{"id":744601,"date":"2013-04-02T11:12:55","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T15:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=626434"},"modified":"2013-04-02T11:12:55","modified_gmt":"2013-04-02T15:12:55","slug":"wow-former-windows-phone-exec-to-head-amazons-mystery-mobile-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/744601","title":{"rendered":"Wow. Former Windows phone exec to head Amazon\u2019s mystery mobile project"},"content":{"rendered":"

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?<\/p>

That’s what’s happened. \u00a0As Geekwire<\/em> reported <\/a>on Monday — and yes it dispensed with the April Fool’s aspect –\u00a0Charlie Kindel, <\/a>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<\/a><\/p>

His current job description:<\/p>

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>

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\u00a0group in Palo Alto, Calif. <\/a>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).<\/p>

There have been rumors for months that Amazon is building its own smart phone<\/a>. 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<\/em> get something out by then, Kindel will have had very little, if any, input into what they’ve done.<\/p>

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.<\/p>
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