Recent reports from BI Intelligence detail Amazon’s mobile ambitions, analyzing everything from the potential impact of a rumored Amazon smartphone to Amazon’s ability to become a huge player in mobile advertising.

Access the Full Reports By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today

Here’s a brief overview of Amazon’s mobile ambitions:

Tablet Sales: Amazon’s Kindle tablets and Android tablets had a big third quarter last year. Kindle shipments, including e-readers, jumped 104% in the quarter, likely helped by the early September launch of the new Kindle Fire tablet line and the fact that the 7-inch version began shipping that month. It’s tablets priced very competitively. With the release of the Nexus and the iPad mini, the competition has never been hotter.

Software sales: The Amazon Appstore has been a huge success on the Kindle Fire. Developers make almost as much revenue per active user as they do on iOS. Google Play has many more users, but it does not generate substantially more revenue in the U.S. than the Amazon Appstore. Apple executives reportedly worry that Amazon’s controlled, iTunes-like approach makes it more competitive than other app stores, including one operated by Google. Given strong early results, Amazon shouldn’t have a hard time convincing developers to bring their apps to an Amazon phone.

Media sales: The Kindle Fire is best understood as an interactive catalog which drives sales of all sorts of Amazon products. The Kindle ecosystem includes ebooks (Kindle app), music (Amazon MP3), movies and TV shows (Amazon Prime), and apps. Almost 50 million Americans visited an Amazon site on their smartphones in July. Over 86 million U.S. smartphone owners accessed a retailers’ app or mobile site, meaning 47% went to an Amazon property. The next largest smartphone draw was eBay, which had 33 million visitors with a reach of 31%.

Smartphone Sales: Amazon continues to push forward with the makings of a smartphone platform. The potential platform has been widely rumored but not yet confirmed. The beginnings of a platform strategy are coming together: a recent purchase of 3D mapping startup UpNext, last year’s acquisition of voice recognition software creator Yap, and the launch of a prepaid wireless service in Japan. However, big questions remain about its ability to build out and manage a software platform and design the hardware to deliver it.

Mobile ads: Amazon has the potential to be a huge force in mobile advertising. Data is the lifeblood of online advertising and Amazon has a unique data trove. It’s not just data on what people like to buy, but data on what recommendations work in getting people to buy things.

As the iPhone, Android phones, and iPad became bestselling consumer gadgets, businesses realized their Web presence needed to translate to those smaller screens. Otherwise, their websites would bear tell-tale signs of a business clueless to mobile: tiny text, tinier links, and a jumbled layout. They risked lost traffic and sales.

These days, responsive design is recommended as the gold standard. But as with most technologies in a multi-device world, it has disadvantages, and it’s not right for every business, or every application.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we describe what responsive design is and compare it to other mobile optimization tools, analyze responsive designs pros and cons, examine data and statistics that track responsive design adoption and performance across mobile, and evaluate whether dedicated mobile websites have their place, and detail the ramifications for HTML5 development.
To access the full report, sign up for a free trial of BI Intelligence today

Here’s an overview of the main mobile optimization tools:

Mobile apps: Particularly at the beginning of the mobile boom, when some believed apps would channel virtually all mobile activity, businesses rushed to create apps. Apps may be dominant in some mobile markets like the U.S., but consumers use their mobile browsers too — and not just for casual browsing, searching and information look-ups. A great deal of e-commerce happens in the mobile Web browser, not in native apps. Not to mention: Apps are expensive. Apps are not the be-all, end-all for mobile.

Dedicated mobile websites: Some usability gurus advocate for separate mobile sites that offer a stripped-down version of its content and carry their own Web address (often with the URL that looks something like this: m.website). These mobile-only sites tend to perform very well in terms of load speeds.

Responsive design: In responsive design, the same Web code or HTML is delivered to every device, but tweaks to CSS code which determines the layout of Web pages — allow it to determine the device size and adjust layout accordingly. The website maintains the same Web address or URL regardless of what device it’s seen on. In sum: The fluid layout means that content adapts to all form factors, even smart TVs — a fast-growing source of Web traffic.

Responsive Design With Server-Side Support– This is a variant of responsive design. The difference is that the computer server that hosts the website will deliver different batches of HTML and CSS Web code depending on what device the user is on. This method solves some of responsive design’s performance issues, but requires device detection. It means a company can use responsive design and enjoy its advantages where it wants, but deploy more customized components too. It may deploy responsive elements across mobile, while keeping a more traditional fixed layout for the PC. It may even deliver customized experiences for certain device models (like a feature that only works on retina screens, etc.).

The downside: it only works for Office 365 subscribers, or those who pay for Microsoft’s cloud-based Office service. Office 365 starts at $100 per year and lets you access your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on just about any device using Microsoft’s virtual storage service called SkyDrive.

The iPhone app is pretty straightforward, letting you view and edit documents stored in your SkyDrive account on your iPhone. All your changes and new documents will automatically sync with your Office 365 account, meaning you can access it all from your PC or Windows tablet too.

It’s not the perfect Office solution for iPhone, but it’s the closest Microsoft has come.

The new service, Amazon writes, can be used to support “a variety of use cases and applications, such as database encryption, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) including authentication and authorization, document signing, and transaction processing.” The actual appliances are Luna SA modules from SafeNet, Inc.

The new CloudHSM service uses Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and the appliances are provisioned inside the user’s VPC with an IP address the user specifies. The service, Amazon says, provides businesses with secure key storage and protects these keys with “tamper-resistant HSM appliances that are designed to comply with international (Common Criteria EAL4+) and U.S. Government (NIST FIPS 140-2) regulatory standards for cryptographic modules.

Because the HSMs are located close to the user’s EC2 cloud computing instances, network latency should be very low.

All of this, however, doesn’t come cheap. The upfront cost to provision a CloudHSM is $5,000 and the hourly cost are $1.88 per hour, which comes out to $1,373 on average per month. For businesses that need this kind of security, that’s probably a small price to pay, but this is clearly not a service that’s geared toward startups that just want to ensure their encryption keys and data are stored safely. The HSM client software can load balance requests across two or more CloudHSMs, though Amazon notes that it can take “several weeks” to provision more than two HSMs.

The United Kingdom’s industry association for e-retail presents no shortage of valuable tidbits about mCommerce, which continues to grow at a breakneck pace across multiple continents.

To learn more about the biggest trends in mobile shopping, technology, and communications today, check out the infographic below

That 350,000 is the same as the number of total iOS apps reported by Apple as of January 2011, just a year after the launch of the iPad. At the time, Apple had only 60,000 iPad apps, which means iPad-specific titles have seen a 483 percent increase in the intervening years.

Apple also revealed that it has App Stores in 155 countries, covering 90 percent of the total iOS user population, and that it has so far paid out more than $9 billion to developers. That’s a $1 billion increase from the total it reported it had paid out to developers as of mid-February.

Apple now pays out $1 billion per quarter to devs, Oppenheimer said at the close of the call, and $4.5 billion or half of the grand total has been paid out during the past four quarters alone.

Apple confirmed this week that WWDC 2013 will take place June 10 through June 14. Tickets for the annual developer extravaganza went on sale this morning.

“We look forward to gathering at WWDC 2013 with the incredible community of iOS and OS X developers,” says Phil Schiller, the senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple.

In his announcement regarding WWDC this year, Schiller pointed out that the past year has been the most profitable year for App Store developers to date.

“Our developers have had the most prolific and profitable year ever, and we’re excited to show them the latest advances in software technologies and developer tools to help them create innovative new apps,” the executive concluded. “We can’t wait to get new versions of iOS and OS X into their hands at WWDC.”