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Last updated: Monday, June 29, 2009

Giant online retailer Amazon.com may be plotting a broader foray into software for smartphones. The company already offers a handful of mobile applications. One lets users of Apple’s iPhone read electronic books on their screens. Another lets BlackBerry users snap photos of products in stores, then find similar items on Amazon. Those may be just the start of Amazon’s mobile efforts. In the past several months the online retailer has been expanding its team of mobile engineers. It’s also acquiring companies whose products and knowhow could help Amazon turn out new software for cell phones. The goals may be to sell new programs that can run on Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, make Amazon’s digital titles available for more devices, and ring up revenue from sales of mobile applications, say several software executives and analysts. Amazon won’t comment on its mobile-software ambitions. “We don’t discuss future plans or developments,” spokeswoman Cinthia Portugal says in an e-mail. A push by Amazon into mobile software may make sense. Right now, smartphone users often buy applications from makers of their devices. But that may change if consumers’ loyalties shift from smartphone vendors to online stores that supply software for these phones, says Alex Bloom, CEO of mobile-application vendor Handango. “Devices change, and what’s hot today isn’t necessarily hot tomorrow,” he says. “Consumers will shift among devices but maybe stay with one retailer.” Handango runs an online PC software store within Amazon’s site. If Amazon can create an online store for Kindle applications that complement the roughly 300,000 e-book titles it already sells for the device, it could beef up profit margins for its Kindle business. Currently, Amazon has to sell seven e-books, many of which are priced at $10, to make as much money as it makes on a sale of one regular hardcover book through its site, according…

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Big Software Plans for Amazon’s Kindle?

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