Amazon has released an application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, which could be in keeping with the old adage, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
The application gives Amazon customers the ability to buy Amazon’s products with full access to an existing shopping cart, wish lists, payment and shipping options and settings, order history, the 1-Click service and Amazon membership benefits.
The app also includes a new feature called Amazon Remembers. This allows a user to create a visual wish list by taking a picture of things the user wants to remember while he is out and about. Not only does the feature store these images on the app and on Amazon’s web site, it can even attempt to find a product similar to those featured in photos for sale on the web.
If successful, Amazon sends an e-mail alert listing the result and photo.
By producing the apps, Amazon is recognizing the importance of Apple in the mobile and PMP market, so one has to wonder if Amazon MP3s are available for purchase through the application. If downloads are indeed supported, or are made to be in the future, this could be a swipe at taking away some of the digital music market from Apple.
Amazon also has a chance to reap some e-book profits from this application. Amazon’s Kindle, an electronic book reader, has seen a lot of success of late, thanks to an endorsement from Oprah.
The Kindle for Amazon is similar to the iPod line for Apple. The real money isn’t on the hardware itself, it’s made on the media that the hardware plays. In this case, if Amazon could find a way to display and produce e-books on the iPhone or iPod touch, it could branch out to a whole new audience.
The Amazon Remembers service is run through the Mechanical Turk system. Mechanical Turk is an Amazon service that lets people do small tasks for money. The tasks are called “human intelligence tasks” because they are tasks that a human brain could perform more efficiently than a computer. This includes things like correcting some spelling, determining if two products are the same, some translations and determining if Web sites are appropriate for all audiences.