Imagine that: Amazon’s smartphone will also make it incredibly easy for you to buy stuff from Amazon.
The feature, dubbed Firefly, can recognize what the Fire Phone’s camera is looking at and link you to it on Amazon’s storefront. It’s basically the impulse buyer’s worst nightmare.
As demoed on stage today by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos today, Firefly can recognize physical objects, audio, text, and even things like QR barcodes. It can also be instantly accessed using a button on the side of the phone.
We broke the news last week that Amazon would be integrating some killer shopping features in its smartphone last week. Today’s Firefly announcement is pretty much what we expected: A quick and easy way for Amazon to separate you from your money.
Firefly keeps tabs of everything you’ve scanned with the phone, so you’ll never forget a potential Amazon purchase. The feature can also be used to quickly look up information. When he scanned a painting on-stage, the phone quickly pulled up its Wikipedia entry.
Amazon is also opening up the Firefly SDK so third-party developers can take advantage of it. MyFitnessPal, for example, will use Firefly to quickly pull up nutritional information for food.
"We can't wait to see how the developer community will surprise us with what they do with Firefly,” Bezos said.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where cu... read more »
