Amazon.com Inc.'s Fire Phone, unveiled today, has a button that blends mobile purchasing with real-world shopping.
The feature, called Firefly, uses the phone's microphone and camera to identify any real-world product the user observes. Consumers who practice
In a demonstration at the phone's unveiling, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos demonstrated how the phone could identify a jar of
Firefly is sophisticated enough to recognize a specific episode of a TV show by hearing the audio from it, Bezos said, according to
Firefly can identify 70 million physical items that can be purchased on Amazon.com, the e-commerce giant says in a
"There are a lot of ways Amazon can go with this, maybe eventually wrapping a mobile wallet around it," says Brian Riley, senior research director and analyst with Boston-based CEB TowerGroup.
In many ways, Amazon has a stronger trove of customer data and shopping habits than Apple does, Riley says. Apple has
"Amazon has inserted itself as the hub for its merchant base, and it keeps the payment relationship in place," Riley says.
Amazon is also launching a Firefly software development kit to allow companies to build on the functionality. iHeart Radio, for example, developed a system that builds a playlist around a song scanned by Firefly, Bezos says.
The Firefly system can also read bar codes and
Firefly is the latest of many tools in Amazon's growing payments arsenal. The company's recent moves include a "guest checkout" system called
The Fire phone will launch exclusively on AT&T, a move reminiscent of the iPhone's 2007 launch on AT&T only.
