Among the start-ups I have been following, there is one that is worthy of its name - InMobi, a mobile advertising platform - something that started back in 2007 as a SMS based localised shopping deals and ads. Finally realizing the potential of mobile phone applications and the penetration of handheld devices in our lives, they went ahead to become a platform that provides a bridge between mobile-app publishers and advertisers. But this, here, today is not about InMobi. It is about an interesting article I read by Shamanth Rao (Head of Campaign Management, APAC regions at InMobi) - on how you and I are paying for every Akash tablet the government is selling around.

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Had the Kindle Fire not been for $199, it may have been facing a lot of criticism right now – after all it lacks quite some features that as a user I would have expected it to come with. It has no camera, no microphone, and the biggest shortcoming – no 3G capabilities. But at the price-point Amazon has offered it for, it is still a pumped up tablet high on steroids and that too at $300 less a price as the cheapest iPad2. It is the package that will make a difference – as evident from the numbers just discovered. The Kindle Fire has been pre-ordered at an average rate of 50,000 per day; taking the number of pre-orders up to quarter-million in the last five days.

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I've said this before, and I'll say this again - Amazon is on Fire! But I never realized that they literally were riding 'on Fire'. The world's largest online retailer unveiled its much talked about under-$200 tablet earlier this week - Kindle Fire. A device that has a screen size small enough (7-inch display) for it to fit comfortably in your hands, and at a price tag less than half of Apple's cheapest iPad ($499), it is clear that Amazon has Apple in Fire's crosshairs.

Fire is more or less a bumped up version of the Kindle e-book reader, packed with features and runs on Android. The way I see it, Amazon will be able to leverage its dominance in the e-commerce space to ramp up the sale of Fire, and give a real challenge to the iPad with its attractive price tag, and feature-rich product.

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