E-Books From Your Local Library

Libraries are trying their best to make borrowing e-books convenient, but publishers are not making it easy. See E-Books Are Easier to Borrow, Just Be Prepared to Wait. The New York Times story said that e-book borrowing is preceded by e-book waiting. I decided to take a look a virtual visit to the library in Ridgefield, CT and see for myself. I logged on to the library site and clicked on the button for downloading eMedia. The library has 1,730 e-books, but only 347 of them are available. This is what the New York Times writer meant by borrowing being preceeded by waiting. The library had just one copy of most of the e-books I looked at, and since that copy was presently loaned out, I would have to click the waiting list button and get in line to borrow the book when it is returned. The library has one copy of The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, and there are eight patrons on the waiting list to borrow it (there are dozens of patrons waiting for some books). I selected an available book and clicked to add it to my list. I proceeded to checkout, logged in with my library card number, selected a seven-day lending period (you can choose up to 14 days), and then clicked “Get for Kindle”. I was then redirected to the Amazon site where I clicked “Get Library Book” and the book downloaded to my Kindle just as if I had purchased it from Amazon. The whole process is pretty slick, easy to follow, and efficient. So what is the problem? There are several.

Why isn’t the digital inventory infinite? The library knows how many patrons it has and how many books they read per year. They could estimate how many will be e-books and establish a budget to cover the purchase of X copies for lending. I suspect the answer is that publishers don’t want to do it that way. They want to sell books the same way they have always sold books. One book at a time at a retail price. They are not about to have the book business be like the music business. Or, so they think. The other problem is the mechanics of borrowing the e-book. The process is easy for a Kindle with some publishers following the process I described. With Ken Follett’s books, however, his publisher requires that you connect your Kindle to your PC with a USB cable and then download the book. “Due to publisher restrictions, this book in the Kindle format cannot be delivered wirelessly and must be downloaded and transferred via USB.” Note that it is a publisher restriction, not a hardware or software restriction. You can click another link for instructions on How to transfer Kindle books to Kindle devices via USB.

Kindle is not the only kind of e-book, of course. Some books are in the Adobe ePub format and others are in Adobe PDF format. Each requires a different download and installation of software. The convenience of borrowing an e-book ranges from a few clicks and wireless transfer to your Kindle to a hassle of plugging your Kindle into a PC with a cable to several variations in between. Everywhere you turn, you can see content publishers clinging to the past. In my doctoral courses, the e-book textbooks we use can only be opened with Adobe Acrobat (not Preview on the Mac) and they can not be saved or transferred to an iPad, in other words e-books that can not be read on an e-reader.

Publiishers are clearly struggling to find the right model. They had made progress with the Apple deal, but then the governmnet said it was an illegal approach. Three of the five publsihers involved have agreed to revert to the model Amazon has been advocating — letting the retailer set whatever price they want. We are a long way from getting to a free market where consumers can get what they are willing to pay for. A new book arrives on the scene but you can’t get it on your Kindle until you get in line and wait. A new movie is available, but only if you go to the theatre. You spend $125 for a textbook fee, but you can’t read the book on your iPad. The good news is that there are many entrepreneurs circling the wagons, creating innovative new devices and services. The publishers can slow down progress, but they can’t stop it.

Tags: books, e-book, ebook, ipad, Kindle, publishers

Back from Florida

The weather was so nice, it was difficult to leave and come home. I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend a bit more time in Florida this winter. Thanks to FaceTime, Skype, Polycom, iMessage, email, and the web, it was easy to participate in board meetings remotely. I was even able to chair a hospital quality committee meeting remotely, thanks to the high quality PolyCom video-conferencing system they have. My current doctoral course is in health care economics. One of the team assignments required a teleconference. There were four of us in diverse locations; Ottawa, Baltimore, Florida, and Jordan. If two of the students were in Canada and the Middle East, it didn’t matter that I was in Florida instead of home in Connecticut. We were all just a few hundred milliseconds apart.

Before leaving Florida, I decided to try out the new iPhoto app on the iPad3. It goes beyond the photos app that comes with the iPad. In addition to taking advantage of the greatly enhanced retina screen, the iPhoto app has a new feature called Journals. In addition to viewing your albums, events, faces, and places, you can create journals. A journal is a web page that can include pictures from your albums plus special add-ins from the app including a calendar icon representing the date you took the pictures, a map showing where you took them, and a weather icon showing what the weather was like when you took the picture or alternatively what the weather there is now. You can also add quotations and text boxes. See March in Florida for a page I created as a first try. The pictures can be edited, touched up, brightened, manipulated with effects, air-brushed, and arranged in a collage — all with your fingers. You then save the journal to a glass shelf and it is uploaded to iCloud where you can share it with friends, family, or the public. A home page shows all your shelves with the journals lined up on them in date sequence. In effect, journals gives you the ability to create a web site at iCloud with no traditional design tools. Just your iPad and your fingers.  This is classic Apple making things easy — it just works. But, it is not perfect.

iCloud can be slow in accepting your upload. The shelves on the iPad include a favorites shelf but that shelf does not appear on the homepage at iCloud. The six journals I created are not in date sequence as they are supposed to be. The iPhoto app does not sync with your iPhoto app on the Mac or your photos on a PC. The iPhoto pictures sync to the photos app on the iPad, not the new iPhoto app on the iPad. Syncing is one-way. If you delete or edit a picture or add a new one in one of your iPhoto albums on the iPad, it does not sync to iPhoto on the Mac or on your PC. There are a few things that need polish but you can see the vision coming through. Take a picture with your iPhone or iPad and the picture automatically goes to your photostream at iCloud. iCloud then pushes the picture down to all your other devices. You can then create journals and share them via iCloud. Facebook, Google, flickr, and others have nice ways to store and share photos, but journals are now offering an alternative that includes content creation for anyone with some imagination and an iPad. Take a look at patrickweb.com/iphotojournals and let me know what you think. As usual, I confess to not being a good photographer nor artistically creative.

Tags: albums, apple, events, ipad, iphotos, journals, mac, photos, pictures

The Future of the Internet

The following story was published in the April 2012 issue of  Sun and Surf Magazine

The Future of the Internet
By John R. Patrick

The future of the Internet in our lives is very positive but we are only about 10% of the way there. Of all the things that could be done online that would save us time and simplify our lives, only 10% of them are there. Travel and banking web sites are getting better, but we are still at the early stages of what is possible. Consider retail e-commerce. Although there has been continuous and steady growth of retail e-commerce, it still represents just 5% of total retail sales. Why isn’t it 25% or more? Much is written about that here at patrickWeb but the short version is that there are still a lot of lame web sites. “Click here for the location of our nearest dealer where you can visit” or “call to get a price on the product you just found” or “Click here to download this form, fill it out, and fax it to us”. It is no wonder that Amazon captured 28% of all online sales in the fourth quarter of 2011. One company out of 4 million retailers got more than a quarter of all the sales. Have you ever heard a friend complain about poor customer service at Amazon? They walk in the customer’s shoes and deliver a terrific experience. Most of the rest of the e-businesses in the world have a long way to go. And in the physical world, there are the ubiquitous clipboards at doctor offices where we take a pen and provide a lot of information that they already have.

The changes in Internet technology have been continuous for decades and there is no end in sight. For the past fifteen years, I have been writing about the evolution of the Internet by describing developments in seven key areas: Fast, Always On, Everywhere, Natural, Intelligent, Easy, and Trusted. In the following paragraphs, I will hit the highlights of some of the more important trends and developments.

Fast
Broadband in the U.S. is not a pretty story compared to other parts of the world. We are second after China in the number of broadband users, but 28th in the world in the number of broadband users as a percentage of our population. The problem is that there are too many lobbyists, and the FCC is a political organization. The new FCC head is a very smart guy with technology and business experience. He totally gets it. The only problem is that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have more lawyers than the FCC does. Meanwhile France is offering 100 megabit access for $90 per month and rolling out WiFi throughout the country. Thanks to the telco lobby, many states have banned the offering of WiFi by municipal entities. Every citizen in Greenland has Internet access. We have 31,000 post offices.

Always On
WiFi is part of the fabric of the world. The big shift is the streaming of data — not just tweets, but data from *things* — bridges, toll booths, traffic lights, buildings, cars, iPhones, Androids, handheld GPS devices, weather instruments, and health monitoring devices attached to people. The growth in creation of data is staggering. Of all the data in the world, 90% of it was created in the last two years. YouTube receives 60 hours of new video every hour – an hour every minute. Wikipedia has 4 million articles and 8,000 editors. Hospital physicians will soon be adjusting the drip rate on infusion pumps in the hospital from their office based on real-time data from the patient. WiFi-enabled infusion pumps will enable hospital administrators to know where the pumps are (they never have enough of them) and which ones need maintenance.

Everywhere
There are one billion computers (including tablets), one billion cars, 1.5 billion televisions, and 2 billion Internet users. Small numbers compared to cell phones — 5.2 billion paid subscribers. The Internet used to be where your PC is, but now the Internet is where you are.  Most of the cell phones are dumb but soon most of them will be smart and they will all have Internet access. The mobile web is unfolding and is taking part in creating data by streaming data to the Cloud and then consuming data by streaming it from the Cloud. When you take a picture on your iPhone, it goes into the photostream and from there to iCloud and from there to all of your other devices and, if you choose, to the devices of your friends and family.

Natural
Social networking has become fundamental to all aspects of our economy and society. Integration of social networking with a full range of web applications will evolve to become the primary means of finding jobs, finding employees, finding business partners, and collaborating on projects. The emerging issue is that many people, especially young ones, are a bit liberal with sharing their every movement — what they are eating, listening to, where they are headed, their current latitude and longitude, and where they slept last night. They are not thinking that some day they may run for office or interview for a job. A new protocol will emerge to enable people to “erase” things they placed on the Internet. The Europeans may legislate it. OpenSocial is an important new standard that will enable social media apps that work across all of the social media sites.

Intelligent
The Semantic Web is the next big turn of the crank for the evolution of the World Wide Web. Most web pages have links but do not have context. The words on the web page do not necessarily mean anything — but they could. For example, if a web page said “Join us for a concert by The Eagles at Kimmel Center in Philadelphia next Tuesday” that set of words could have a lot of context. Clicking on it could add the concert to your calendar, knowing what “next Tuesday” means. It would also know exactly where the Kimmel Center is and provide a map. The Eagles is a performing group that performs a particular genre and your music player would receive a list of suggestions of music they have recorded or links to live concerts under way at the moment and make recommendations about their music to your friends. This is the tip of the iceberg. The semantic web will lead us to a point where most of the interactions of web pages will be between computers, not between computers and people. The biggest growth of intelligence is occurring in the field of analytics. Exabytes of data are being stored. A byte is 8 bits (a bit is a zero or a 1) and represents one character. An exabyte is a 1 followed by 18 zeroes! Business Intelligence and analytics are poised to enable new insight into the mounds of data – “Big Data” — that are being accumulated. Analytics will enable businesses to make sense of the explosion of data, develop digital models of their business, and continuously adapt it to what is going on. IBM’s Watson successfully challenged humans on the Jeopardy Show, but what is more interesting is the ability for a primary care physician to call and get a recommendation based on patient symptoms and measurements they describe to Watson. Within a couple of seconds Watson technology will be able to review all available medical information in the world and make a useful suggestion.

Easy
Technology is not the easiest thing at times. There are many dimensions to “easy” but one good example is the Nintendo Wii. At a local senior center, members find the Wii to be their exercise coach. It is not just for kids! The iPhone and iPad have shown how easy it can be to get applications on a handheld computer. Amazon has done the same with the Kindle. Most companies still don’t get the idea that the Internet is about power to the people. If you can’t make it simple, people won’t buy it. Cloud computing has become the mainstay for me and for millions. The ease, convenience, and reliability of the Cloud is compelling. Add Dropbox to your laptop and your iPad and your iPhone and you have a completely replicated set of data – all of your data at your disposal wherever you are and with whatever device you may be using. How about the future of TV? Three of the most common remotes — BlueRay, Cable box, and TV — include 151 buttons. Even a savvy child could not possibly master this impossible user interface. Boxee TV has produced a good model of the future of TV – think of it like TV Guide on the web — but I suspect that an upcoming Apple TV will be what finally provides the needed regime change.

Trusted
This is the big one. Can we trust the Internet? Security technology is available to achieve much higher levels of security than is presently deployed both at enterprise and consumer levels. It is a constant battle and requires significant budgets and a lot of talented people to maintain the needed security. The equally important issue is privacy. The good news is that there are some good technology solutions available to help us control access to our Internet habits. The bad news is that politicians have gotten interested in the subject. Banks have our personal information and they are using it. Healthcare insurers have more information about our health than our doctors do. Nevertheless, there is much to be optimistic about when it comes to electronic medical records. Perhaps 25% of doctors and hospitals use them but they are not easily interchangeable and accessible. This will change over the next few years as the government adds dollar incentives to make it happen. The result will be better quality of care, better outcomes, and fewer errors. And, fewer clipboards.

In January, I gave a talk about the Future of the Internet and Healthcare at the SIIA Conference in New York. The slides and a video of the presentation can be found here.

About the author

John R. Patrick (john@patrickweb.com) is president of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM. Mr. Patrick was a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in 1994 and of the Global Internet Project. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a member of the American College of Healthcare Executives.  He is a director of Knovel Corporation, WebMediaBrands, Inc., and Western Connecticut Health Network. He is the author of Net Attitude: What It Is, How to Get It, and Why Your Company Can’t Survive Without It (Perseus, 2001).

About SUN and SURF

SUN and SURF Magazine is published quarterly and mailed to all property owners in Hammock Dunes in Palm Coast, Florida. The magazine currently has a circulation of approximately 1,000.

Tags: analytics, big data, cardionet, corventis, IBM, internet, Internet Technology, ipad, patientslikeme, social media, telemonitoring

iPad Evolution of Resolution

Today was the day so many of us knew would bring forth the next iPad from Apple. In some respects, it is just another iPad, but I am quite impressed with the technical specifications that have been announced. I can’t wait to get my hands on it! This may be the turning point for many new users of the iPad who previously were content with their desktop or laptop computer. I am a firm believer in the “post PC” era as described by Tim Cook in today’s brilliant keynote (watch the video here).

What to do with my current iPad? That answer is the same as what I had done with the iPad 1, iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 4. Gazelle.com has a very nice model for how to manage the transition of technology. They provide a guaranteed price and offer a very simple process to ship a product to them and receive a market-based payment for it. I especially like the feature that gives you get an extra 5% if you accept the payment in the form of a credit at Amazon.com. I will be receiving $304.50 for the iPad. It may be possible to do better on eBay but the convenience of Gazelle wins the day.

The price of the current iPad may drop fairly quickly as people get attracted to purchasing the newer technology. When will the rapid introduction of new products obsoleting predecessor products that still seem like new? The answer is not any time soon. The pace of technology is rapid and increasing. Consumers are the beneficiary and of course, it has made Apple the most valued company in the world.

The big picture is the transition to tablets. Today I read that a hospital in Canada has purchased 4,000 iPads for their physicians. There are so many applications where you have to “go to” your PC or laptop. With a mobile device such as the iPad or iPhone or any other of the rash of wannabes in the market, the Internet and the applications are where you are, not where your PC is. The updating of records of a patient in a hospital used to be by a chart on a clipboard filled out by the nurse. Much of that has moved to the PC or the laptop on a cart in the hall, or in some cases down the hall, not very close to the patient. The iPad can be with the nurse or physician and not only provide a way to enter the data, but also a way to show an x-ray with amazing clarity to the patient or a 3D model of their muscle and bone system enabling the physician to explain exactly what may be wrong and what will be done to correct it. The resolution of the new iPad is quite amazing and exceeds the ability of the human eye to discern pixels. The iPad displays 3.1 million of them — more than your HD TV. I can not imagine being a physician and not having one of the new iPads.

The laptop and desktop will not disappear because they are still quite useful for those who create information as opposed to those who consume information. Consuming information from a mobile device has changed the world and how we interact with information already — and we are still at the beginning. But someone has to create this content and most of that creation will be done on laptops and desktops as long as typing is involved. How long will that be the case? Talking to Siri on your iPhone is the beginning. Typing may become a thing of the past, but of course art work still requires paint and brushes — or does it? The WSJ reviewed a wide range of new styluses available for use with the iPad (Sketching Out a Future for the Stylus). The world is becoming digital at an increasing pace.

Tags: art, digital, Healthcare, ipad, iPhone, media, nurse, paint, paint brush, physician, radiology, siri, stylus

Genesys XVIII

The 18th Annual Genesys Partners Venture Dinner — Gen XVIII– Monday night at the Union League Club in New York attracted more than 100 venture capitalists, investors, journalists, entrepreneurs, and industry executives. As always, Jim Kollegger — CEO of Genesys Partners and one of the pioneers of the information industry — was an elegant master of ceremonies. He introduced the various sponsors, next day panelists for the SIIA Conference, several startup CEO’s, and a few of us who have been around the block a few times, each to make some comments.

Like a broken record, I offered the normal upbeat view of the future of the Internet but prefaced my remarks by asserting that we are only 10% of the way there. In other words, of all the things that could be done on the Internet that would save us time and make our lives better, only 10% of them are there. It may sound low but consider retail e-commerce. Although there has been continuous and steady growth of retail e-commerce it still represents just 4% of total retail (as of the end of October). Why isn’t it 25% or more? Much is written about that here at patrickWeb but the short version is that there are still a lot of lame web sites. “Click here for the location of our nearest dealer where you can visit” or “call to buy the product you just found” or “Click here to download this form and fax it to us”. And of course there are the ubiquitous clipboards at doctor offices where we take a pen and provide a lot of information information that they already have.

I described one man’s view of the evolution of the Internet including the seven characteristics below. This parsed way of looking at the Internet has served me well for quite a few years. The things going on under each area continuously change and Jim asks me once a year to do a thumbnail sketch of my latest thinking.

Fast
Broadband in the U.S. is not a pretty story compared to other parts of the world. We are second after China in number of broadband users, but 28th in the world in number of broadband users as a percentage of our population. The problem is that there are too many lobbyists and the FCC is a political organization. The new FCC head is a very smart guy with venture and business experience. He totally gets it. The only problem is that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have more lawyers than he does. Meanwhile France is offering 100 megabit access for $90 per month and WiFi throughout the country. Thanks to the telco lobby, many states have banned the offering of WiFi by municipal entities. Every citizen in Greenland has Internet access. We have 31,000 post offices.

Always On

WiFi is part of the fabric of the world. The big shift is streaming of data — not just tweets, but data from *things*. Bridges, toll booths, traffic lights, buildings, cars, and health monitoring devices attached to people. Hospital physicians will soon be adjusting the drip rate on infusion pumps in the hospital from their office based on real-time data from the patient. The WiFi infusion pumps enable hospital administrators to know where the pumps are (they never have enough of them) and which ones need maintenance. The creation of data is staggering. Of all the data in the world, 90% of it was created in the last two years. YouTube receives 60 hours of new video every hour. Wikipedia has 4 million articles and 8,000 editors.

Everywhere
There are one billion computers (including tablets), one billion cars, 1.5 billion televisions, and 2 billion Internet users. Small numbers compared to cell phones — 5.2 billion paid subscribers. The Internet used to be where your PC is, now it is where you are.  Most of the cell phones are dumb but soon most of them will be smart and they will all have Internet access. The mobile web is unfolding and is taking part in creating data in addition to consuming it through streaming. When you take a picture on your iPhone, it goes into the photostream and from there to iCloud and from there to all of your other devices.  

Natural
Social networking has become fundamental to all aspects of our economy and society. Integration of social networking with a full range of web applications will evolve to become the primary means of collaboration. The emerging issue is that many people are a bit liberal with sharing their every movement — what they are eating, listening to, where they are headed, their current latitude and longitude, and where they slept last night. They are not thinking that some day they may run for office or interview for a job. OpenSocial is an important new standard that will enable social media apps that work across all of the social media sites. The Europeans may legislate it, but regardless, a capability is needed to be able to remove things from the social media.

Intelligent
The Semantic Web is the next big turn of the crank but the crank is moving slowly. Most web pages have links but do not have context. In other words the words on the page do not necessarily mean anything — but they could. If a web page said “Join us for a concert by The Eagles at Kimmel Center in Philadelphia next Tuesday” that set of words could have a lot of context. Clicking on it could add the concert to your calendar, knowing what “next Tuesday” means. It would also know exactly where the Kimmel Center is and that The Eagles is a performing group that performs a particular genre and your music player would receive a list of suggestions of music they have recorded or links to live concerts under way at the moment. This is the tip of the iceberg. The semantic web will lead us to a point where most of the interactions of web pages will be between computers not between computers and people. The biggest growth of intelligence is occurring in the field of analytics. Exabytes of data are being stored. Analytics will enable businesses to make sense of it, model their business and continuously adapt to what is going on. IBM’s Watson took on humans on the Jeopardy Show, but what is more interesting is the ability for a primary care physician to call and get a recomendation based on patient data they describe to Watson. Within a couple of seconds Watson will be able to review all medical information in the world and make a useful suggestion. Business Intelligence and analytics are poised to enable new insight into the mounds of data that are being accumulated.

Easy
Technology isn’t the easiest thing at times. There are many dimensions to “easy” but one good example is the Nintendo Wii. At a local senior center, members find the Wii to be their exercise coach. It is not just for kids! The iPhone and iPad have shown how easy it can be to get applications on a handheld computer. Amazon has done the same with the Kindle. Most companies still don’t get the idea that the Internet is about power to the people. If you can’t make it simple, people won’t buy it. Cloud computing has become the mainstay for me and for millions. The convenience and reliability of the clouds is compelling. Add Dropbox and you have a completely replicated set of data, wherever you are and with whatever device you may be using. How about TV? Three remotes — BlueRay, Cable box, and TV — include 151 buttons. Even a savvy child could not possibly master this impossible user interface. Boxee TV has produced a good model of the future of TV, but I suspect that an upcoming Apple TV will be what finally provides the needed regime change.

Trusted
This is the big one. Will we trust the Internet? Security technology is available to achieve much higher levels of security than presently deployed both at enterprise and consumer levels. It is a constant battle and requires significant budgets and a lot of talented people to maintain the needed security. The bigger issue will be privacy. (Stay tuned for the Firefox “do not track” feature). Banks have our personal information and they are using it. Healthcare insurers have more information about our health than our doctors do. Nevertheless, there is much to be optimistic about when it comes to electronic medical records. Perhaps 25% of doctors and hospitals use them but they are not easily interchangeable and accessible. This will change over the next few years as the government adds dollar incentives to make it happen. The result will be better quality of care, better outcomes, and fewer errors. And, fewer clipboards.

On Wednesday I gave a talk about the Future of the Internet and Healthcare at the SIIA Conference. The presentation can be found here.

Other patrickWeb conference related stories

Tags: broadband, fcc, future, health, health care, Healthcare, IBM, internet, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, union league, WiFi

Kindle Update

Thanks to Mary Keough, over at IBM, for reading my post and correcting me on the weight of the Kindle Touch. I was thinking of the new $79 Kindle when I said six ounces. I weighed four devices this morning to make sure I got this right. Here is what I found.

I have to admit that I am vascillating a bit between the Kindle and the Kindel Touch. They are both very light and a pleasure to read on. The touch screen is nice, but the simple buttons on the Kindle create a certainty about your intentions. When I swipe, sometimes I go back a page to make sure I had not swiped two pages. With the Kindle, a click is always “a” click. All the Kindle devices are great, and I suspect the Fire will keep getting better with software updates and follow-on models.

Mary asked about the advertising and quetioned whether it is worth the extra $30 on the Kindle or $40 on the Touch to get the device “without special offers”. My opinion is that it is not worth the extra money. The special offers appear as a screen saver when you stop reading. They are totally unobtrusive. You can easily not even notice them. If you want to look more closely and are interested in something being offered, you can go for it. Speaking of reading, the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was really great (see Apple at Grand Central Terminal). I am now reading Fall of Giants: Book One of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett. I have read most of his books, and this one too is really good so far. 

 Other patrickWeb stories related to the Kindle

Tags: amazon, apple, fall of giants, fire, founders hall, ipad, iPhone, isaacson, ken follett, Kindle, kindle fire, kindle touch, steve jobs

Kindle Fire – Part 2

On September 28, Amazon announced three new Kindles — a $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch, and the $199 Android-based color touch screen Kindle Fire tablet. Technology pundits have criticized the Kindle Fire’s touch screen and various aspects of the user interface (see Daily Report: Kindle Fire Attracts Critics, and Buyers – NYTimes.com). I have observed the shortcomings also, but I think the device has a market niche that will be well served — people who like to read books. At $199, it is less than half the cost of an iPad. Amazon will relentlessly promote the Fire on its site and is rumored to be nearly ready to provide software updates for better performance and improved user interface.

I remain a believer in purpose-built devices. The iPad is great for documents, weather, stocks, surfing the web, and reading books at the kitchen counter. The Kindle Fire is great for reading books. That is what it does best. It can also do most everything the iPad can, but not everything. I don’t see myself giving a slide presentation with a projector and the Fire. I don’t plan to put 40 gigtabytes of dropbox folders containing all my data on the Fire. The Fire is great for reading a book, listening to music, or watching a movie. It is basically a media player. You can do many tablet computing tasks, but that is not what it is best at. The device I like the best for reading books is the new Kindle Touch. It weighs six ounces and has no moving parts. Turning pages and setting bookmarks is as easy as a touch. You can change the font size to the optimum and read comfortably for long periods of time wherever you may be — incuding outdoors in the sun, which you can do with an iPad. If I am at the kitchen counter and want to read for ten minutes, I launch the Kindle app on the iPad and it automatically takes me to wherever I left off on the Fire or iPhone or wherever I last read — a seamless experience. So many gadgets, so little time! I plan to donate the entry-model Kindle to the senior center.

Tags: amazon, apple, fire, founders hall, ipad, iPhone, Kindle, kindle fire, kindle touch

Apple at Grand Central Terminal

It was a coincidence that I had a board meeting in New York City yesterday, on the day that Apple was opening it’s fifth retail store there. The store opening was planned for 10 AM with collector teeshirts to be given to the first 4,000 visitors. I arrived at Grand Central Station from Connecticut at 8 AM and there was already a line of 2,500 people. When I returned to the train station at 2PM, the shirts had been gone for two hours. I was one of the many thousands who visited the store, which will have 315 employees. Some day my grandchildren’s grandchilren will tell friends that their Pop Pop was there on opening day.  The Wall Street Journal reported that more people visit an Apple store each quarter than visit Disney’s four biggest theme parks in a year. It was quite a site to be there yesterday. I took some pictures but the one’s in the WSJ are much better. There is a short video done by Engadget that is worth looking at (see  Apple just arrived at Grand Central Terminal, we hop aboard video).

After visiting the new Apple store, I could not help but think about Steve Jobs. He will be revered for many generations as a great innovator and business leader. After you read his biography by Walter Isaacson, you will also respect this great biographer. I met Walter in 1996 just before he became editor of Time Magazine and I was greatly impressed with his embrace of the Internet. He came to IBM with some colleagues and we brainstormed about how the publisher might take advantage of the Web. None of us really knew the right strategy at the time, and unfortunately, the publishing industry still has not figured it out. Industry by industry, it was Steve Jobs who showed the way.

Steve Jobs – by Walter Isaacson is already the biggest selling biography of all times.  Jobs not only authorized the biography but gave Isaacson access to his home, his family, and his innermost thoughts over a two-year period leading up to just before his death. Great biographers write about great people. Isaacson’s books about Benjamin Franklin and Einstein were great but much harder for me to read. The Jobs biography read more smoothly in part because I could identify directly with the technology issues so aptly described in the book. I know or have met many of the characters in the book. Although not a technologist, Isaacson did a gret job in desscribing the technolgy issues in layman terms. He offered an insight that will help many readers better understand the impact and potential of technology.

The basic premise of the Steve Jobs philosophy was to create a simplified and integrated experience for the consumer. Critics say that the integration of iMacs, iPods, iPads, etc. with iTunes and Mac OSX represents a monopolistic strategy. After reading the biography, I suspect most people will be convinced that it was an intense desire to make things easier has been the driver. Jobs would say that products and profits are both important, but elegant and simplified products are most important. It was the intense drive and focus of Steve Jobs that made such products available to the mass market and catapulted Apple to become the most valuable company in the world. 

I continue to believe that the Amazon Kindle is the best platform for reading books, but I read the Steve Jobs biography on the iPad. 

Tags: apple, ipad, isaacon, steve jobs

kindlefire – 1

There are many reviews out there already about the new Kindle Fire (see Nook’s Specs Are Exaggerated, Again). I would not glority this posting by calling it a review — it is simply my first reaction upon receiving the kindlefire this afternoon. The fire was actually delivered to the Marriott Atlanta Century Center on Tuesday. I have been in Florida for the last few days and when I got notice of the shipping, I had the Kindle diverted to where I would be staying during the weekend for a University of Phoenix residency (more on that later).

My first reaction on taking the fire out of the classicly simple Amazon packaging was that it was heavier than I expected. It is not as heavy as the first Nook, but it is heavier than the other new Kindles. After a few hours of using it, I would say it is lighter than the iPad and not really so heavy after all. Speaking of the iPad, the obvious question from many will be “how does it compare to the iPad?” My son reminds me that the fire “is not an iPad”, and it should not be compared to something that is totally different in design and intention. I agree — the two are different animals with different purposes.

I had some difficulty setting up the fire because of the marginal WiFi signal in my room at the hotel. The fire wants you to confirm your Amazon account after getting a WiFi signal, but the Marriott wants you to confirm your room # before it activates your wireless. It took a while to figure out how to get around the Catch 22. The fire is clearly a content device — it is designed for reading books and the news, watching movies, and listening to music. There is a large selection of apps but I have not yet had time to try many. The free enhanced email program available in the Amazon app store works very well.

The fire navigation is a bit awkward but I think that is a matter of getting used to a different paradigm. The text entry mode has a nice movable cursor for use in corecting entries that is very nice. I need more time to experiment with it, but as a first impression, I think that text entry may be better than the iPad in that respect. I know — don’t compare the fire to the iPad! They are both great and I look forward to more experience with the fire and will share that as the days progress.

Tags: amazon, fire, ipad, Kindle, kindlefire

iPhone 4S Tracking

UPS tracking shows that the iPhone 4S is in Windsor Locks, Connecticut after arriving in Louisville, KY. Before that the iphone was in Anchorage, Alaska, where it arrived from Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong. The origination of the shipment was somewhere in China, and from there it went to Shenzhen, China enroute to Hong Kong. I am expecting the 4S to arrive mid-day tomorrow and I can’t wait. Stay tuned. Meanwhile iOS 5 is running on both the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2. The press has had mixed views, but my view is quite positive. The key feature is iCloud. I tested it today. You take a picture with the iPhone and then go to your MacBook or PC or iMac, and the picture is there in your Photo Stream. iCloud is implementing cloud computing for the consumer. Much more to come on the subject.

Tags: 4s, apple, fedex, icloud, ipad, iPhone, iphone 4, iphone 4s, iphone4, itunes