Which is odder: That Amazon, the Kindle company, hired a guy named Kindel to head up a new stealth mobile development project? Or that Amazon hired a Windows phone guy to head a mobile project?
That's what's happened. As Geekwire reported on Monday — and yes it dispensed with the April Fool's aspect – Charlie Kindel, who helped build Windows 7 Phone and then left Microsoft for a startup in 2011, is now at Amazon "working on something wonderful," according to his LinkedIn profile
His current job description:
"I'm building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon. I'm hiring cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers."
There's been other evidence that Amazon, which fields the Kindle reader lineup, is also getting more mobility-focused in its Amazon Web Services group. It's building a new development group in Palo Alto, Calif. to build client side applications and folks also expect AWS to expose more of its existing technology services (as well as future offerings) in a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS).
There have been rumors for months that Amazon is building its own smart phone. And, as GigaOM's mobile maven Kevin Tofel put it: If Amazon is doing a phone and just pulled Kindel into it it'll be hard for the company to get anything out by summer, which has been a rumored release target. If they do get something out by then, Kindel will have had very little, if any, input into what they've done.
One thing's for certain, a couple months down the road we'll start seeing lots of Amazon mobile services news posted on the AWS blog.
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