “split browsing,” and makes Silk, which lives on the Kindle Fire and the EC2, the connector. For the end user Silk means a tablet free from heavy processing and thus able to provide a faster browsing experience and conserve battery life.

While EC2 does the major processing for the Kindle Fire, EC2 also hosts many top sites and has relationships with major Internet service providers. This means that many Web requests never leave Amazon servers and also reduces the browsers’ transit time to milliseconds.

In addition to Silk’s split browser software, the browser observes user behavior across sites, detects patterns and can accurately predict the next page content and navigation before the user requests it. These algorithms are based on Amazon.com’s filtering techniques that produce the “You Liked This, So You May Also Like This” feature. Silk’s “smart” browser functionality allows it to establish persistent connections with the sites users visit the most and pre-push content to the tablet’s cache. This, as with EC2 integration, allows for a faster, more seamless browsing experience.

To go with Silk’s enhanced browsing experience, the Kindle Fire offers users seamless access to and integration with Amazon’s vast wealth of content; all Fire users need to do is either sign up for an account or link their Amazon.com account and they’ll instantly have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines and books, and the Amazon app store with thousands of popular apps, such as Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, etc., and games like AngryBirds. It’s worth noting that the apps found in the Amazon app store, like those in the iTunes store, are heavily vetted and tested by Amazon.

With purchase of a Kindle Fire, Amazon also gives buyers one month of free access to Amazon Prime, the membership program that gives users free two-day shipping and reduced prices on one-day shipping on
Amazon.com purchases as well as unlimited instant access to 10,000 commercial-free movies and TV shows on their Kindle Fire. After the free trial, users can purchase an Amazon Prime membership for the annual fee of $79.

General Implications

•    Content consumption over creation. The Kindle Fire was never designed to store large files, which is best illustrated in the device’s relatively small 8 GB of storage and Amazon’s emphasis on document reading over editing in the Kindle Fire’s description. These hardware and software choices were specifically made to meet the demand of a large part of the consumer audience that wants to browse and view content, not create it. In a recent WIRED article, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in comparing the Kindle to the iPad, said “It’s a different audience. We’re designing for people who want to read.” In the near future, look for Amazon to bolster its already vast content libraries in order to make the Kindle Fire even more distinct from the iOS (iTunes and iBooks)–dominated space.

•    New buyers to tablet market. New buyers to the tablet market will be faced with tough choices when it comes to their tablet purchases. Do they spend less to get less? Do they spend more and potentially not use all of the tablet’s capabilities? Or do they choose a device that gives them an intermediate option for a reasonable price? Time will tell, but it seems like Kindle Fire, with its middle-of-the-market positioning, is perfectly poised to pick up first-time tablet buyers. Also, expect Amazon to heavily market the Kindle Fire to current Amazon account holders because the tablet is an obvious extension of their Amazon accounts and the content they already purchase through these accounts.

•    Tablet switching. The Kindle Fire’s low price ($199) and its features and functionality will attract both high-end tablet users (iPad, Galaxy, Playbook, etc.) and low-end e-reader users. High-end users may flock to the Fire when their tablets become slow and outdated, as a lower¬-cost alternative. Additionally, high-end users may realize they don’t need or use all of their tablet’s bells and whistles, and decide they want a leaner machine. Low-end users may upgrade to the Fire because they want a tablet that can do more. Also, look for Amazon to heavily promote the Fire to current Kindle users as a step up from their current device, one whose benefits easily justify the small increase in price.

•    Silk transforms digital expectations. The Kindle Fire’s smart and split browser, Silk, will have ramifications outside of the tablet world. The browsing experience will raise user digital expectation with seamless content and lightning-quick service. Silk users will come to expect that type of service constantly, whether they’re viewing websites, using apps or potentially even interacting with brands through offline channels such as call centers or in the store. If user expectations aren’t immediately met, users will look and go elsewhere, and the brand that provides them with this sub-par experience will look like an amateur.

•    Silk spreads beyond tablets. For the time being Silk will be strictly a tablet-based browser, but in the meantime, Amazon will no doubt begin thinking about taking the browser beyond the Kindle Fire. Mobile phones and laptops would be a likely next step, but what about at home? Imagine how seamlessly a partnership between Amazon and a major cable company or Internet service provider could create the ultimate content-providing service.

•    Mobile advertising heats up. With more and more consumers using their mobile phones and tablets to access videos, music, books, apps, websites, etc., mobile display and video advertising is becoming increasingly important. Kindle Fire takes content consumption to the next level and may offer new opportunities and challenges for mobile advertising.

Pharmaceutical Industry Marketing Implications

•    7˝ screen further complicates compliance issues. With another screen size entering the ring, pharmaceutical websites will need to rethink how they design websites for readability, fair balance and presentation of a drug’s Important Safety Information. Because of all the various screen sizes and resolutions out there, marketers will have to make strategic decisions, hopefully based on Web analytics, on which browsers and screen sizes to optimize their sites for.

•    Kindle will remain an e-reader, not a medical tablet. Even before the Kindle Fire, when it came to the medical community, Amazon’s focus within the HCP community focused on e-reader versions of the major medical textbooks and journals, such as New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and approximately 90,000 more titles and publications. With Fire, Amazon doesn’t appear to be changing its positioning or game plan when it comes to the healthcare community. Although the Fire’s size makes it easier for HCPs to carry with them, the hardware (memory and lack of camera) and lack of HCP-focused apps in the Amazon app store make it more likely to be used as a reference rather than a medical diagnostic device or aid. Also, there are security and HIPAA concerns with Silk’s integration with EC2 and the cloud; this is likely to turn HCPs off from using it to send and record patient data. Given all this, it is likely that HCPs will use the Kindle Fire as an e-reader that helps them get quick and easy access to medical information and allows them to stay on top of professional literature.

•    Uptake with younger MDs, nurses, techs, etc. With tablet price points slightly too high for medical students and those healthcare professionals on limited budgets, the Kindle Fire may be just the device that gets them into the tablet market. Amazon offers medical journal subscriptions and textbooks for a wide variety of medical professionals, including significant resources for nurses. For med students and young doctors, the Fire gives them a financially feasible option for textbooks and references, and Kindle books are sold at a discount compared to the print versions. It’s possible that younger doctors, nurses and support staff will choose to adopt the Kindle Fire, and potentially become tablet loyalists, because of its price point, diverse medical practice content options and because it also provides them access to non–work-related content.

Recommendations

•    Keep current on tablet adoption. With the Kindle Fire not yet in market, it’s impossible to predict what adoption of the new tablet will be. In the interim, try to find out what the current mobile tablet and phone market looks like and how consumers are specifically using those devices.

•    Invest in a mobile site. While mobile website viewing is nothing new, the Kindle Fire is the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to whether or not to create a mobile-optimized version of a website. With this new tablet, more and more everyday, average consumers will be surfing the Web on a mobile device, and if a site isn’t built to provide them with a well-designed, easily touchscreen-navigable experience then you’ve lost them, and potentially lost them for good; marketers cannot afford to make that mistake. When it comes to designing a mobile site, marketers should optimize their standard website based on the top browsers and screen resolutions site visitors use to view their sites. For mobile phones and smaller-screen tablets (e.g. Kindle Fire), marketers should build sites that detect these devices and serve up the mobile site rather than the standard site. However, marketers should give mobile users the option to load the standard website with the caveat that it is not optimized for mobile viewing and usage.

Download the entire POV: ICANN TLD Options POV

At RTC we love to test new technology by putting it into practice (the daily grind) as much as possible. Our latest attempt was to use Google Wave as a collaboration and planning tool for a new business pitch. Rather than the internal network, Xinet,  or (sigh) email, we wanted to use something that allowed real-time one -to-one AND one-to -many coordination in a single place. We also hoped the plug-ins (charts, drawing boards, and voting buttons) would allow for more emphatic and engaging content that would spark our brains and getting the creativity flowing. In theory, Wave would be the perfect agency tool. In practice, we suffered from the same, if not additional complaints as the rest of the digital scene. You can find a number of complaints online; Here are our top 5 :

5. Logging in is complicated and requires another username, password and account. You might be able to use your g-mail account, but not if you’re invite went to a personal account.
4. People can see you typing. Once you start typing, even if you decide not to post it, people have already seen it. Privacy is limited. And in fact there’s no need to actually post anything, you just have to type and delete. Type and delete….
3. Gadgets are cool, but you have to go find them on your own. They don’t actually exist in Wave.  You have to go online, search for “google gadget for wave” and then add it. You would think there would be a menu in Wave for this…
2. Collaboration without chronology is a mess. You have the ability to respond to old posts, which sounds reasonable, but really hurts sensory input. I personally found receiving responses to old posts to be chaos- Wave doesn’t even alert you to these posts, so your left thinking no one has responded
1. It is sooooooo slow. So slow that we had to wait 3 hours for profile pics to upload. That’s enough time to plan our strategy, approach and start working on tactics.

In the end we saved everything to the network and communicated via email and meetings. Wave didn’t pass our test, though we did have fun comparing our complaints to the rest of the online world.

Instead, everybody seemed to be talking abstractly about people.

What do people do?

What makes them happy?

How should you talk to them?

The answers were sometimes surprising, but mostly they were deceptively simple. So much so that it seems the only way to sum them up is by saying: “Peoples is Peoples.” Allow this clip from Jim Henson’s The Muppets Take Manhattan to explain:

Got it? Good.

I’ll admit it’s funny to hear statements like “Talk to people like human beings”[^2] elicit enthusiastic applause from an auditorium full of people, but at the same time, I understand why that’s an important thing to say. Many other great revelations, like the one from Robert Hoekman, “People don’t like to feel like idiots,” received similar, well-deserved responses.

Why are these such powerful statements?

1. When dealing with any burgeoning technology, many companies become so focused on catching-up that they forget to consider how approachable their interactive product or service will be for real people. They get so wrapped up in the battle of Company vs. Technology that they loose sight of the all-important relationship between Customer & Service.
2. The procedural structures of most companies have never before had to confront the complexities of how different people will engage with an interactive system, so they treat “creating a website” as an additional, expensive chore, rather than a revolutionary, cheaper, and easier way to make customers happy and secure their loyalty.

So what happens?

Without a solid philosophical framework or methodology to keep interactive projects in perspective, they’re built so that tasks are made possible, not easy. The products do just what they have to do, and neglect what people expect them to do. Users are thought of as a captive audience of determined robots, rather than a finicky group of complex human beings. And then designers and developers travel thousands of miles to conferences so they can share insights like: “We are not transactions.”

So although these statements may seem too obvious to be worth saying, they’re really pointing to the fact that many times in fast-paced business situations, even the most intuitive of truths can be forgotten, and we really have to keep them in mind if we want to be successful, and shift the collective mindset from “I need to have a website,” to “How should I utilize a web presence to craft countless positive relationships with all kinds of people?” Because people are not just hits, registrations, or even transactions — is peoples.

Brent Canfield utilizes his advanced mobile device to avoid the complexities of peoples.

[^1]: SXSW ’09 Peoples. Photo by armiller.
[^2]: Quote from Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic.

Marketers come from the world of persuasion and influencing customers that products/experiences are relevant to them and worth purchasing/adopting. To this goal, modern marketers bring incredible sophistication in research, strategy, measurement, and message-making that comes from a century of practice.

The Web is More Complex Than Other Advertising Mediums

However, the Web is fundamentally more complex than all advertising mediums ever before, and hence the IT-world has gotten mixed up with the marketers. Creating sites is much more like software engineering than traditional advertising in two main ways.

The Web empowers:

1. huge volumes of information, and
2. real-time interactions with customers.

Before the Web, advertisers were limited to a one-way message that could fit on a billboard, in a TV commercial, or at most, in a brochure or booklet. Advertising was about getting a customer’s attention and quickly selling an idea in the limited space and time. Hence, messaging has always been such a focus for marketers .

However, when you have a library framework combined with a software application platform , there is a lot more that marketers can do suddenly, but that power brings its own challenges. Web users tend to actively seek out information and actively “request” pages rather than to accept messages flowed at them. While entertainment is still a big goal of web-surfing, lots of users have other specific tasks they are trying to achieve online, and thus, their state-of-mind is dramatically different from someone who is reading a magazine or watching TV. It turns out that the Web is a very dynamic place – it’s user-directed; it contains machines, and it is information-centric.

With Great Power Comes Big Challenges

The problem with all of this new horsepower that the Web offers is that it is so powerful and there are so many options and so many decisions about how to use a site. In the past, advertisers were forced to be minimalists and create universal messaging for entire segments. Now, the Web lets them customize information and messages to more precise segments and even to individuals. Additionally, the Web lets marketers deliver greater depth of information as well.

Customers behave differently on the Web too. Since visitors choose which sites they use or ignore more than they do with other advertising, we need to understand our target audience even more as individuals and users in order to design interactive website experiences that people will accept. We have to figure out how to prioritize information and how organize it to enable customers to navigate the new volume of information we have for them. In addition, we need to design the site experience within the context of what our user experienced before they arrived and after they depart, as well as within the context of the wider marketing campaign.

UX Designers Are Essentially Product Engineers

This is where UX designers get called in to help. UX designers bring expertise in content strategy and interaction design and thus, tend to have close affinities with the world of software engineering and library science. They are accustomed to building software and libraries online, creating products and content structures that must stand up to the test of actual users.

Thus, marketers and UX designers approach online marketing in two fundamentally different ways. Marketers are focused on selling and messaging, while UX designers are focused on designing products. So viewing it from that perspective, it is understandable that there is a natural conflict between the desire to persuade and influence versus the desire to create streamlined relevant experiences. But that doesn’t mean the two approaches can’t learn from each other and contribute to each other; it just means it will take time, some careful thought, and mutual openness.