Today Amazon issued a press release with quite possibly the longest title to date. I’ll let it do all the explaining:
“Announcing Whispercast for Kindle—A Free Self-Service Tool for Schools and Businesses to Manage Large Deployments of Kindles and Support Purchase and Distribution of Kindle Books and Documents Across Kindle E-Readers, Kindle Fires and Free Kindle Reading Apps”
I didn’t know it was possible to use the word Kindle six times in a title, but Amazon found a way.
Basically Whispercast for Kindle allows schools and businesses to manage a large collection of Kindles from one centralized account. This allows them to purchase and distribute Kindle content across multiple Kindle devices and Kindle apps. Whispercast supports the distribution of personal and business documents too, including PDFs and word documents.
Account administrators can setup different groups within the account to accommodate for multiple types of users within the system. For example, a school can setup user groups for different grades and classes.
Administrators can also configure device settings across all Kindles at once for things like setting up Wi-Fi and setting up parental restrictions to disallow access to the web and Kindle Store.
For businesses and schools that support it, there’s a “bring your own device” program for students and employees wanting to add their own devices to a Whispercast account.
Right now Whispercast works with Kindle content and documents. In the “coming months” they plan to add support for distributing Amazon’s Kindle Fire Android apps through Whispercast too.
Below is a YouTube video (commercial) that Amazon put together introducing Whispercast for Kindle at schools.
This is very smart on Amazon’s part. Why Apple doesn’t do this I don’t know. Could you imagine the traction an Apple offered “Enterprise App Store” would get with corporations struggling to adopt the iPad? Amazon is going to make money on selling the devices and a cloud service. Very smart..
Good point. Apple really should steal this idea.
I think it is ironic that some of the features touted as ‘revolutionary study aids’ in the video have been removed from the latest version of the Kindle. Text-to-speech and audio support are gone. The only option now is to buy a Kindle Fire HD, and from the looks of this video, emphasis is on E Ink readers, not tablets.
I think this is brilliant. Anything to get students excited about reading is awesome. I’d be interested to read a case study on how one of this program works out for a school in a year.