"The runners-up — Amazon Clunk-o-matic, Amazon Yet Another Gadget to Carry, Amazon Your Laptop Can Already Display e-Books But, Hey, This Ugly-Ass Thing Has a State-of-the-Art-Circa-1993 Black-and-White Screen — were all deemed too cumbersome." — Simon Dumenco on alternate names for the Amazon Kindle. [AdAge]
Amazon.com will revise its 1-Click online-shopping patent and the New Zealander who forced the change is ready to celebrate. "This breaks the monopoly of shopping with one click," actor Peter Calveley told the Sydney Morning Herald. "It's exactly what I wanted. Victory, woo hoo!" Calveley, also known for making a fuss over his bit part in The Lord of the Rings, began his quest in 2004, after Amazon delivered his order late. (Photo by hyku)
Before Jonathan Ive, there was Robert Brunner, the designer behind Apple's original, iconic PowerBook. Brunner, who left design firm Pentagram this summer and now has a new product-design studio, Ammunition, worked with Amazon.com's Lab126 unit, also staffed with Apple veterans, to design the Kindle e-book reader, a source tells us.
Currently, the top three bestselling titles for Amazon.com's Kindle, Jeff Bezos's tree-killer killer, are newspapers and magazines: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Despite the fear that newspapers and magazines are dying, they are the most popular purchase on the future's book killer. These traditional publications are all available online, mostly for free. Kindle purchasers, in other words are spendthrift, hyperliterate gadget junkies who feel guilty about both the environment and the demise of old media. Who besides Craig Newmark is buying this thing? I can't wait to I buy a $20 Kindle on eBay — a past reminder of a failed future.
Somebody bleach Saul Hansell's hair and hand him some eyeliner. He wants you to LEAVE JEFF BEZOS ALONE! After Amazon.com shoppers and a few gadget reviewers slammed Bezos's latest pet project, the Kindle e-reader, the New York Times reporter has blogged "In Defense of Kindle." His main point is that the Kindle is a version 1.0 product which will improve over time. A touchscreen, for example, would improve the user interface. Hansell argues that some of Kindle's "missing" features — color, email, and ads — would make the device better, not worse. Yesterday, you saw our side-by-side comparison of the Kindle versus its nearest competitor, the book. Now it's time for you take sides in our latest Valleywag poll. Bonus points for anyone who composes a video response on YouTube in proper style.
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Egoblogger Robert Scoble takes the video show on the road again. Fortunately, he isn't risking other lives while driving. This time, he's merely walking around his neighborhood, showing off his new gadget — Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader — while he films and talks to himself. Why? I have no clue. Maybe Robert simply enjoys walking into things blindly. Maybe he knows his audience is most likely to view his videos if there is a chance he may walk into oncoming traffic.
Jeff Bezos, sitting in an office in Seattle, is basking in the credit for Amazon.com's new Kindle e-reader. But who really deserves credit for it? Lab126, an Amazon subsidiary in the heart of Silicon Valley — Cupertino, Calif., Apple's hometown. With former Apple and Palm employees running the quasi-startup, some have speculated that Lab126 might be coming up with an MP3 player or handheld computer. Instead? The Kindle, which many have dinged for a design that hardly matches the iPod or Treo. ("The Pontiac Aztek of e-readers," says a friend of blogger Jason Kottke.) The good news: Lab126, which now openly takes credit for the Kindle, is hiring two more designers. If you want to do something about the Kindle's design, now's your chance.
Amazon.com CEO and firestarter Jeff Bezos sat down to Charlie Rose's table last night. There, Bezos predicted Amazon's new e-reader Kindle will in the near future lead to new forms of art — like serial novels! — and render books made from "dead trees" as relics for "cabinets of curiosity." Bezos also gets in a characteristic maniacal laugh or two. Rose impersonates a tree.
U.K. album sales are down 11 percent for the year to date and it's been a slow holiday season so far. British music retailers blame record labels for worrying about digital piracy too much. Kim Bayley, director general of the Entertainment Retailers Association, told the Financial Times her members specifically want labels to quit insisting on using digital-rights management code that prevents customers from making copies and playing the music on multiple devices. Bayley said research indicates consumers are about four times more likely to buy DRM-free music than DRM-encoded music. Apple, Amazon.com, and others already sell DRM-free music online, but the selection is limited.
Rob Beschizza over at Gadget Lab made an important observation about Amazon's new electronic book reader: It's terrible. At least 38 percent of customer reviews on Amazon.com douse the Kindle with a 1-star rating. Perhaps Jeff Bezos should consider adopting Apple's old policy of automatically assigning top ratings to its own products.
Amazon's new e-book reader Kindle was released today to great fanfare — and a Newsweek planted story "exclusive." The Kindle — supposedly named after the "crackling ignition of knowledge" — holds 200 books, each downloadable for $10 over a works-anywhere-sort-of EVDO data connection, fetches the New York Times for $13 a month, and generously allows you to pay a subscription fee to have blogs like Huffington Post and TechCrunch pushed to your Kindle. That's all well and good, but how does it stack up to the book? You know, the thing that Amazon has made billions of dollars shipping to you? Our easy-to-read chart is after the jump — and you don't have to pay $2 a month to read it.
Today, Amazon told the world about Kindle, a "wireless portable reading device with instant access to more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers." We're guessing it's called "Kindle" because soon all books will have to be burned, as we will no longer know how to interface with them without our wireless readers!
Read/WriteWeb last night reported that Amazon.com will announce today, among other things, support of Google's OpenSocial Web widget platform in all of its applications going forward. Now Google can tout Amazon's support for its rival platform to extend social networks. Or can it? Amazon flacks, after sending Read/WriteWeb a press release about the move, are now retracting it and claiming the company is not adopting OpenSocial. Or if it is, they're pretending they don't know about it.
Amazon.com topper Jeff Bezos possesses an estimated personal wealth of $9 billion. He's come a long way, too. Born to a teenage mother and a disappearing dad, Bezos also survived the dotcom bust. But according to a weekend profile in the Times, all the success has gone straight to Bezos's head and exploded it. The man is nuts. As in, he's trying to monetize space travel.
After adventurer Steve Fossett disappeared flying over the Nevada desert two months ago, Amazon.com joined the search party for his crash site by uploading satellite photographs covering 17,000 square miles. The idea was that volunteers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service could pore over the photos and find Fossett's remains. But after 50,000 volunteers spent two months on the the effort to no avail, Amazon pulled the plug. Why?
Stuart Scott, Microsoft's former CIO, is not the only Microsoft employee unceremoniously being shown the door. Some staffers who are putting in their notice are being escorted off campus immediately. Why? Because they've put in their notice to join Google. In Microsoft's eyes, Google is Enemy No. 1. Anyone leaving Redmond for the search leader is a threat. Not because they'll scurry around collecting company secrets — as if Google's interested in Microsoft's '90s-era technologies. Departing employees, however, might tell other 'Softies how much better Google is. If an employee is leaving for Amazon.com or another second-tier employer whichdoesn't make Microsoft so paranoid, they'll probably serve out the traditional two weeks of unproductive wrapping up. So if you're planning on leaving Microsoft for Google, pack up your belongings and say goodbye to friends ahead of time. There'll be no cake and two weeks of paid slacking for you. And, Microsoft, don't expect former employees who are treated like security threats to ever want to come back, even after their Google stock options have vested.
In September, we idly speculated on what would happen if Facebook merged with Amazon.com. Now, in an extension to its new ad-targeting system, Facebook may well get all the benefits of such a partnership, without having to give up any control. AdAge reports that part of its new SocialAds will track buying activity on websites, and report to Facebook users' friends what they're buying. Creepy — but lucrative, since Amazon.com shares a cut of purchases with sites that refer buyers. And Amazon.com and Facebook have already teamed up to let users share book reviews.
Last week I bitched wrote about a delayed order for the new Fake Steve Jobs book, Options, from Amazon.com. An email from the online store told me that the book, out today at a Borders near you, had been rescheduled for a December shipment. I emailed CEO Jeff Bezos with my sob story and got a very apologetic email from Executive Customer Relations. I now know that my "experience with this order has been unordinary and not truly representative of the quality of service we offer." Well, that's a relief. Maybe I'll get free overnight shipping. Until then, I'll have to be happy with excerpts. The full email after the jump.
