Amazon’s virtual currency “Amazon coins” are now live on the Kindle Fire. The company introduced the concept of coins, a currency that lets users buy apps, games and make in-app purchases on the Kindle Fire, back in February in a push to get developers on board.

To help get users started, Amazon is giving away 500 “Amazon Coins”  to every Kindle Fire owner in the U.S. This equals about $5. To encourage adoption, Amazon will give discounts to users. The more they buy, the larger the discount.

Developers that want to offer Amazon coins should follow this link. Here is more from the press release: “Amazon Appstore developers will earn their standard 70% revenue share when customers make purchases using Amazon Coins. No Coins-specific changes are required for developers with apps and games currently in the Amazon Appstore.”

Do you want to back up your iPhone photos to your Amazon Cloud Drive account? Now you can do it directly from your phone, thanks to Amazon’s new Cloud Drive Photos iOS app. Previously this app was only available for Android users.

Using the app, you can upload photos from your iPhone and save it to the Amazon Cloud or download photos from the cloud that you had uploaded from your computer.

Amazon is not the only cloud service to offer storage via an iPhone app. Apple itself has the iCloud service and there are a number of other third party apps that will let you free up space on your device through cloud storage.

Still, if you are already an Amazon Cloud user and you have an iPhone, this is good news for you.

Amazon has launched its App Store in China. The store offers thousands of apps including the popular Angry Birds, Subway Surfers and Temple Run, to name a few.

Amazon introduced a Kindle Store in China a couple of months back. The company has yet to begin selling its devices in China, but the Kindle store works through Kindle iOS and Android apps available in Chinese.

Amazon has been expanding Kindle’s international presence over the past couple of years. Over the past few months, the company launched the Kindle Store in Brazil and the Kindle launched in Japan. Back in 2011, the company opened Kindle stores in Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

Amazon has updated its Kindle iOS app to make it easier for blind people to use. The update includes new features that tap into Apple’s voice over technology and let users have books read to them.

Users who have difficulty seeing can choose to have the app read to them character-by-character, word-by-word, line-by-line, or continuously, and can tell the app to go forward or backward. The voice tool also allows the user to search in the book to find a specific passage. In addition, users can add and delete notes, create bookmarks, and highlight passages. The new features are available on Kindle for iOS, and will be available on other platforms soon.

Dorothy Nicholls, VP of Amazon Kindle stated: “With this update, we’re also making customer-favorite features—such as X-Ray, End Actions, sharing, highlighting and bookmarking—more accessible. We look forward to continuing to develop and extend our accessibility features on Kindle Fire and our other Kindle apps.”

Amazon has updated the Kindle Android app giving it a new design and a new user interface that makes it more like the Kindle Fire.

The 4.0.1.3 update optimizes the Kindle Store experience including a new library interface, a redesigned home screen, and a simpler navigation. The app now features a carousel display of recent items that the user has accessed on their Kindle app home screen. The new navigation panel organizes content so that users can jump between eBooks, and Newsstand periodicals. It also makes it easier to navigate between content that is downloaded on the app and content that is in the cloud.

The update also makes it easier for users to access to eBook samples. New users will be encouraged to explore free sample chapters for current bestsellers on the app’s home screen.

Amazon’s net sales were $16.07 billion in the first quarter of 2013 an increase of 22 percent, compared with $13.18 billion in first quarter of 2012, the company said today.

During the quarter, Amazon acquired social reading platform Goodreads; made the Kindle Fire HD 8.9” available in more countries; and made Amazon MP3s available to iPhone users. They also grew the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which lets Amazon Prime customers borrow eBooks for free, to 300,000 books. The company also focused on expanding its TV and film licensing agreements and on creating original programming.

“Amazon Studios is working on a new way to greenlight TV shows. The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say,” stated Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO. “I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don’t matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production. We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

The number of paid app downloads in Google Play is 2x that in the Amazon Appstore , according to Distimo AppIQ data.

The latest research compares the trends in app downloads between Amazon and Google during March 2013. Check it out: “The Amazon Appstore competes aggressively with Google Play in terms of the top 1000 paid applications: the number of paid downloads is roughly twice the size in Google Play.”

The research also revealed that across both app stores, the top 200 free apps had a total of 16 million downloads during the month and the most category was games. In addition, Temple Run 2 was the most downloaded free app in both of the stores. Fruit Ninja also did well during March, when it had 2.3 million installs from Google Play and 250,000 downloads from the Amazon Appstore. According to Distimo, Rovio Entertainment was the top publisher in March. Its app The Croods ranked well.

In a profile with The New York Times, David Blum a New York media veteran who is now heading up Amazon’s Kindle Singles division says that Amazon is bold for creating a business model which pays writers based on sales. And the service does. Authors are paid 70 percent of all sales through the store, Amazon takes 30 percent.

Kindle Singles is designed as a place where journalists and authors can publish works that are longer than your typical magazine article but shorter than a book. This includes essays, novellas and long form stories. The format has attracted the likes of Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, and Lee Child, among many others.

The New York Times points out that the business is profitable, having sold five million copies since it launched in January 2011. The Times even asserts, “…the program is as much about gaining entree into the literary world as it is about revenue.” Do you agree?

Amazon is reportedly gearing up to launch a store in Russia, according to a report in Russian Forbes, which was discovered by TechCrunch.

According to the reports, Amazon has applied for various patents in Russia, including the right to store and deliver goods; the ability to store text and media files; and the right to publish books.

Amazon already operates in the UK, Germany, Japan, France, Canada, Italy, China, Spain and Brazil. Amazon has been expanding its business internationally over the past year. Amazon opened its Kindle Stores across Europe in 2011 and opened up in Japan last fall. Earlier this week, the company expanded its App Store to almost 200 countries worldwide, including: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, South Africa, South Korea, Papua New Guinea and Vatican City.

Amazon has acquired Evi, a company that offers a Siri-like voice-activated personal assistant, for $26 million, according to reports.

Much like Siri, Evi(which is already available as an iPhone and an Android app) invites users ask questions and search for solutions. Looking for a restaurant, information on the number of calories in a meal or who directed a specific film? Evi will search the Internet to find answers and will speak the answer back to you. She’ll also send text messages on your behalf and give you directions. We’ve embedded a video demonstration of the tool above.

It’s not clear what Amazon plans to do with the technology but it would support rumors of a Kindle phone and perhaps they would even add the feature to Kindle tablets and eReaders. Evi, can you read me War and Peace?