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I'm Drew Breunig and I obsess about technology, media, language, and culture. I live in New York, studied anthropology, and work in advertising technology.

These are reactions to things I feel are important.

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Questions about Amazon’s Silk browser and the Kindle Fire:

  1. Will websites that run or partially live within Amazon Web Services see a performance boost in Silk? For example, Tumblr images live in Amazon’s S3. I’d guess that those images will load like lighting on the Kindle Fire, as Amazon’s existing transfer rates between S3 images and EC2 instances are quick and free. Update: In minute three of this video the team implies that AWS sites will see a bump.
  2. Will technical specification marketing (feature lists) be further minimized when half the device’s storage or performance comes from the cloud? Amazon never listed the Fire’s local storage during their presentation, but we learned afterwards its 8GB. But with infinite storage in the cloud and a smart interface to handle the exchange, wouldn’t it be more apt to call that 8GB a cache? (I can’t wait for this trend to expand…)
  3. Will Amazon release their own SDK for the Fire that allows developers to easily draw on EC2 and S3 for processing power and storage? Many apps could kill it with such abilities. For example, imagine an app that builds slide shows: the app would send the photos and instructions to an EC2 resource which could render a video in no time. I know this is feasible now, but I’d love to see this function wrapped in a dead-simple API. A developer shouldn’t have to know what type of instance or image to boot up. They should only have to pass a task1.

  4. Will Amazon eventually release Silk for other platforms? I’d use it on my iPhone and my MacBook Air if I was on tepid wifi. The Silk team says it’s exclusive on the Fire for now.

    The importance of Silk, and the capabilities Amazon is showing off, cannot be understated. Just as Apple dips it’s toe into cloud storage, Amazon is leaping into cloud processing.

Thoughts?

  1. Apple has been gearing up developers for this shift, but the focus has been on multicore readiness. Grand Central design let’s developers easily break down their functions into asynchronous tasks so that a device ships with a spare core, the software already knows how to take advantage of the new thread. Imagine if Apple integrated EC2 power into Grand Central: if your processor was maxed out but you were on wifi, you could throw off some work to the sky. That’s the tech I want. ↩

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