Why would AT&T, a mobile and wireline phone company, be interested in an online video portal? Through its U-Verse service, AT&T is a video-programming provider selling the equivalent of cable TV to 4.8 million households. It could be interested in Hulu for the same reasons as Time Warner Cable and DirecTV are, to bulk up their TV everywhere services.

But AT&T’s interest in Hulu might stem from much more unexpected place: its mobile division. Video is proving to a very tricky proposition for mobile operators. On the one hand, they’ve built these big fat wireless pipes to carry video, but on the other, they’re still charging per-megabyte rates that makes large-scale video usage prohibitive. Video usage is booming on mobile devices, but for the large part it occurs at home on Wi-Fi not on 3G and 4G networks.

We’re seeing some content provider-carrier deals harking back to the old days of walled garden, for instance Verizon’s exclusive agreement with the NFL to stream all of its games. But I don’t think AT&T is angling to become the exclusive mobile carrier for Hulu – no one would agree to such terms no matter how big AT&T’s investment.

AT&T, however, is keen on testing out the toll-free mobile data business model its been touting for a year, and Hulu would be the perfect guinea pig. The idea is simple: consumers are unwilling to pay the massive mobile data fees required to view lots of mobile video, so carriers would charge the content providers instead. AT&T and Verizon have been promoting this idea of subsidized mobile internet vocally, and entertainment companies like ESPN are reportedly amenable to the idea. But so far there haven’t been any takers.

By investing in Hulu, AT&T could get one of the world’s most popular online video providers to at least test out its two-sided revenue model. Hulu would pay AT&T for every megabyte of its video traffic traversing Ma Bell’s mobile networks, and AT&T would exempt all Hulu programming from its customers’ data caps.

Financially that seems like robbing Peter to Paul – Any revenue AT&T collects means fewer returns on it Hulu investment. But the deal could have enormous strategic value to both companies. AT&T customers, suddenly finding themselves free to watch CSI:Miami with no restrictions, would start gravitating toward the Hulu service and its subscription fees. AT&T rakes in the data revenue no matter what, and given Hulu’s prominent position in online video, AT&T might see some big subscriber gains as well.

If the project proved successful, then other content providers would be more likely to follow Hulu down this dark path. After all, if consumers are spending all of their mobile time on Hulu, they’re not watching Netflix or YouTube.

This might sound like a great deal for consumers, and to a certain extent it is. Such a model could spur the online video revolution on mobile devices without decimating consumers’ wallets. But as I’ve pointed out before, there could be some big unintended consequences to such a model. It would upset the delicate balance of the mobile internet by favoring the video providers who can afford to pay over those who can’t.

Tango isn’t going to develop games itself — though it has designed a few of those in the past. Rather, it wants to power social communications elements for the gaming industry, and it has already gained traction with one of the giants of the mobile entertainment space in Gameloft.

In the next week or so, Gameloft will launch a title called Candy Block Breaker for Tango, a game which uses the company’s communications platform as its social layer, Tango CTO and co-founder Eric Setton said. Tango is working with a dozen developers and publishers big and small, though the only other partner Setton would reveal was Australian game studio Bubble Gum Interactive.

Tango launched as an video chat app in 2010 at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference, but in the last three years it has grown at an incredible pace, adding messaging and voice capabilities and signing up 120 million users. As Tango’s network grew, Tango began layering on content and social media elements, which became its primary revenue source. Among its popular features were a handful of social games users could play while chatting via text or voice, Setton said. The company is now hosting 20 million games sessions each month.

Social networks like Facebook have evolved into communications networks, and Tango felt that street ran both ways. With a huge user base under its belt, the company could turn its underlying network into a platform for social gaming communication.

It has released an SDK that developers can use to integrate messaging, voice and video chat features into their social, multiplayer and networked games. Bigger shops like Gameloft will still host their own gaming sessions, overlaying Tango’s features on top, while smaller outfits can actually host their gaming sessions on Tango’s network, Setton said.

The idea is that anyone who is a Tango customer will be instantly available over the gaming network, and gamers can use their address books within game sessions just as they would use them in the Tango app. In addition, to communications services, Tango can provide basic gaming social layer features, such as point tracking, standings and leader boards. Tango will make its money through revenue share agreements.

Tango isn’t the first OTT provider to try this model. KakaoTalk and Line have pioneered the concept in Asia, though Tango will be the first tackle it in the West. “In my opinion this is going to the business model for the entire mobile industry,” Setton said.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to charge for communications services, so most OTT providers are forced to give their core messaging, voice and video chat features away for free, Setton said. The only way to make money is to use those networks as conduits for paid content.

Content providers could do this through direct payments to carriers, Stephenson said, but according to Fierce, he also said they could subsidize data costs through some kind of advertising revenue share. The end result, though, would be the same: content providers who pay would see their traffic exempted from customers’ mobile data caps.

Randall Stephenson

Stephenson comments come a week after reports that arch-competitor Verizon Wireless is in discussions with ESPN for just such a toll-free data deal. What seemed like a crazy suggestion from AT&T and other carriers last year, now looks like it might become reality. But is it a reality we really want?

A content provider-subsidized internet would be appealing to many consumers, especially those on AT&T and Verizon since carriers have hunted the unlimited data plan to the point of extinction. Imagine streaming Netflix movies and ESPN games to your heart’s content without ever worrying about exceeding your data cap or incurring overage fees.

But as I pointed out last week there could be some major unintended — or if carriers are being really cynical, intended — consequences to adopting these kinds of subsidy models. Legally mobile operators aren’t subject to the same net neutrality guidelines as the wireline broadband providers, but if mobile carriers created two separate classes of mobile data traffic they could upset the delicate balance that makes the mobile internet the mobile internet:

… there are enormous consequences to such a deal. The biggest and most obvious consequence is that it favors one provider’s content over another. If all access is created equal, then no content has an inherent advantage over another — which is the whole idea behind the wireline network neutrality rules the FCC established in 2010. But if consumers know they can get ESPN’s content without incurring any additional charge, they’ll naturally gravitate toward that content.

There’s an even bigger risk that ESPN’s competitors won’t just get penalized in the eyes of the consumer. Their traffic flow could be penalized as well. Embedded deep within Verizon’s network are policy servers that can distinguish an ESPN packet from any other packet. Not only could Verizon use that technology to exempt ESPN traffic form data plans, it also could use that technology to prioritize ESPN’s traffic from all others. The  [Wall Street] Journal’s story didn’t mention anything about traffic shaping, but you can bet its high on the list in any negotiation.

What’s particularly noteworthy about Stephenson’s comments, though, is the mention of using advertising as a former of subsidy currency. Stephenson could just be talking about inserting carrier-generated advertising into their app ad engines as compensation for their free ride on the network. But the other implication is that AT&T wants a true revenue share, taking a cut off the top of any revenue generated from YouTube ads or any Netflix subscription used on mobile.

This is an old idea the mobile industry first proposed way before the advent of the smartphone – in an age when the mobile internet was still a walled garden and carriers its gatekeepers. The idea was that operators would become equal partners with content providers, and that’s a scary proposition. I doubt that content providers want to give the gate keys back to the carriers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Disney-owned ESPN is negotiating with Verizon Wireless to let the operator’s customers partake in unlimited quantities of ESPN content without incurring any additional data charges. In essence, ESPN would pay Verizon to exempt its content from its data caps.

The Journal reported that no deal is imminent and ESPN isn’t even sure that the economics will work, but the fact that it’s entertaining the idea is significant. It turns the notion of a neutral mobile internet on its head. The hierarchy of the internet is pretty simple: customers pay for access in the form of data plans, leaving internet players free use of the mobile airwaves to deliver their content either for free or as paid services. If ESPN and Verizon strike a deal that hierarchy gets flipped, and there would be consequences.

The mobile internet has problems, but it works best when it remains neutral

Mobile operators have chipping away at the principle of net neutrality for years, banning certain apps here and restricting competing over-the-top services there. In Europe, carriers are battling with Google over carriage fees. But in this case, a carrier appears to be challenging net neutrality with the complicity of a content provider. I can understand why ESPN might be eager to take the plunge into subsidizing mobile data. In fact, I’m surprised a big name player like Netflix or Hulu hadn’t done it sooner.

One of the biggest obstacles to widespread video consumption on the mobile internet is overage fees. Who’s going to watch a 3-hour sporting event on their mobile phone or tablet if it drains your monthly data plan in the process? If ESPN wants to make consumers as comfortable using its mobile apps as they are watching its cable programming and using its web services, then it has to get around those data caps.

But there are enormous consequences to such a deal. The biggest and most obvious consequence is that it favors one provider’s content over another. If all access is created equal, then no content has an inherent advantage over another — which is the whole idea behind the wireline network neutrality rules the FCC established in 2010. But if consumers know they can get ESPN’s content without incurring any additional charge, they’ll naturally gravitate toward that content.

There’s an even bigger risk that ESPN’s competitors won’t just get penalized in the eyes of the consumer. Their traffic flow could be penalized as well. Embedded deep within Verizon’s network are policy servers that can distinguish an ESPN packet from any other packet. Not only could Verizon use that technology to exempt ESPN traffic form data plans, it also could use that technology to prioritize ESPN’s traffic from all others. The Journal’s story didn’t mention anything about traffic shaping, but you can bet its high on the list in any negotiation.

Do carriers really want to go down this road?

I suspect ESPN isn’t the only content provider interested in bargaining with the carriers. And I’m sure the carriers are thrilled at the prospects at an additional mobile data revenue stream. But there are risks for the carriers, too.

Operators have long complained about being reduced to mere dumb pipes, but these kind of subsidy deals would only make their pipes dumber. If all the big destinations on the mobile internet starting paying network fees for the consumer, then operators won’t have much left to sell. Consumers basically would be dealing with the big internet brands to get their content and their access. That leaves carriers selling smaller and smaller mobile data plans to customers who will increasingly gravitate toward those big content providers. Operators will have even fewer ways of distinguishing themselves from their competitors.

What’s more, operators are making the very dangerous assumption that they will always have the upper hand in such negotiations. Last week The New Yorker published a very insightful piece by Tim Wu about the growing threat to net neutrality. While Wu was making his case for wireline neutrality, his points apply to the mobile internet as well:

An important aspect of the Internet’s original design is that many prices were set at zero—what have been called zero-price rules. The price to join the network is zero. The price that users and sites pay to reach others is zero: a blogger doesn’t need to pay to reach Comcast’s customers. And the price that big Web sites charge broadband operators to carry their content is also zero. It’s a subtle point, but these three zeros are a large part of what makes the Internet what it is. If net neutrality goes away, so does the agreement to freeze prices at zero.

If mobile carriers and content providers start negotiating over access the delicate balance of the mobile internet suddenly goes off kilter. Right now it’s teetering toward the mobile operators but that might not always the case. ESPN, Google, Facebook and HBO are enormously powerful brands and their consumer influence is only growing. Meanwhile carriers are becoming increasingly less significant.

It’s not hard to imagine a day when ESPN asserts itself in mobile just as its done in the cable industry, turning the tables on the operators. One day carriers may have to pay ESPN for the privilege of delivering its sports content.

Featured photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Lane V. Erickson; Verizon photo courtesy of Flickr user slgckgc

TV shows Top Chef and America’s Test Kitchen have both launched their own online cooking programs, and we’ve even see the emergence of the first online professional culinary school. Now a San Francisco startup called Feast is taking a tech startup’s approach to the cooking school.

Feast co-founder and CEO David Spinks doesn’t have a cooking background. Instead he’s online community developer that has created or managed the community portals for the LeWeb conferences, Zaarly, u30pro, BlogDash and Scribnia. He even created a meta-community for community managers called, you guessed it, TheCommunityManager. But after he did some consulting work for online learning startup Udemy, helping it develop its community strategy, Spinks got the idea for Feast.

Spinks said he wanted to apply the same online education methods underlying teaching sites like Udemy and Coursera to create a platform for cooking lessons. In addition, Spinks wanted to anchor those classes with a strong community, not only to address the inevitable questions and problems that emerge when trying to prepare a dish, but to keep students interested and engaged.

Spinks added that he didn’t want to create something dull or overly academic either – not the cooking equivalent of a coding course.

“We wanted to take the entertainment value you get on television, but create a format where you can actually learn,” Spinks said. “There is a problem with the Food Network. It’s entertaining you, but they’re not really teaching you how to cook. They’re selling you a lifestyle. We’re actually trying to get you in the kitchen.”

Last fall, Feast launched its first online cooking course, a four-week class designed to teach basic cooking techniques ranging from knife skills to braising. Led by Feast’s in-house chef Jeremy Umansky, the self-paced lessons use detailed text descriptions and photographs along with numerous videos.

It’s in the community discussions, though, that a lot of the real learning goes on, Spinks said. Not only does Umansky engage with students on the boards, but students interact with one another, often solving problems before an instructor get involves, Spinks said. That student interaction also acts a motivator, helping solve one of the key problems of online learning: retention. In self-paced learning programs such as those offered by Coursera, Spinks said, as few as 7 percent of students actually finish the curriculum from beginning to end. Feast’s inaugural class last winter attracted 75 students, and more than half participated up to the very to its conclusion.

The company’s spring semester starts up next week, offering a new kitchen basics class as well as a new course on vegetarian cooking (both $60 for four weeks). Feast has also begun offering a free mini-course on fermentation where you can learn how to make Kimchi, Korean spicy preserved cabbage.

Feast has also managed to attract the attention of Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, which accepted the company into its accelerator’s sixth batch of startups.

Saute pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko

“This shift from what I believe to be mass communications to a mass of communicators has created a strong fundamental shift in the way brands are going to be built going forward,” he said. “They’re going to have to figure out how to engage with people instead of advertising at them.”

For Dachis that means direct engagement with people influential in their field through social media channels. Those influencers can then, in turn, amplify their message through the same social media outlets, he said.

Speaking on the same panel as Dachis, Google VP of Partner Business Solutions Bonita Stewart took issue with the idea that older formers digital marketing were ineffective. Contrary to popular belief, Stewart said, some display CPM rates are increasing, and Google’s publisher partners are seeing a lot of success using a combination of traditional advertising and new social marketing tools such as Hangouts.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on paidContent .

But sometimes April Fools’ jokes can get interesting — like when a gag starts to look more like a prophesy about our changing industry or a foreshadowing of a future product or service. Here are three April Fools’ jokes from this year that we think may, unwittingly, have more than just a hint of truth to them.

A broadband connection in every alley

Google is famous for pulling out all of the stops each April 1^st, and this year is no exception.  There’s Gmail Blue and a new levity algorithm. One of its biggest pranks, Google Nose, actually has some grounding in real technology, as my colleague Barb Darrow pointed out earlier today.

But the one that really caught my eye this year was Google’s video advertisement of its fake new broadband service fiber-to-the-pole in Kansas City, where Google is building high-bandwidth optical connections to homes and businesses.

“We thought a lot about what we do to enable this kind of ubiquitous connectivity throughout our fiberhoods, and we realized that the answers were all around us: utility poles,” the on-screen spokesman says. “I mean, we’re already invested in building a fiber network using these utility poles so we thought: why not make them even more useful.”

To be honest, the humor falls a little flat: Google pictures people gathered around poles plugging their laptops into Ethernet ports. But the idea of Google providing ubiquitous broadband in its fiber cities is probably far from a joke. Google of late has pursued a wide range of initiatives related to building better mobile and wireless broadband networks: it’s experimenting with high-capacity, long-range Wi-Fi gateways, it’s testing new small cell mobile network architectures and it’s been an active proponent of using TV white spaces spectrum for broadband.

I don’t know for certain what Google plans to do with those technologies, but all of them could easily ride on the back of its pole-mounted fiber infrastructure.

Your kid’s first 3D printer

Millions of future artists and draftsmen began their careers on Etch A Sketches. Maybe the next generation of sculptors and industrial designers will get their starts on 3D printers. ThinkGeek is advertising the world’s “most economical and fun entry-level 3D printer on the market” for just $49.99. Its media? What else: Play-Doh.

Many of you are already thinking this would be an incredibly handy gadget to own (and not just for your kids)– and it might not be too long before something like it appears on store shelves.

Once the purview of sophisticated engineering shops, 3D printers are becoming much more accessible to the everyday creative classes. Companies like Shapeways are providing 3D printing services for artisans. Today my colleague Kevin Tofel wrote about a 3D printing kiosk at Virginia Tech University available free of charge to any student – just insert an SD card with your 3D design code and out pops your object.

Of course, there are still plenty of technological and economic obstacles in the way of a $50 3D printer. But keep in mind Play-Doh is a much more forgiving material than steel or ceramics (and you don’t need a laser to bond layers of Play-Doh together). Our toddlers might have trouble figuring out the ins-and-outs of Autodesk’s computer-aided design software, but if the market for home-brew 3D printing develops you can bet more novice-friendly software will follow.

The selective vision of Guardian Goggles

Leave it to the U.K.’s liberal mainstay The Guardian to add some wry political humor to the April Fools’ mix. Its gag is a sendoff on Google Glass: Guardian Goggles, a set of spectacles that filters everything through the Guardian’s prism.

“And then there are those times your willpower falters,” goes the Guardian’s promo video as a reader reaches for a discarded copy of competing – and right-leaning – paper The Daily Mail. “It happens to the best of us. But Guardian Goggles can help keep you on track. Our proprietary anti-bigotry technology automatically protects you from harmful opinions before they even reach your eyes.”

Here are my colleague Mathew Ingram’s thoughts:

“The Guardian’s Goggles are obviously designed to lampoon Google’s version, and play on the newspaper’s reputation for leaning to the left. But Augmented Reality devices could be programmed to exclude or blur out content that a user didn’t want to see, such as that involving offensive words or imagery.

We already filter what information we expose ourselves to by selecting the type of media we consume – whether it’s The Guardian or Fox News. Technology helps us refine those filters further. Augmented reality could actually insert those filters directly into our lines of sight.

As part of its upgrade to version 4.0 of its service, Springpad on Wednesday unveiled a notebook-embedding feature for publishers and brands. The idea is that brands will create notebooks full of relevant content for their customers and then post those notebooks on their websites. Customers can browse and interact with those notebooks just as they would through Springpad’s web and mobile apps, and if they find something they like they can save those notebooks into their own Springpad libraries.

For instance, one of Springpad’s new partners, Glamour, is using embedded notebooks to aggregate everything from beauty tips and shopping list suggestions to specific articles on fashions or product pages. Customers never have to leave Glamour’s site to explore that notebook, but if they want to save the notebook it will be copied into a new or existing Springpad account. There the notebook lives on the user’s library – every time Glamour updates it, the customer’s digital copy reflects the new content.

Springpad co-founder and VP of Business Development Jeff Janer said that brands have long been taking advantage of social media and curation services to promote their content and products, but while Facebook and Pinterest generate an awful lot of traffic, there’s limited follow-through. For instance, many customers may “like” a brand’s Facebook profile, but there’s little chance they’ll return to it after the initial liking. Pinterest is a great way for brands to display their wares in a visually appealing way, but beyond the visual, there are few options for displaying other forms of content.

While embedded notebooks are initially targeted at companies  and advertising agencies that will pay Springpad for the service, Janer said they’re just a first step in the startup’s strategy to make all of its user-organized content portable. Right now a lot of loose information flows into Springpad, gets organized and then stays in Springpad. The company wants to encourage users to take those notebooks outside Springpad’s confines and show the world their organizational labors, Janer said.

Right now, anyone can embed a notebook into a Facebook page, but Janer said Springpad is working with blogging platforms and other social networks to increase its reach. Eventually Springpad hopes to make posting a notebook anywhere on the web as easy as embedding a YouTube video.

Springpad 4.0 isn’t quite a facelift of last year’s 3.0 upgrade, which effectively turned Springpad from a note-taking service into a social networking and collaboration tool. But it is supporting another nifty new feature: intent-based search. Springpad has created new search categories that parse a user’s content based on specific interests or activities.

For instance, if you want to be entertained, you can hit the “watch something” button and Springpad will dig up every movie or TV show you’ve ever “sprung” and display them in a menu. Any movie or show that is available instantly through Netflix will pop up on top. Movies that are available for rent or purchase on iTunes or Amazon will appear next. And finally showtimes and prices for films in the theater will appear at the bottom.

The launch is timely, considering Punchfork is shutting down its API at the end of the month after it was bought by Pinterest. Several sites and apps tap Punchfork’s recipe content and search capabilities – for instance, Punchfork powered Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes feature – so it will soon be looking for an alternative.

Yummly’s API, though, isn’t just a Punchfork clone, said Brian Witlin, the search portal’s new head of platform and mobile. Punchfork aggregated content from member food blogs and organized its recipes on social principles. Yummly on the other hand delves deep into the ingredients, cooking methods and the science behind each of the recipes it categorizes. It teases nutritional data out of its recipes, and its algorithms can even infer if a particular dish will be spicy, bitter or sweet. Users, for instance, can use Yummly to search specifically for low-fat or gluten-free dish options or find meals guaranteed to blow the socks off even the most jaded spice fiend.

“There are so many ways we can slice and dice the data we have,” Witlin said. “We plan to offer even more options in the next couple of months.” Yummly, however, doesn’t yet have tools to replace the social context Punchfork provides its customers, but Witlin said it’s in the works.

Initially customers most likely will use the Yummly API to provide more generic recipe content and search in their sites and apps. One of Yummly’s early API testers, search engine DuckDuckGo, uses the API to answer specific recipe queries, basically extending Yummly’s search portal onto its own site.

But developers will eventually be able to tap into Yummly’s technology to make their recipe and cooking services smarter. For instance recipe aggregation apps such as Evernote, Paprika and BigOven store recipes scrapped from all over the web, most of them drawn from the same sites Yummly categorizes. Those companies could use Yummly’s API to organize their customers personal recipe boxes into much more useful categories.

Instead of sorting your recipe library by generic soup, salad, meat and poultry labels, you could sort them by calorie level, salt use, level of spiciness or any of hundreds of different categories that aren’t spelled out in the recipes themselves.

Of course, Yummly can only sort the recipes it catalogs so any recipe you enter manually or from a site Yummly doesn’t aggregate won’t benefit from the API. But Witlin said Yummly eventually plans to amp up its recipe parsing technology so it will immediately scan any new recipe it encounters, adding it to its database.  When that happens, there won’t be any recipe Yummly can’t categorize, Witlin said.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user lilivanili

Books have always been Amazon’s bread and butter, and much of Amazon’s ebook strategy has focused on finding more ways and identifying new devices for people to enjoy the pastime of reading. The car is the logical next step, considering how much time people spend their automobiles on their daily commutes and simply running errands. In fact, a lot of drivers already do plenty of reading in their cars with audiobooks, using both physical and digital media. Some people have even managed to cram Amazon’s Audible books into their car stereos using USB drives or auxiliary ports.

Amazon stands to gain plenty by embracing that trend, and I don’t just mean by selling audiobooks in the car. (In case you’re wondering, it’s not possible today to stream an Audible book through Cloud Player). While there is a healthy segment of readers who just want audiobooks, I bet there’s a far bigger market of people who normally read their books in ink — in either the printed or digital variety — but would like the option of switching to audio when they get behind the wheel.

No large-scale development required

For Amazon to make that work it would have to supply its books in dual-media formats. You would then read from your Kindle or Kindle smartphone app when otherwise unoccupied, but once you stepped into your vehicle the device would automatically pair with the Kindle app in the car, which would immediately start reading your book aloud at the exact point you left off.

Amazon already has much of this technology in place. Last year, Amazon introduced Whispersync for Voice, which allows you to pair an Audible book with an ebook for a few extra bucks. Amazon isn’t just selling the same media in two formats, it’s integrating them. A narration feature allows you to listen along as you read from the Kindle — after each word is spoken the text is highlighted on the screen. Customers can switch between audio to visual-only formats with just a touch of the button.

It would be cinch for Amazon to integrate that technology into the car. It would merely have to develop software for the Kindle and Kindle apps that would integrate with the various automakers’ connected car interfaces, just as it’s done for Cloud Player on Sync AppLink.

It could also tap into the automakers’ speech recognition systems, allowing readers to pause the audio stream or navigate their books with simple voice commands. Amazon has invested plenty in voice and speech interface technologies over the last two years, buying both Ivona and Yap. Those acquisitions could come in handy when developing any new connected car technology.

Amazon stays mum

I should say now that we have no specific knowledge that Amazon is working on Kindle for the car, but just to be sure we put the question to the company itself. While an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the company today has the technology to seamlessly switch between book formats, Amazon wouldn’t comment on any future connected car plans. The spokesperson said as a matter of policy Amazon doesn’t comment on future product plans.

That’s pretty much what we expected to hear, but if Amazon does wind up pursuing this technology, I for one would buy it. Today I have an uneasy relationship with ebooks. I download the occasional tome on iBooks or Kindle, but for the most part, I still have an irrational attachment to paper books. I can get away with that attachment because today I can read a physical book in the same places I can read an ebook — on a train or in plane, while camping or lying around on the couch — but one place I cannot read a physical book is in the driver’s seat of a car. By creating a connected car app, the Kindle and ebooks in general would become immensely more valuable to me.

It’s not just consumers who would get excited about Kindle for the car. The automakers would fall all over themselves lining up to support it. One of the reasons the automakers have proceeded so cautiously with app development is a concern over safety — distracting apps could cause accidents. But the auto industry has been quick to sign off on any audio-only multimedia service, as evidenced by all of streaming music and radio apps that populate connected car dashboards.

In fact, audiobook apps have already made their way into many cars. Harman’s Aha content platform has already made into Honda’s connected car platform HondaLink, offering audio book libraries among its many channel choices. I’m actually surprised Audiobooks.com, a cloud-based streaming service, hasn’t launched a connected car app already.

Featured photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Rob Byron