Categories
Design Education Innovation Reading Tablet

Amazon’s Kindle capitulation ?

Want to confuse customers?  How about taking the “if ya can’t beat`em, join`em” approach….
kindle-ipad-email-banner-600K-590x._V191415697_

I wonder what Bezos thinks about when you pull this type of capitulation.  I cannot help but wonder about Amazon’s own statement: NO KINDLE REQUIRED.  If anyone sees this add and is deciding which to choose, this move by Amazon cements the iPad as the choice.

BTW: Did you catch the color image in the book?

Tags: iPad, Kindle, ebook, price war, ebook sales, reading, trends

Categories
Education Globalization Google Innovation Milwaukee Network OpenSource Technology

Google offer ending soon for K12

Last year Google announced it would provide industrial strength email anti-spam & anti virus (Postini) to K12 schools for FREE.  Act Now – Deploy later. Google’s offer ends July 2010

Google Apps for EducationAs budgets have been cut across the country for education, this is a smart move for many financially strapped school districts.  Does it pay for a District to force taxpayers to pay for expensive, legacy email programs like FirstClass and Novell when cloud based solutions with robust feature sets are being embraced by K12 and Colleges around the country.

Source article

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends

Categories
Design Education Globalization Innovation Network Reading Rich media Tablet

Sports Illustrated on the iPad ?

ipadIn January Time Inc., the publisher of Sports Illustrated showed off their own tablet highlighting a future issue of SI for tablet users.  I immediately questioned their “announcement” to produce their own tablet.

Clearly the business model for ANY publisher to develop a tablet is a mistake with the marketplace is its infancy.  The internet forced computer companies to move faster in transforming their business.  Its simply smarter to drop SI into the iPad Store inside iTunes.  The RIO is much better.

And just six months later….SI has announced its coming to the iPad for the same price as the print version.  So much for their own hardware eh?

Time Inc, holds major content providers in business/finance, international, luxury/portfolio, lifestyle and style/entertainment media categories and with the initial wave of eBook publishing just beginning to hit a business sweet spot it should not be long before popular titles begin to appear alongside SI.

Tags: Sports Illustrated, Time, Inc., iPad, Tablet, design, wireless, magazine, trends

Categories
Design Globalization Network Reading Rich media Tablet Technology

New eReader price wars

So what happens when Apple’s $500 iPad sells like mad?  Well a price war of course between the Nook and Amazon’s Kindle.

nookkindleIt appears that Apple has produced a product that consumers have been wanting and are willing to pay quite a premium.  But at the same time Apple has cut into Amazon’s ownership of eBook sales.  The problem with both of the above devices – they are not color.  Think about purchasing a dedicated eReader that cannot produce color, and is only available for, well….reading….despite Amazon’s attempts to open the Kindle platform with an API and goals of an iTunes-like store.

Amazon left their newer Kindle DX at $500.00

Tags: iPad, Kindle, Nook, price war, ebook sales, reading, trends

Categories
Education Globalization Reading

Latest read: Too BIG to FAIL

I humbly believe Andrew Ross Sorkin‘s Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System–and Themselves is not only a great read and one of the best books written about the Wall Street catastrophe — it is a rather unique history book for this crisis.
BTW:  This is the best book I have read this year.

too big to failSadly this book reads like an intense thriller. Yet the truth reveals how Wall Street’s greed and “good ol-boy network” was too dumb to act in time to save the country from falling into a recession.

Sorkin’s revelations about those so called “financial titans” were more accurately described as totally clueless to the catastrophe surrounding them.  Ego — really was the chief reason for making so many horrible financial decisions. Its rather shocking especially as the impact of the crisis rippled further away from Wall Street and into the homes and businesses of everyday Americans.

I cannot think of a more striking example Sorkin described as the Board members of Bear Stearns. They voted to send the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy — with one board member “choosing” not to participate in the vote because he was playing in a professional card tournament in Detroit and instructed his secretary not to be interrupted.

Titans….ha! Sorkin paints a more accurate picture of these guys closer to the attitudes of the out-of-touch imperialist British monarchy.  Defined by The Dictionary of Human Geography, Imperialism is “the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination.”  Sorkin’s reinforces this definition about that failed Wall Street Empire.

I was amused to actually see a photograph of Mitsubishi’s $9 Billion check for Morgan Stanley….yep NINE zeros. Making it probably the biggest check ever written and the IQ of everyone who supported that decision.  Simply shocking.