Want to confuse customers? How about taking the “if ya can’t beat`em, join`em” approach….
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
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
As 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.
Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends
In 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
Wired Magazine has arrived for the iPad. Initial reports indicate each issue is ~500MB and will be $4.99/episode app via iTunes. Wired will be shipping additional tablet formats in the coming weeks.
As initial reports are indicate this is a new, in depth re-birth of magazines for the digital world. By exploiting the iPad’s technologies the premier issue is loaded with interactive multimedia extras simply not available in print.
So now comes the business end of the release: $5 an for each app issue while you can get a full year print subscription for just $10.
–Since I have a print subscription — can get all my back issues on the iPad? Doubt it. Lets not be foolish – publishers are setting elegant revenue models for their print to iPad app conversions…..
Reviews:
Wired’s internal review (duh) – Wall Street Journal review – Business Insider review – Gizmodo review
Tags: iPad, publishing, design, trends,
Google has released their internal learning platform, CloudCourse under an open source license. Built entirely on Google’s own App Engine, CloudCourse is a new entry into a crowded LMS arena. CloudCourse provides calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.
To no surprise CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar. Google has also made CloudCourse customizable for schools by supporting service provider interfaces:
Sync services – Sync CloudCourse data with school’s internal systems
Room services – Schedule classes in school locations
User info services – Support for school profiles (employee title, picture, etc)
CloudCourse was built in Python and uses Django (web application framework) and the Closure Javascript library.
CloudCourse code site and wiki link
Tags: CloudCourse, open source, Learning Management System, LMS, education, python, django, trends