The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs and tools that make it fast and easy for you to create new voice-driven capabilities for Alexa. Alexa is the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, a new category of device designed around your voice.

We announced the availability of the Alexa Skills Kit a little over a month ago, and we’ve been impressed with some of the skills developers are teaching Alexa. We wanted to give you an early look at a few of these third-party Alexa skills that are starting to come out of the pipeline.

Being a great coder today requires many skills and habits beyond the code itself. The Code Writers Workshop is a one day event that tackles many of these areas through a series of talks, panels and lessons learned from some of industry's most successful developers. This event is intended for developers across languages and platforms with an interest in getting all they can out of the great profession of coding.

If you've never published an app to the Amazon Appstore, now is the perfect time to join! Most Android apps just work on the Amazon Appstore, but it’s not always easy being the new guy.  That’s why for a limited time, we’re helping drive impressions and installs for developers that publish to the Amazon Appstore for the first time.

Publish your first app to the Amazon Appstore by August 16th, and we’ll provide you with a $100 promotional credit towards an ad campaign on Advertise Your App. Advertise Your App helps you promote your app to millions of users on Fire tablet wakescreens and mobile placements on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network. Ads are shown to users within the United States, depending on app compatibility.

Join us on Monday August 10, 2015 at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco for a full day of learning and activities. Our Developer Evangelists will share tips and best practices on how to build, optimize and monetize your apps and games. The developer day is complimentary and doesn't require Casual Connect event badge access.

The Amazon Mobile Ad network is offering a limited time opportunity to earn a guaranteed $6 CPM for interstitial ads on qualifying apps*. All qualifying iOS and Android apps that integrate the Amazon Mobile Ads API and send the ad request for the first time on or after July 14, 2015 will receive a guaranteed $6 CPM on interstitial ads in September, October and November (up to 1 million impressions per app per month). Interstitial impressions served across all supported devices (iOS, Android, and Fire OS tablets and phones), supported countries (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan), and supported stores (Apple App Store, Google Play and Amazon Appstore) qualify.

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• Introducing the Alexa Skills Kit, Enabling Developers to Create Entirely New Voice Driven Capabilities
• Why Isn’t Your Game Doing Better?
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In April, Amazon introduced Amazon Fire TV, and it quickly became the most wished for item by Prime members in 2014.  Amazon Fire TV, made it easier for customers to watch Netflix, Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus, WatchESPN, and more on their big-screen TV, and brought photos, music, and games to the living room.  In October, we brought the same experience customers love about Amazon Fire TV—ease of use, great performance, and vast selection—to a smaller and even more affordable device - Fire TV Stick, which is the fastest-selling Amazon device ever.

This week, we announced that Amazon Fire TV has the fastest growing selection of any streaming media device. In just the last 3 months, Amazon has added over 600 channels, apps and games to the Amazon Fire TV platform—more than Roku and Apple TV in the same timeframe. Popular new titles include Popcornflix, Funny Or Die, GameFly, Candy Crush Saga, and Fox News. 

For developers, one of the most exciting prospects of publishing your game on Amazon Fire TV is that you can run Android games directly on the TV. If you are already building games for Android, you can use the same codebase you currently have, and make that game playable on Amazon Fire TV.

How to Optimize Your App or Game for Fire TV

While you may be familiar with targeting Android tablets and phones, there are a few things you need to consider for your app to run correctly on Amazon Fire TV.  Below is a quick round-up of some of the great content we’ve created since the device launched to help make the transition easy.

Responsive Game Design: Making Games that Scale Across Desktop, Mobile & TV

Gone are the days where you can make a game and publish it to a single platform and expect to be successful. Like any business that sells consumer products, you need to go where the people are. That means the games you make should run on a multitude of different platforms and accept any number of different input types. With that in mind I have outlined what I call “responsive game design,” which is modeled loosely after some of the core concepts of responsive web design. It’s also a framework that will help you think about enabling your games to scale across multiple platforms.  Click here to learn more.

10 Tips for Remote & Controller

If you’re porting an existing Android app to Fire TV, you have to add support for user input from the Amazon Fire TV remote and maybe the Amazon Fire game controller. Luckily, basic controller support is already built into Android.  You can leverage the Android input device APIs and the game controller API from the Amazon Fire TV SDK to get your game ready to publish in no time. Here are the top ten things you should do in order to get your game ready for Amazon Fire TV customers.

Tips for Getting Your Android Apps Looking Good on Fire TV

While you may be familiar with targeting Android tablets and phones, there are a few things you need to consider for your app to run correctly on Amazon Fire TV. This includes understanding the layout, dimensions and orientation of Amazon Fire TV views, changes to the user experience when interacting with a TV (10’ away on average), UI and navigation patterns, as well as some other TV-specific gotchas such as overscan and color reproduction.  Here are some practical tips to help you get your Android apps looking good on Fire TV.

Building Apps & Casual Games for Fire TV Stick

Fire TV Stick is one of the most affordable devices on the market for creating apps and casual games intended for the big screen. The best part is if you are already building for Android, Fire TV stick is another great platform to help grow your audience.  In this post we cover how to get started, optimizing for Fire TV Stick as well as the hardware/software differences between the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV to help make your apps and games run great on both devices.

Reaching New Android Customers with Xamarin & Amazon Fire TV

Xamarin is a cross platform development environment that leverages the power of the C# programming language and takes full advantage of native hardware acceleration. Xamarin includes a suite of tools that allow you to test, build, and analyze your apps across all of the major mobile platforms. Utilizing Xamarin you can now publish your own apps and games to all Amazon Fire devices. This includes Amazon Fire tablets, Amazon Fire phone, Amazon Fire TV and the recently announced Amazon Fire TV Stick.  Click here to learn how to get your app or game running on Fire TV using Xamarin.

Introducing the Web App Starter Kit for Fire TV

Fire TV and Fire TV Stick both support HTML5 web apps. The Web App Starter Kit for Fire TV is a new open source project intended to help developers get up to speed quickly creating a simple media-oriented app for this exciting new web platform. Features of the project include an example user interface designed for the 10-foot user experience, support for the Fire TV remote control, and sample components to create and customize a media app. You can learn more about the Web App Starter Kit for Fire TV here.

Amazon Reaches the Big Spenders Best

According to Newzoo, gamers using the Amazon Appstore are the most likely to spend money.  More specifically, 64% of mobile gamers that use the Amazon Appstore spend money on mobile games, versus 37% for Google Play. Amazon users are more likely to engage with your app and spend money, and Advertise Your App enables you to target new customers while driving the installs you need to grow your business.

When you launch an Advertise Your App campaign, your app can be merchandized on Fire tablet wakescreens and mobile placements on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network, enabling you to directly reach Android and Fire users.

Reduce Your Cost of Acquisition with Advertise Your App

To get early feedback on Advertise Your App, we conducted a beta with Amazon Appstore developers. Developers who participated in our beta program had this to say about using Advertise Your App:

Ready to get started?

Create an Advertise Your App campaign in less than 90 seconds, and launch a campaign with as little as $100. And the best part? You only pay when a user clicks on one of your ads. For more information check out the following additional resources:

• Click here to learn more about Advertise Your App.
• Learn more about the Amazon Appstore
• Click here to submit your app
• Register for free as an Amazon Developer
• Amazon App Testing Service

How will IoT play out in your ecosystem? Is HTML vs. Native still relevant? Are you using AWS, Azure or Google Cloud? Which are the hottest IoT verticals? These are some of the questions that our friends at VisionMobile address through their Developer Economics research, so take their quick survey and make your voice heard.

Participate in the 10-minute Developer Skill Census survey by June 5^th and enter a draw to win prizes such as an Oculus Rift Dev Kit. A free chapter from one of VisionMobile’s premium paid reports will also be given immediately upon completion, taking a close look at app profits & costs. 

Now in its 9th edition, the Developer Economics research program tracks developer sentiment across platforms, revenues, apps, tools, APIs, segments and regions. This is the most ambitious developer survey to date, spanning across mobile, IoT, desktop and Cloud. The key insights from the survey will be given back to the community as a free download in late July.

Take the survey here: vmob.me/DE3Q15Amazon

Starting May 9th,the Amazon Appstore will be sponsoring a 2-day Hearthstone “Challengestone” Twitch tournament in partnership with top Hearthstone influencer @Reynad27 (236K followers, +20MM views).  The goal of this tournament will be to test players’ execution abilities and deck building skills.  The tournament will be casted by @nl_Kripp and @Artosis and include some of the top Hearthstone players from around the world: @Hyped, @Lifecoach, @Trump, @StrifeCro, @Kibler, @Xixo, @Chakki, and @Savjz.   The prize pool will be $3,000 with the 1^st place winner earning $1,800.  In conjunction with the tournament, Amazon Appstore will be running an Amazon Coins promotion which will provide customers the ability to get more Card Packs in Hearthstone for the money they spend. For example, for $90, a Hearthstone player can get 106 Card Packs when they purchase through Amazon Appstore using Amazon Coins (vs. only 70 Card Packs when they purchase Card Packs through Google Play).

Tune into the Challengestone Tournament (http://www.twitch.tv/tempo_storm) to find out more.

Saturday May 9th 09:00 PDT / 11:00 CT / 12:00 EDT / 18:00 CEST: Deck building & Ro8

Sunday May 10th 09:00 PDT / 11:00 CT / 12:00 EDT / 18:00 CEST: Semi-finals & Finals

How Game Developers Reach New Customers with Twitch

Twitch is the largest live video platform and community for gamers with more than 100 million visitors per month. Twitch connects gamers around the world by allowing them to broadcast, watch, and chat from everywhere they play.  At GDC San Francisco, the Twitch team facilitated a session about how game developers are creating engaging experiences and reaching new customers via the Twitch platform. Watch this video to learn more.