{"id":14025,"date":"2012-10-19T08:00:36","date_gmt":"2012-10-19T13:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=14025"},"modified":"2012-10-18T21:26:53","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T02:26:53","slug":"amazon-going-up-against-apple-in-the-education-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/hardware\/tablet\/amazon-going-up-against-apple-in-the-education-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Going Up Against Apple In The Education Market"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Amazon<\/a> has announced it plans to make a push into the education market by introducing Kindle Whispercast<\/a>, a service for centrally managing all the Kindles used in a system. The online retailer faces off against\u00a0Apple<\/a>, which has been firmly entrenched in the education market for quite some time and shows no signs of losing steam. From the early days of the iMac<\/a> to the latest iPads<\/a>, Apple has made huge efforts to embed itself in the education market, especially K-12.\u00a0Several years ago, Apple launched iTunes U<\/a> to allow anyone, including formal educators, to create interactive course material for the iOS. Apple also launched iBooks<\/a> on the iPad to allow students to replace all those heavy textbooks traditionally carried in a backpack.\u00a0Plus, Apple has provided easy-to-use tools for creating courses for iTunes U and has the biggest textbook manufacturers starting to create versions for iBooks. But\u00a0Apple’s strength has always been the hardware its ecosystem runs on. Apple is a hardware and software company, but it’s not really a content company.<\/p>\n

Enter Amazon and the Kindle. Let’s face it, Amazon is the content king. You can find almost any book published for purchase on Amazon’s website. And now most of those books are available in the Kindle format. According to Forbes.com<\/a>\u00a0in an article recently published, a BBC interview<\/a> with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos confirms that the Kindle is sold at Amazon’s cost, so the company breaks even on the hardware. Amazon does this solely to get the hardware into people’s hands so it can sell them content.<\/p>\n

The problem that has plagued Apple from the very beginning is the lack of central administration tools or the lack of capabilities built-in. Popularity of the iPhone and iPad made Apple improve that flaw and these devices have led the way in consumer technology entering the business world. Amazon has gained a large foothold in the marketplace for devices to deliver its content with the extremely popular Kindle line and now the Kindle Fire line of Android-based devices. Amazon has already been testing Kindles with students in kindergarten through twelfth grade in recent years and now it is going full throttle. Amazon will sell Kindles at even more of a discount than getting it for cost and is introducing its new Whispercast service.<\/p>\n

Whispercast allows a single administrator to control all the Kindles in a system. Kindles can be customized by grade or class and they can even disable non-educational distractions like Facebook and Twitter. Amazon has plans to enable the control of apps on the Kindle Fire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Amazon is a little late to the game that Apple has led for years, that is, getting product into the hands of kids who become buying adults in the future. The question is whether Amazon can deliver on the amazing central management it’s promising and only the market can decide that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazon has announced it plans to make a push into the education market by introducing Kindle Whispercast, a service for centrally managing all the Kindles used in a system. The online retailer faces off against\u00a0Apple, which has been firmly entrenched in the education market for quite some time and shows no signs of losing steam. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[905,31,12],"tags":[244,1631,472,1399,1229,1633],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14025"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14053,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14025\/revisions\/14053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}