The pulse of Alexander Interactive

The Ai office was abuzz today with the news of Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The new tablet appears to be the first competitor to steal the wind out of the iPad’s sails (and possibly iPad sales as well).

The overall sentiment around the implications of the product itself was a guarded excitement. Most of that excitement focused on the price, an appetizing $199.

It is only a matter of time before t-commerce reaches the tipping point that sends it into its boom. A sub $200 price tag could be that tipping point. If so, retailers with tablet-optimized UX will be the benefactors. With only a seven-inch screen, the Fire will put an even higher premium on the size of retail sites’ calls-to-action.

While the Amazon redesign may have overlooked many t-commerce UX fundamentals, one site that appears to be perfectly optimized for use on the Fire is the recently launched, MyHabit, Amazon’s partner in competition with Gilt Groupe. With large call-outs and a minimalistic design layout, the site appears to be tailor-made for use with the Fire (even down the the flash product videos, which will render on the Fire’s Silk browser).

After the (positive) sticker shock, the second-most exciting piece of news to come out of today’s Amazon press conference was the the Fire’s native Silk browser. Silk is a truly tablet-optimized browser that will split site rendering processing power between the tablet and Amazon’s cloud computing system. Using Amazon’s cloud as a type of “endless cache,” sites should render significantly quicker than they would using only the Fire’s dual core processor.

This type of “split browsing” (as Amazon is calling it) has huge implications for t-commerce. During this early period of tablet development, processing assistance is vital for optimizing page load times.

Ai has put a premium on designing sites for page load time optimization. Will this innovation make this optimization irrelevant? The answer is almost certainly “no” since even with the demo of the browser show some lag in load times. It could mean though that sites optimized for page load speed have comparable load times on Silk as they would on a laptop.

The one real certainty coming out of this news is that the future of t-commerce is getting closer by the minute.

I’ve been loving my Kindle 3 since I upgraded from my sony reader. There are so many options for getting various reading materials onto it. Here are a few of the ones I like the best:

• Want to get some RSS feeds onto the Kindle? (12 feeds for free) KindleFeeder is the way to go. It also has a bookmarklet for capturing and sending whole pages from your browser.

  I use this to send articles in Google Reader that I want to read later to my Kindle. I use my starred items to do this. Starred items have their own RSS feed which you can put into kindlefeeder. For information on how to get the link to the RSS of your starred items, click here.

• “Send to Kindle” for chrome is a button that will send the content of the page your are currently viewing.
• The third method is the built in free Kindle email address that isn’t broadly advertised: your.name@free.kindle.com will beam most docs that you mail it to your Kindle over wifi (does not work with 3G)
• Calibre is great for managing what is on your Kindle and converting just about any file format to .mobi (a format the Kindle can read)