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.

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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.

The new ads — which will be unveiled Tuesday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity — will revisit what a banner can be on Windows 8 devices, whether they’re desktop computers, tablets or mobile phones. One question: do advertisers Windows 8 enough to do custom creative for it?

The software giant is showing off the prototypes developed with brands and agencies, including All Saints, Dell, Universal McCann and VML.

One of the most sriking examples comes from clothing brand All Saints and London agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay. As a user horizontally scrolls through Vice’s Windows 8 app, they may overlook the tall rectangle featuring models garbed in All Saints. However those models don’t take their eyes off the user.

The ad uses what Microsoft’s VP-global agencies and accounts Stephen Kim described as “parallax view” so that its image adjusts to its position on the screen. Assuming the gimmick is eye-catching enough to get the user to click on the ad, the unit opens up into video mural that plays as you horizontally scroll through the posh dinner scene. Littered throughout the video — which builds on Microsoft’s new Ad Pano format that aims to be a digital version of the magazine fold-out — are hot spots tied to the items worn by the models that can be clicked on to navigate to a product page and buy the shirt or dress.

“The highest order challenge the creative industry has had for a long time…is how to create ads to get people to interact with a larger experience,” Mr. Kim said.

In another example, footwear brand Vans and New York agency Rooster Worldwide built an ad displayed in the Skype app plays as a user horizontally scrolls. If a user clicks on the ad, he or she is prompted to team up with a friend via a Skype video chat to build a virtual skatepark. After assembling the playground they can check out Vans shoes, watch branded videos and share their creation with other Skype contacts or to Facebook and Twitter.

The unspoken hope is that top-tier brand advertisers will flock to the new Windows 8 ads whenever they roll out of testing and that app developers will see the premium ad revenues to be had and create apps for Microsoft’s operating system. In other words, Microsoft is Kevin Costner trying to build in-app advertising’s Field of Dreams on its operating system; advertisers are the ghost ballplayers; and app developers are the line of cars that close the film.

Apple is trying to do the same with its iAds, having built its mobile operating system to enable ads that appear as generic mobile banners but, when clicked, open up to function more like an app than an ad. Price drops indicate those ads may not be worth their complexity, but a drive to attract brand dollars to digital may hinge on these types of more immersive, premium banners.

That makes it all the more puzzling that Google, a company far more dependent on advertising revenue than Microsoft or Apple, has yet to build any premium ad products unique to smartphones or tablets running its Android operating system.

Last year Microsoft had also worked with agencies to come up with ad units unique to Windows 8 devices. Those in-app prototypes also aimed to deliver more in-depth brand content but via nontraditional ad formats akin to a Yahoo or AOL home-page takeover.

Without the flexibility to run in various apps or sites, the prototypes are little more than the digital equivalent of a Times Square billboard. Mr. Kim acknowledged the looming scale question, saying the first step was to draft the concepts then figure out how to make them more accessible to advertisers. “Each [prototype] has an element that is designed to take on the challenge of how to work within a more standard ad unit,” Mr. Kim said of this year’s batch.

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