Amazon's Fire Phone Highlights Online Retailer's Expansion Moves

Amazon.com’s launch of the Fire Phone smartphone on June 18, 2014, highlights the company’s expansion and transformation from an online book retailer into a giant of the ecommerce world. The latest in the company’s lengthening line of devices used by Amazon to “anticipate and respond” to changes in how consumers read, shop, and entertain themselves, the Fire Phone comes with the Firefly button, which provides cloud-based information about what the phone sees or hears — a song perhaps, or a TV show. Most importantly, for the online retailer, it tells phone users how to buy it from Amazon. Forecast to become the world’s second-largest retailer in terms of sales by 2018, according to Kantar Retail, Amazon, which reported total revenue of $74.5 billion in 2013, sells 230 million items in the United States. It also launched the Kindle ereader and ebook business and Amazon Web Services cloud computing operations.