Following F8 last week, where Facebook described a future where you never need to leave Facebook, this week Amazon described a future where you don’t really ever need to leave them.

With 4 new products, the Kindle range is pretty audacious – and very keenly priced. What the Kindles do isn’t quite what the iPad does, but they do a lot for the money.

As we have discussed over the last 18 months each of the GAFA* giants is trying to build a vertical ‘stack’ where they control every aspect. Apple have been in the vanguard, launching great hardware and then developing an ecology ( and the software) that enables them to capture the value of the content consumed using that hardware.  So selling music, books, movies, games and apps becomes a very profitable way of enticing people to buy new hardware that lets them use the content they have bought.

Of course all these eyeballs inside an Apple ecology worries Google, as they are the dominant monetiser of eyeballs through search. And new research on the success of Facebook in terms of time spent online has to concern Google too. So they have started to build their vertical stack – they key difference being that they started with the software (android) before recognising they needed to be involved in the hardware too – buying Motorola.

When we first started including Amazon in the GAFA, many people questioned it. But we should remember that Amazon have built a big business outside of ecommerce, with Amazon Web Services powering a huge proportion of web businesses. And don’t forget things like crowd sourcing pioneer Mechanical Turk, measurement company Alexa; or their search engine A9. They closed the standalone search engine in early 2010 and concentrate on search for commerce players. We wonder who is going power search on the Fire?

As the dominant player in selling content, they have most to lose as other people enter the market. So whilst Amazon has a huge advantage in physical content (CDs, DVDs etc) iTunes hurts them with MP3s etc.

So yesterday Amazon went a step further in building their vertical stack. They have built on the huge success of the Kindle (look at the graph below showing how Amazon now sell more Kindle books than paper ones) with new products. The Fire looks like a great way to listen to music, watch movies and yes, read books. And with their own Silk browser they are also positioning this as a great way to browse the web too. So at around half the price, this does what most people use the iPad for. Game on.

One reason for the low pricing is that Amazon expects to make money from content sales to subside the devices  - and (this wasn’t made very clear) these devices will also include Special Offers – unless you pay another $40. Just as Amazon launched an ad subsidised version of the kindle a while back, they will us this model to get great headline prices. This probably explains why the UK price looks so expensive – that media play hasn’t reached the UK yet so the UK

This is probably the key weakness of the Amazon launch – much of the sizzle depends on Amazon services like their cloud drive and streaming movies which so far are US only.

NextWeb have a good round up of the Amazon announcement here. And the Guardian look closely at how it matches the iPad.

Apples turn next week

Confirming all the rumours, Apple have announced an event for next Tuesday. The key question is whether this is just about the iPhone5 or whether we’ll see some new products.

On the iPhone 5 we think a big focus is going to be around voice control – with a feature rumoured to be called Assistant. Since Apple bought Siri last year there have been talk about Apple want to develop the iPhone into more of an assistant and voice control seems central to this. Announcements around the work Apple have been doing with Nuance were expected at the launch of Ios5 but didn’t happen. 

We also expect that NFC will be supported in some way, making sure Apple get to play in Mobile Money, rather than letting Google et al take a lead. Given that research suggests Apple have an 89% retention rate, whatever they announce will have queues out of the door.

Our other bit of speculation is that we see the iPod rejuvenated. We’ve mentioned stories of Apple buying 9 inch screens before and we wonder whether Apple couldn’t take some of the wind out of Amazons sails with a iPod Touch tablet that is designed for consuming media. Using the tech from the first iPad with this smaller screen would give Apple something at a lower price point and leave the iPad as the premium product.

The other thing we suspect might happen is a bit more love for iAds. No-one at Apple will have been very surprised by the Amazon launch – given the deep relationships Apple have with all the component manufacturers they will have had a good idea of what Amazon was doing. But the pricing may have given Apple cause to think – and we wonder if all their dealings with content companies will have reminded them just how good advertising can be at subsidising products and services. If Apple could rethink their ad proposition and scale it, they could use that revenue to reduce the cost of hardware. That’s what Eric Schmidt has been saying for years.

Facebook

Like us, you will have read many articles looking at the new features from Facebook. You might even have seen Don Draper presenting it. This summary from John Battelle is probably the best thinking on the subject we have seen.

The one thing that everyone seems to have missed is the mobile element. Every time a feature was shown Zuck stressed this was going to be available on all platforms. And if you watch the videos the mobile experience is going to look a lot more like the desktop one than it does now.

There are over 7 million apps and websites integrated with Facebook – and all these potentially are now going to be delivered on mobile. Except all of them that use Flash that is. We mentioned Project Spartan, the rumoured Facebook mobile platform using HTML5 last week and we expect that HTML5 is the way forward.

We await some word from Facebook on what is going to happen with mobile and apps, but we’re convinced this is huge news as brands can use the same technology to develop their presence on Facebook and mobile – as well as desktop web.  TechCrunch think that Monday is the day Project Spartan gets launched so we’ll know a lot more then. Screenshots of Spartan here

This interview with their head of mobile is worth reading; Within another year or two, we’ll be a mobile company, with 1/2 mobile users.”

Quick reads

The new edition of excellent Think Quarterly from Google is now out.

Google launch an MVNO in Spain. Turns out not to be true but do they want to disintermediate operators? We looked at that back in 2006

Smart thinking on how to use Twitter as an ad medium from @PeterKim at Dachis

Cool new Android phones from Japan. How long before they arrive here?

People are quick to unlike brands on Facebook

Not that quick but this video about HTML5 is a good summary of a hot topic.

Good interview with Zynga about mobile gaming

Everyone knows that integration is essential. Some new research from Google measures the additional impact of adding digital and mobile to TV.

 

Finally

One of the biggest events in the mobile calender is talking place next week in London. The MMA Forum has an excellent set of speakers – including experts from China, Japan, Africa and Indonesia sharing a truly global view of mobile. We’re part of a panel on day one, looking at one of our passions – Permission Marketing. This is a great chance to supercharge your mobile understanding. It’s just £200 for brands – and we could probably sort a deal for Mobile Fix readers. Let us know if you’d like to come and we’ll see what we can do.

 

*GAFA – how we describe Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. – the people who boss this market – like the Gaffa in cockney slang. Eric Schmidt calls them the Gang of Four. We suspect he doesn’t know that much cockney slang.

We were going to add this fascinating infographic (showings the 20 most expensive keywords on Google) as a quick read at the end of Fix.

But we decided to try a little experiment – we searched for the first 3 keywords on our mobile. And guess what? The lead advertiser for each (Insurance – GoCompare, Mortgage – Moneysupermarket, Loan – Sainsbury’s Bank) is paying to drive people to sites that are not optimised for mobile.

How much money are brands wasting by not going mobile?  In every project we have done, the cost of developing mobile friendly landing pages has been more than covered by the value unlocked in mobile search. What are people waiting for?

With some big numbers – 100 million active users - Twitter have been talking about their plans for the future – including advertising. Their CEO Dick Costolo spoke last week ; this live blog of the speech is worth a read – not least to get a flavour of how ubiquitous Twitter is now.
Some of the smartest thinkers have built on this news. John Battelle has a typically well thought through piece on twitter advertising.  One key quote;
( I think) Twitter will adopt a model based on two familiar features: a cost-per-engagement model (the company already uses engagement as a signal to rank an ads efficacy) and a real-time second-price bidded auction 
Fred Wilson shares some thinking about the different ways people use Twitter, reminding us that lots of people just treat Twitter as a place to get news and views – essentially a broadcaster that aggregates people you’re interested in.

It is this scale – the constant broadcast – that sums up Twitters greatest asset but also its key problem. There is so much content how can users get to the good stuff? Other media have solved this problem – print lets you tear out the good articles and search back issues online. The reason Sky+ is so popular because it lets people organise their TV viewing – saving the stuff you really want to see whilst the on demand services like iPlayer and 4OD let you access stuff you missed.

But on Twitter that’s just not possible – so we get a degree of Twitter anxiety if we don’t check every few hours; worried about what we might have missed.

If Twitter can solve this problem and highlight the good stuff, they make themselves even more valuable. And advertising could prosper if it can be that well targeted. But advertising that merely adds to the noise it will be resented – and have little purpose other than perhaps motivating sign up to a premium ad free service – a la Spotify.
We were interested to read that the YouTube founders who have bought delicious from Yahoo are thinking on similar lines and see the potential to evolve the bookmarking service to focus more on social discovery.

With lots of buzz around Windows 8 this week we were reminded that Bing is pushing out some good mobile products – all getting ready for the imminent debut of Nokia phones running on Windows?

Our pitch in Sao Paulo last week revolved around using HTML5 as the platform, with native features blended in. This is a good summary of the issues and the current state of play on the HTML5 and Native debate. And this is a good article on how the Boston Globe have adopted HTML5 for a redesign

This blog post looks at Taiwan and how / why mobile web is so dominant there.

Forrester have a good summary of brands that are getting it right on mobile. The common theme? They solve a problem for consumers. All our projects are conceived around the belief you can only solve a business problem by solving a consumer problem. Branded Utility is alive and well and thriving on mobile.

And Branded Content is back too -  this article takes a detailed look at how brands are investing in content creation in a bid to get attention. We’re convinced that the best use of mobile is around these two strategies; Brands creating (or curating) content and delivering utility have an opportunity to make mobile really work for them.

Alternatively you can design an app as a more orthodox marketing tool and see what happens.

We’re sure you have heard the mobile conference cliche that Starbucks will, one day, be able to message you as you pass a store, with an offer of a free coffee. That day just got a lot closer -Foursquare is poised to release their Push API.

More evidence that mobile advertising is growing up – $200m of funding for mobile ad network InMobi and agreement on mobile rich media formats from the IAB.

Ben Hammersley of Wired has shared a fantastic speech  – summing up that we are still at the start of the internet. Really interesting thinking.

Over the next few weeks there are some good events that are worth going to. The MMA have an excellent line up for their London forum, with Coke, Unilever, BBC and other major brands speaking. And brands can attend for just £200.

With Connected TV a hot topic around the world (our guys in Brazil are just delivering 20 games for the LG appstore) the MediaTel event on this subject is well timed. Speakers include LoveFilm, Samsung, Google and BARB.

And there are still some places at the Senior Market conference taking place next week.