lab126.com Lab126, Amazon’ Kindle division, added several new openings to its jobs board.Since Apple announced its plans for the iPad, Amazon has shared few details about how it would respond to the competition for its Kindle. But over the last few weeks, it has offered some more clues.
Lab 126, the division of Amazon responsible for building the Kindle, has been on a hiring binge, with dozens of new job listings on its Web site. Some are positions for testing and readying new products. And this suggests that the company might be preparing a new device.
The announcement earlier this year about the iPad — with its high-contrast color screen, Web browser, games, applications and computing capabilities — brought a wave of of speculation over the future of Amazon’s e-reader.
Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, even referred to the Kindle while announcing the iPad iBookstore, saying: “Now Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle. And we’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit further.”
After the iPad announcement, I debated with my colleague Brad Stone whether the iPad would kill the Kindle. I argued that the Kindle could never compete with the iPad’s user interface or hardware design. Brad said that the Kindle was here to stay, that it was a device “for book lovers, and the iPad is not.”
Then, a few days later, we reported that Amazon had purchased Touchco, a start-up based in New York that specialized in a new touch-screen technology, which signaled that the company was going to stay the course with the Kindle.
But the ferment of activity in the job listings gives some hint about Amazon’s plans.
For example, the job listing for a “Software Quality Assurance Engineer” suggests that some kind of project is moving from concept into a development phase, where this kind of engineer helps guide the process through to final production.
Another listing for a “Software Development Test Engineer,” also known as an S.D.E.T., suggests that a product needs to be tested. These engineers usually join a team later in a product cycle; their role is to write software that tests already existing programs, in some instances trying to break the applications, to make sure they are ready for consumers.
And finally a job listing recently appeared on the site for a “Buyer/Planner,” a role that includes “working within the local and remote Operations team driving order fulfillment.”
In addition to the job listings, several people working with Amazon who are not authorized to speak publicly about products in development, said Amazon representatives had been meeting with publishers to discuss new games the company hoped to put on the new version of the Kindle. It is unclear, though, when consumers could expect a new product.