Amazon’s Kindle Fire is in glorious living color, but its original and still-strong-selling Kindle and cousins, the Kindle Paperwhite family, are still irritatingly stuck in 1950s-style black-and-white.

That may soon change.

As The Digital Reader found, Amazon has bought recent Samsung acquisition Liquavista while attempting to hide the fact by routing the acquisition through a limited liability corporation registered in Delaware, which is in turn linked to a holding company named CSC: “Corporation Service Company.”

Very tricksy, Amazon.

Amazon confirmed the purchase with a short emailed statement, saying:

We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.

Liquavista has built a screen technology that approaches the efficiency of traditional e-reader black-and-white e-ink screens while offering the color of LCD and other full-color screen technologies. In other words, you can have your cake and eat it, too: gorgeous full-color screen plus long-lasting battery life.

That might be just the technology that Amazon needs to kickstart conversion of its full e-reader line to a full-color and quick-response screen, as e-ink is also notoriously slow to refresh.

And that is important, because Amazon is doubling down on digital content, hoping to drive both sales and margin growth by selling digital media like movies and TV shows, apps, in-app purchases, and games. The company just launched its new virtual currency, Amazon Coins, today, attempting to increase the rate at which Amazon customers buy things that don’t have to be expensively stored, packaged, and shipped.

And you can’t sell much digital content on a slow black-and-white screen.

While Liquavista’s screen tech won’t be cutting-edge enough to run Samsung’s Galaxy phones and tablets, which need the best screens available, it is advanced enough for Amazon’s Kindles, The Digital Reader says, which are primarily budget, mass-market devices.

And advanced enough to move Amazon’s low-end devices beyond being ghettoes for books, and towards being able to handle all the full-color and full-motion media that Amazon can sell.

Image credits: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon launched its first digital currency today with a giveaway: 500 free Amazon Coins for every Kindle Fire customer. The coins, which are worth $5, can buy games, apps, and in-app purchases.

Kindle Fire customers who wish to buy apps or make in-app purchases can purchase Amazon Coins at a rate of 100 for every $1, but they can also get up to a 10 percent discount. Buying 10,000 coins earns you the full discount, and will cost Amazon customers $90.

One caveat: Amazon Coins are only available in the U.S. right now.

“Today is Day One for Coins,” Amazon VP of apps and games Mike George said in a statement. “We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/olivepress/6348546698/

Amazon Kindle Fire

Amazon announced the virtual currency back in February, when the company also said it would give away tens of millions of dollars worth of free Coins to customers. That’s a hint about the number of Kindle Fires sold — 10 million Kindle Fires would account for $50 million in free coins — as Amazon has never given device sales figures.

Virtual currencies can be useful for gift purposes, for children’s allowances, and for, perhaps, making it easer for customers to spend actual money since they may feel they are only spending virtual money. However, it is another layer of complexity, both for people and for the company issuing the currency, and mobile competitors Apple and Google have not released virtual currencies.

One of Amazon’s biggest goals is expanding the sale of digital content.

A full 12 of the 15 business highlights the company chose to include in its first-quarter 2013 annual earnings release were digital-content related. And that’s what Amazon Coins is all about: increasing the sale of virtual goods, which don’t have to be warehoused, packaged, mailed, and delivered.

As Mike George said:

“We are giving Kindle Fire owners $5 worth of Coins to spend on new apps and games, or to purchase in-app items, such as recipes in iCookbook, song collections in SongPop or mighty falcon bundles in Angry Birds: Star Wars.”

One important point for developers: They’ll receive their full 70 percent revenue share when customers buy items with Amazon Coins, even if the users earned a 10 percent discount on their initial coin purchase.

Image credit: Brian Sawyer/Flickr

This weekend Amazon launched its Appstore in China, beating Google itself to the punch. Amazon’s AppStore is based on Android, but Google’s own app store only provides free apps to China, not paid apps.

This is the latest move in Amazon’s worldwide expansion. In April the Amazon Appstore hit more than 200 new countries, including Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. It also arrived in India, China’s parallel in population growth. China has more than 1.3 billion people.

Amazon is eager to expand its audience, but the growing Chinese market is now too large to ignore. According to Flurry, China just became the world’s largest smartphone market, having an estimated 246 million smartphone devices compared to the U.S.’s 230 million. In comparison, India has only 19 million active smartphone devices.

Amazon’s Appstore expansion also gives it a bigger platform for its Kindle Fire Amazon Coins currency, its rumored Kindle TV set-top box, and future Kindle Fire HD devices.

The Amazon Appstore launched two years ago with about 4,000 apps including a free version of Angry Birds Rio. It now has only about 75,000 apps, which, according to some developers, is one of its advantages.

Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In yet another move to differentiate the Kindle Fire from other Android tablets, Amazon today just announced Amazon Coins, a new virtual currency for purchasing apps and games on the Kindle Fire.

Amazon Coins is launching in the U.S. in May, and the retailer says it will also be giving out tens of millions of dollars worth of free Coins to customers. Developers will get the same 70 percent revenue cut when you pay for apps with Amazon Coins as they do when you pay with cash or credit cards.

Amazon is clearly trying to rev up its app store with the virtual currency, but it could also be a good way to get parents to spend more money. It’s far easier to give kids an allotment of credits for purchasing apps and games instead of giving them access to other forms of payment.

“Developers continue to report higher conversion rates on Amazon compared to other platforms,” Amazon’s vice president of apps and games Paul Ryder said in a statement today. “Now we have another new way to help developers reach even more of our millions of customers.”

Developers not in the Amazon App Store yet will have to submit and get their apps approved by April 25 to take advantage of Amazon Coins. It’s just one of several recent announcements by Amazon to make the company’s app store more inviting to devs — like Game Connect for virtual goods, and in-app purchasing for PC, Mac, and web apps.