Fire Phone: Amazon’s direct line to your data, dreams, and desires

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff — they call Bezos a genius entrepreneur, but I don’t think so. He seems smart simply because he can keep pouring mountains of money into new ventures, throw them out in the world flailing like newborns on Ritalin, and see if anything sticks.

Let’s see if the world will let us flatten a publishing house so that we can corner the book market because angry authors and disappointed customers are great revenue generators. Let’s see if we can castrate iTunes with a music service that contains a whole — gasp! — million songs. Newsflash, Jeff: Spotify has more than 20 million songs and it’s still a pale shade of iTunes.

[ What do you get when you cross vaporware and an empty suit? Hewlett-Packard’s ‘Machine.’ ]

Yesterday, I stood secret witness to that company’s latest drunkenly thrown venture dart, this time aimed into the mobile market. This slick launch event came with the usual feigned secrecy and a choreographed information leak that made his PR department so furious about 24 hours prior to curtain.

Dynamic Perspective: It knows where you were looking

Inspired by the stunning (yawn) success of his Kindle platform, Bezos has decided to push into the smartphone business with the unintuitively named Fire Phone. The $200-to-$300 smartphone is available only from AT&T and differentiates itself from the rest of the phablet pack with a 3D-capable, 4.7-inch screen that tracks users’ head movements using a new technology called Dynamic Perspective. Finally, your dream of texting friends and getting motion sickness at the same time have been fulfilled.

I’d flown into Seattle the night before and spent the evening disguising myself. Yes, I’m press, but I’ve been banned from the Amazon campus ever since security caught me sneaking into Bezos’ office to check on his rabid piranha Bitey. I thought about apologizing to his PR reps, but figured the best course was to make myself up as an Amazonian concubine and sneak in. The bikini wax hurt, but more painfully, I realized I needed to hit the gym — that C-cup torpedo bra fit perfectly. I ninja’d my way onto the Amazon campus at 4 a.m. when the guards were mostly passed out, but it’s no easy feat when you’re decked out in a plus-sized, French-cut onesie and thigh-high three-inch heels. (Please note my dedication to entirely truthful, not at all gonzo, journalism.)

Much fanfare preceded Jeff’s arrival, but that was to be expected. When he finally wandered on stage, he appeared to be smiling. I can’t be certain because I couldn’t see past the glare off his obsessively polished head. I suspect he wants to look like Captain Picard, so he can scream, “Make it so,” at anyone dumb enough to enter his office. Truth be told, he looks more like Captain Stubing, only with a weak chin and an even weaker sense of humor.

Shop till you drop

It took him a little while to stop trembling with avaricious anticipation and get to why he’s making this move. Since I couldn’t see past the shine of his head, I had no choice but to listen. As expected, Jeff thinks the Fire will make you buy more of his stuff. From movies to muffins to music, you can now order it while walking down the sidewalk. However, he failed to mention you’ll be bouncing off passersby and light poles as you crash into meatspace obstacles. You know who you are. Don’t expect any sympathy when you step off a curb mid-sext and get slapped by a bus.

When you eventually become some driver’s hood ornament, remember to thank Jeff, as the Fire Phone will include Amazonian apps that tie users more closely to the company’s “ecosystem,” whatever that means. It’s the usual drill: Base the OS on Android, make sure to block any competitor apps (in this case, mostly Apple and Google), and suck customers into an e-tail hell from which there is no escape.

Firefly: Convenient — or creepy?

The most diabolical bundled Fire app is called Firefly, for which I hope Joss Whedon can sue. It recognizes movies and music so that you can one-click to Prime and snap them up. Fine — but it also uses the phone’s main cam to identify objects (read: products), then instantly link to their prices or equivalents if it’s one of the two or three items Jeff doesn’t either own or sell. In short, Bezos is making every brick-and-mortar retailer on the planet an Amazon showroom. That’s a nice touch in a “Despicable Me” sort of way. Folks also say it’s Jeff’s latest attempt to get more information on what you’re buying. Frankly, if that’s what he’s after, he should have spent the phone money more wisely.

Amazon already has access to a wealth of information on who I am, where I live, what I buy, when I buy it, who I buy it for, and generally what I’m willing to spend and how I like to pay for it. What does it do with all that information? It shows me “people also bought this” recommendations loosely based on old purchases and often just product searches where I didn’t even buy anything. I snap up every John Sanford and Michael Connelly novel as soon as they come out, but I search on Sarah Palin’s “Guide to World Geography and Pithy Press Interviews” one time and now all I see are thumbnails of Glenn Beck’s agonizing attempts to become Dan Brown.

I’d tell Amazon to get a clue, but it has all the clues it needs. What it has to do is use some of that AWS compute muscle and learn deep analysis and accurate data correlation.

It’s obvious that Jeff has a bad case of Google envy and wants to kick off his own march toward world domination, but he has a long, long way to go to match Larry and Sergey when it comes to maniacally wringing the last drops of personal data from every click and swipe. I doubt a phone will help that much. At this point, he’s better off with his drone dreams.

This article, “Fire Phone: Amazon’s direct line to your data, dreams, and desires,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.