What Hides Behind Amazon Fire's Pricetag

What Hides Behind Amazon Fire's Pricetag

Photo: The Verge

Today I came across some news regarding the launch of two new cheap Kindle eReader versions and an Android tablet (YES!) by Amazon. My interest took a crest when I delved deeper into the tablet- Fire. It was really cheap! $199. That's it. I said- Well, that's a great deal. Moved on with reading the whole specs.

Now I realized something, very interesting. The new Fire tablet HAD to be cheap. Reason- The tablet featured only an 8GB worth of and internal memory and no additional SD card slots for and memory expansion. Further despite being an Android tablet one would not have the facility to access the Android Market.

Why so? Well, let's see the big picture. Amazon has, first, it's own store. Why let Google feast the cookie then. Secondly, Amazon is moving ahead with the next gen cloud services. So in case you run short of the meager 8GB memory on your Fire tomorrow, Amazon's waiting to offer you it's cloud service.

Hence, what I sense here is that hidden behind the catchy price tag were the bars that caged you into solitary confinement. Sorry Amazon, a $100 more and I'd live the rest of my life, a freeman, at least.

Are we looking at the third dimension of the tablet era that leads to the combination of the open source policies of Android for developmental openness and those of Apple for usage terms? What do you have to say about it? Do share your views in your comments.

AMAZON ACQUIRES ZAPPOS FOR US $ 900 MILLION

AMAZON ACQUIRES ZAPPOS FOR US $ 900 MILLION

Amazon.com, a multimillion enterprise serving online products and services market, is finally up with acquiring an online shoe retailing company Zappos.com. The company has expectantly taken this decision after seeing the exponentially growing turnover of online shoe markets.

Zappos.com is a privately founded company and has a reputation in the markets and among its customers since the past 10 years for its customer royalties such as free shipping and credit card shopping and loads more.

Online shoe markets have seen a growth of a whole of US $ 1 Billion in the past year accounting for US $ 4.3 Billion in 2008 as compared to US $ 3.3 Billion of 2007. And hopefully this is what has affined Amazon towards Zappos.

The current stats say that Amazon has acquired Zappos for 10 Million shares worth US $ 900 Million. The company has also announced an additional $ 40 Million for the employees working at Zappos.

This has been one of the largest transactional decisions in the history of Amazon.com