Kindle

The Amazon Kindle is ubiquitous with the e-reader and enjoys tremendous brand name recognition. It has sold the most units worldwide over the past ten years than any other company and continues to dominate digital books in Canada, UK and the US. Initially the first Kindle was called project Fiona and it borrowed its design sensibilities from the Blackberry, which was mandated by CEO Jeff Bezos. This is the tale of how the very first Kindle got developed and what made it into the juggernaut that is today. November 19 2007 was the day Jeff Bezos walked on stage at the W Hotel in Manhattan and unveiled the Kindle. There were around 100 journalists in attendance, a far cry from the media circuses that surrounded Apple products.  Bezos stated that Amazon’s new device was the successor to the five-hundred-and-fifty-year-old invention of blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg, the movable-type printing press. “Why are books the last bastion of analog?” Bezos asked that day. “The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and as well suited to its task as the book, and if so, how?” “Instead of shopping on your PC, you shop on the device. The content is delivered seamlessly to the device. Normally you would do Wi-Fi. but you have to find a hotspot. We did not like this technology. decided to use EVDO. As soon as I tell you we are using EVDO that should cause a second set of concerns, because everybody knows there has to be a data plan and a monthly bill. We didn’t like that either. So we built Amazon WhisperNet. it is built on top of Sprint’s EVDO network, but we insulate you from all of those things. there is no data plan, no multi-year contract, no monthly bill. We take care of all that in the background, so you can just read.”