Posts Tagged ‘question’
E-Book Readers: Will Secondary Features Win Consumers’ Hearts Or Leave Them Cold?
How many e-book readers do you think are out there right now for you to choose from? If you did a little digging, I bet you’d find 50 or so. Maybe 10 really worth checking out. But right now is a bit of a weird period in e-reader history. The Kindle cemented e-readers in the consumer headspace, catapulting them from weirdo alternative technology to mainstream gadget. That’s what the iPad threatens to do with tablets — we’ll see about that. But the Kindle and the iPad are two important data points in the current e-reader wars; the question, upon the answer of which depends the success of many a device, is whether “bonus” features like second screens and weird form factors in e-readers will be enough to differentiate them from the high-profile devices pressing them on both flanks?
See, the vast majority of e-readers were designed as a response to the Kindle, not to tablet computers, which may or may not obsolete e-readers altogether. It’s a bad situation: the whole time you’re improving your competitor’s product, someone else is skipping your entire device class on the grounds that it will be made ridiculous by their awesome gadget. Some of the special features developed to combat the Kindle will stay, and some won’t live to see their own first birthday.
It’s Time For Microsoft To Turn Itself Upside-Down
There was recently a little skirmish on the web regarding the question of whether or not Microsoft has stopped innovating — whether the internal corporate culture there has thwarted new ideas, and so on. Well, I think we can all agree that Microsoft hasn’t exactly been an innovation machine in recent years; although, with as little currency as the word “innovation” has these days, that’s not saying much — but the fact is that its products haven’t shown as much ingenuity as its competitors in nearly every arena. And like a dragon guarding its hoard, it has striven primarily to maintain its stranglehold on enterprise, which makes up the vast majority of Microsoft’s treasure intake. Who can blame them? You wouldn’t give up a goose that laid golden eggs either. But the the goose is getting old, and people are getting tired of eggs. What’s the next step?
Gates once famously said his greatest fear was “someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” So the solution is simple: start building garages.
Read the rest of this story at CrunchGear…
The iPad Vs. The Kindle: How Should Amazon Respond?
Editor’s note: This a guest post written by Joff Redfern. Redfern is the co-founder of FlattenMe.com, a site for creating personalized storybooks. He was formerly a vice president of product at Yahoo, where he managed Yahoo Buzz and Toolbar.
Amazon Kindle: The Road Ahead
I’m a recent Kindle fan boy. I like the instant access to earth-friendly books, the paper-like display and the way it fits in my hand like a paperback. I’ve also deeply admired the crispness of the Kindle vision—“any book, any language, in minutes”. But with Apple’s iPad announcement the playing field on which the Kindle competes shifts and the disruptive technology itself gets disrupted.
If I were running the Kindle I would answer this question today: “Are we innovating the publishing or the entertainment industry?” Is the Kindle just for my reading entertainment or is it for watching, listening, gaming, browsing, sharing photos, and communicating with friends & family too? Ultimately the answer is shaped by consumer preference, competitors and time measured in years.
As a product guy this is a really intriguing question to try to unravel—which path should Amazon choose? Over time this is what may push the Kindle into being more than just a reader . . .
For the same price, more is better
Will consumers prefer a multi-purpose entertainment tablet over a single-purpose reading device as their prices converge? This is a religious question; sides will be drawn. I look to the evolution of my own personal technology habits for the answer.
When I wanted to manage my contacts I started with a paper-based Address Book, upgraded to a Digital Rolodex, upgraded to a Palm V, upgraded to a Blackberry, then upgraded to an iPhone. Fundamentally I was trying to solve how I manage and communicate with my contacts. With each upgrade I got more functionality yet the price point for each device was not radically different.
If consumers can eventually get an entertainment tablet that also has the core features of a great reader (screen, content catalog, ease of purchasing) at under $200 they’ll want more.
Prices drop. Over time, price won’t be a factor in the purchase decision.
Today, Kindle enjoys a price advantage over the iPad. It is nearly half the price, starting at $260 versus $500 for the iPad, although the cheapest Kindle DX with an equivalent 9.7 inch screen is $489. That is pretty close already. What happens when the price of iPad-like devices trend down to a point of consumer indifference?
Moore’s Law and business model innovation will drive the iPad-like devices to sub-$200 pricing. Unrealistic? The retail price of the iPhone 8GB dropped ~83% in 3 years from $599 to $99.
Also keep in mind that entertainment tablets are using different math from the Kindle. The device pricing will be “subsidized” by multiple revenue streams—downloads of books, music, movies, games, apps, advertising, and more. Today I can get a cell phone device for “free”, will my iPad be “free” some day?
Competitors are playing a platform war. Is Kindle?
Apple, Google and Microsoft have massive investments in their respective mobile platforms. In particular, Apple is king of the mobile mountain. As Jobs declared today, “Apple is now the largest mobile device company in the world”.
This Apple sizzle has drawn 100,000+ developers and publishers to its iPhone (and now iPad) ecosystem. These apps are already available to entertain us in all sorts of ways on the iPad beyond what Apple exec Scott Forstall showed today.
Amazon knows this. Last week they announced a developer API is coming. So the question remains how robust is the API and will the developer community bite, or is it game over?
What would you do if you ran the Kindle?
GM keeping it all in the country with electric engine manufacturing
Good for GM.
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GM keeping it all in the country with electric engine manufacturing
On Formspring.me, Anyone Can Ask You Anything. And You’ll Love It.
No matter what anyone says, one of the most fundamentally appealing qualities of social sites like Twitter and Facebook is the notion that people actually care what you’re doing or sharing. When someone ‘Likes’ your photo album on Facebook, it makes you feel good. Formspring.me is a new service that takes this feeling to a new level. It lets you invite anyone on the web to ask you questions, and gives you a platform to answer them. It’s your own personal interview. And it looks like the site is quickly taking off: a quick search on Twitter for ‘formspring.me’ yields dozens of results in the last minute alone.
The site’s core functionality is incredibly simple. You invite people to ask you any question they want (they can opt either to leave the question anonymously or leave their user info). Then, the next time you log into the site, you’re shown a list of pending questions in your inbox. You select which questions you want to answer and delete the ones you don’t. Your answers can be a word long, or you can write a few paragraphs if you want to.
The result is a stream of questions and answers that let your friends and fans learn about you — think of it as an ongoing interview, where you get to act as both the interview’s subject and moderator. The site makes it easy to connect your Formspring.me account to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Blogger, allowing you to immediately publish your answers as you write them.
The site offers a handful of widgets that you can use to easily embed a question submission form in your blog or website (you can ask me a question using the widget below). You can also use Twitter and Facebook to invite your friends to ask you more questions. And if you don’t have a particularly strong social media following, the site can serve up some random questions for you to answer.
http://www.formspring.me/jasonkincaid
Of course, given the fact that you get to choose exactly which questions you want to answer, you can tailor this ongoing interview to be totally self-serving. Given that many of the questions are likely to be submitted anonymously, you could even ask yourself questions that you really want to answer (”Why yes, I do regularly contribute to charity and promote world peace”). That said, it will be pretty easy to spot people who do this, and the most interesting (and popular) users will likely be the ones who are most willing to leave their comfort zone.
Popular users are likely to draw a lot of spam and negative questions. You’ll have some control over this — you can require people to log in before they submit a question (though their question will still be anonymous if they wish). But most people with a significant following can probably expect some hateful or meaningless questions. Of course, people can @reply you on Twitter with whatever they want, so this isn’t a new problem, and you’re not obligated to answer any of these questions.
There have been similar applications available for both blogs and Facebook before, but what Formspring.me lacks in originality it makes up for in execution. The site is clean and easy to navigate, and makes it easy to connect with multiple social networks and blogs. It’s currently throwing some DB Errors, but I suspect that might be because the site is quickly gaining steam. And it’s not hard to see why people are calling the site extremely addictive.
Formspring.me was created by Formspring, a company that provides tools for building web forms.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Canon Rebel XT survives 3000-foot drop
It wasn’t long ago I posted about the weather-resistant qualities of the 7D . I wonder, though, if you drop an entry-level DSLR and a pro one from half a mile in the air, do they stand an equal chance of surviving
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Canon Rebel XT survives 3000-foot drop
DECAF, the anti-Microsoft COFEE, now available
You sorta knew this was going to happen.
Continued here:
DECAF, the anti-Microsoft COFEE, now available
Apple Reportedly In Talks To Acquire Lala
Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is “in talks to acquire online music service Lala, according to two people familiar with the matter.”
The shoe fits. Back when Lala launched I described it as an iTunes in the cloud — something that we believe Apple will inevitably launch. Apple is certainly building a lot of data center capacity for something. Lala is already one of two companies powering full-song streaming for Google’s new music search (the other one is MySpace Music via its iLike acquisition), and it is a part of the Facebook gift shop. Lala already has all the streaming licenses in place with the major music companies and a team which can help Apple create a killer streaming version of iTunes.
We’ve been huge fans of Lala since its launch in October (you can see our extensive coverage here. The site uses an innovative ‘web song’ model that lets you buy albums for very cheap (10 cents per song) that you can then stream as many times as you’d like. That pay-to-stream model would certainly be more attractive to Apple than just an advertising-supported one. Lala’s streaming licenses might also allow iTunes to deliver a full-song sample instead of the 30-second previews currently available.
Update: I walked over to the Lala office, which is only a few blocks from us, to see if I could gather any more details. They didn’t seem particularly happy to see me. I knocked on the door and a Lala employee answered, keeping the door half shut so that I couldn’t see in. I asked if any of the company’s executives were around. He looked over his shoulder, asked if they were, and a second later said they weren’t (it was not a particularly convincing effort). He promptly shut the door, and I’m pretty sure I heard someone inside say something to the effect of “Are you serious, don’t answer it!”.
Obviously this isn’t confirmation of anything, but they’re clearly on high alert.
One other point to note: back in October we did an extensive sneak preview of the long-awaited Lala iPhone app. The Lala team had previously been concerned about having their app rejected because of the way it competed with the native iTunes app, but in light of the recent acceptance of apps like Spotify they were optimistic.
It’s now been more than a month since we gave that preview. Six days ago I reached out to Lala to find out what the situation was, and, as a secondary question, to see if they had an extra spot in their iPhone beta program. CEO Geoff Ralston replied to my question about the beta, but he totally ignored my question about the iPhone app. Most CEOs in that position would have at least acknowledged that they had fallen prey to the Apple approval process.
We’re still digging for more.
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Twitter Now Asks “What’s Happening”
Twitter has implemented a small change today, which by comparison to Retweets and UI redesigns isn’t such a huge deal but it’s definitely worth mention. Twitter’s prompting question above the box from which you Tweet from has been “What are you doing” since the microblogging platform launched. Today, it’s been changed to “What’s Happening.”
It’s a wise move because “What are you doing” seemed too narrow for the platform. Broadening the question to match all the things people use twitter for was necessary. Considering that Twitter is now used for breaking news, that term doesn’t really cover it. Here’s the full text of co-founder Biz Stone’s blog post:
People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, “What’s happening?” A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.
Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.
The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”
We don’t expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter, but maybe it’ll make it easier to explain to your dad.
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$6500 “Labyrinth Aquarium”: awesome, difficult to clean
I’ve always felt bad for fish. Not just in that they’re fish, but that all those in captivity (and many in the wild) just spend all day swimming in circles
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$6500 “Labyrinth Aquarium”: awesome, difficult to clean