simplicity

Yesterday, Amazon announced a new Kindle, similar in design to the new DX and just $140/$190 for WiFi-only and 3G models, respectively.

Naturally, the tech press is already declaring it “dead”, because the tech press loves product “killers” and other perceptions to completely rule out entire classes of products because they lack the empathy or worldview to recognize these products’ markets.

Dave Winer says:

When I read on tech blogs that Kindle is a goner, I think these people must not read very much.

I love the Kindle. The iPad didn’t “kill” it. Amazon is going to sell a ton of these, especially at this new price point.

Reading on the iPad is a bit of a kludge. You can read on it, and it’s a lot better than reading on a computer, but it’s still too reflective, heavy, bright, and power-hungry compared to the Kindle.

People often assume that the iPad’s backlit LCD screen is an advantage over the Kindle because it doesn’t need a separate light to be read at night. But the Kindle’s e-ink screen is actually more versatile for different lighting: not only does it work in bright sunlight just as well as paper, but I find it easier to read a Kindle at night with a small lamp on than with an iPad in the dark, even using dark mode and low brightness. And I often can’t use those same nightstand or headboard-clip lamps with the iPad to light the area less harshly because the iPad’s screen is too reflective. The iPad is also too heavy to comfortably hold in most ways for long periods, and its wide range of software capabilities can be distracting. When you’re holding a Kindle, all you can do is read. When I read on an iPad, I always want to go check my email. And my feeds. And Tumblr. And Twitter. Just for a minute.

The iPad is a great casual computer, but the Kindle is the superior reading device.¹ And there doesn’t need to be any “killing”. If you really like an iPad for its other uses, now that a Kindle’s entry price is $140, it’s perfectly reasonable to have both.

Tiff and I are taking our first backpacking trip in a few weeks. We’ll presumably have no access to AC power for 6 days, and we’ll likely regret carrying anything heavy or unnecessary. But we’ll have times at camp in which it will be nice to be able to entertain ourselves.

I’m not bringing the iPad. I’m certainly not bringing a laptop. I’ll have my iPhone for emergencies, but powered off to conserve its battery. I’m bringing the S90, not the 5D Mark II.

And I’m bringing a Kindle, loaded up with books and Instapaper compilations, in a Ziplock bag for waterproofing. No case, no charger, no extra batteries. Total weight: 10 ounces. (I’ll be carrying more coffee than that.) If it breaks, it’s a lot cheaper to replace than an iPad. Its battery will outlast the trip, even with heavy use. It holds so much text that I’ll always have a great selection and more than enough supply. And I’m simply bringing a few extra sets of AAA batteries (2 oz.) for my headlamp to light it at night if needed.

Gizmodo and the like probably don’t care that the Kindle is the perfect device for so many uses like this that people encounter on a regular basis in Real Life. But Kindle owners, and Amazon, don’t need them to.

Amazon’s Kindle has always been an interesting device to me. When I first heard about it in late 2007, I was sure I wouldn’t want one. It was awkward looking and at $399, way too expensive. But when the second iteration came in 2009 with a sleeker look, I decided to buy one to see what all the fuss was about. I quickly learned to love it.

That said, I still didn’t see any real future for such a product. At $359, it was still absurdly expensive. And with all the rumors swirling about Apple’s impending tablet device, it seemed like it was a temporary niche product, at best. But on the eve of the unveiling of the third iteration of the device, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is making things more interesting.

Specifically, Bezos seems to understand that he cannot compete with the iPad. And he doesn’t want to. “Mr. Bezos said he intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets. Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution,” he continues.

Whether you believe that or not, it goes against reports from last year that Amazon was trying to figure out how best to compete against more advanced tablets by offering features such as color screens. Bezos even said that they had them in the laboratory to test out. But he also said that they weren’t ready for prime time, so color Kindles were at least a few years away.

But his new statements seems to indicate that Amazon may never go in that direction with the Kindle. If their goal is just to focus on making the best reading device, why go with color and video, is his reasoning. Here’s his killer quote from the WSJ piece:

For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.

That’s a smart position to take — for now. From a consumer hardware perspective, Amazon was never going to be able to compete with Apple — they simple lack the experience. So instead, Amazon is going to forge ahead with this dedicated device in hopes that it will catch on with mainstream consumers before the more expensive tablets do.

Naturally, the key to all of this is the price. The new Kindle will come in two flavors: a 3G one for $189 and a WiFi one for $139. The latter price is almost a full third less than the original Kindle was. It’s also a much, much cheaper than the entry-level iPad at $499. $99 still seems like the ultimate sweet-spot for the Kindle, but it’s hard to argue with $139.

The problem here is that I’m not convinced Amazon really wanted to go that low. Remember that it was only hours after Barnes & Noble announced their Nook would be $199 (and $149 for the WiFi version) that Amazon dropped their price from $259 all the way down to $189 — exactly $10 cheaper. Undoubtedly, Amazon has lowered the costs associated with the making the Kindle over the past three years, but $399 to $189 is pretty dramatic.

Everyone felt the Kindle was far too expensive at $399 or $359 but Amazon still resisted the pressure to lower the price quickly. The reason? They had complete control of the market — they didn’t have to. It was only when the Nook, Border’s Kobo, and the iPad came out that the prices truly started to fall fast.

So the question now: is Amazon making any money on selling these devices? Some may think that doesn’t matter because they’re Amazon’s way to move their content (pretty much the anti-Apple approach). But as Bezos points out, the Kindle store and the Kindle hardware are completely separate entities within Amazon. “Internally, we view them as two stand-alone businesses that have to succeed on their own merits,” he tells WSJ. Can selling the Kindle hardware at such a low price fulfill that?

The larger problem remains for Amazon as well. While the Kindle is undoubtedly easier on the eyes than reading with the backlit iPad, the wide range of things that the iPad and other tablets can do will eventually win the day. Amazon’s price cuts have extended that day quite a bit, but it’s still inevitable.

So is Amazon content to rule the space for a couple of years while not making a lot of money on devices? Or is Bezos simply bluffing on Amazon’s future Kindle aspirations?

Also, does anyone really think Hemingway would have been pleased with his work on a Kindle?

[image via]

There’s a cool new service I heard about recently called TurningArt.

In a nutshell, it’s “Netflix for art with the option to buy”

As a consumer, I love the idea, and like this segment of the art market in general. When I got married, my sister gave me a gift certificate for $888 for Wentworth Gallery.  It was more money that I ever spent for art, so I was excited about all the pieces I was going to be able to buy.

To my dismay, I went to the store and found that I could afford all of 5 pieces.  It was then that I realized that there is a huge bgap between cheap, commodity art.com prints and stuff at galleries like Wentworth (or even more expensive than that).  There is no art for the “Banana Republic” market segment. 

On top of this, I have also realized that consumers like me have very little confidence buying art.  You don’t want something that everyone else has, but at the same time, I need some social re-enforcement to buy something unique.  That’s why I think 20x200 is interesting in the social dynamic is creates between scarcity and social proof.

So I’m excited about TurningArt - it’s a cool service and I’ve always liked how big corporations can have rotating artwork in their offices.  Now I can have it in my living room!

Dean Takahashi, reporting for MobileBeat:

The app in question came from Jackeey Wallpaper, and it was uploaded to the Android Market, where users can download it and use it to decorate their phones that run the Google Android operating system. It includes branded wallpapers from My Little Pony and Star Wars, to name just a couple.

It collects your browsing history, text messages, your phone’s SIM card number, subscriber identification, and even your voicemail password. It sends the data to a web site, www.imnet.us. That site is evidently owned by someone in Shenzhen, China. The app has been downloaded anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times. The exact number isn’t known because the Android Market doesn’t offer precise data.

I’m sure this story will get just as much attention as if it had been an iPhone app that did this. I’d like to see more proof from Lookout, though — there’s [nothing on their weblog][w] about this, for example. Up to 4 million downloads?

Update: The article has been updated regarding what information the app captures: “Update: Lookout notes it does not capture browsing history and text messages.”

Smartest piece written yet on Antennagate? This one, by Watts Martin.

I’m in. I believe. I just saw Marco Scutaro hit a grand slam to complete a three-game Red Sox sweep of the Angels. The Sox look like they are ready for a big stretch run.



Boston Red Sox - Marco Scutaro - Grand slam - Sports - Baseball

When I was 24 I moved from Boston to L.A. in search of a record deal. Never got one, but Edgar Winter did record a song I wrote called, "Stranger to Love," for a B horror movie called Netherworld. Those songwriting days taught me something important about new ideas, where they come from, when they surface, and how to relate to them.

Night after night I would go into my loft and bang away on my guitar, trying to coerce a song out of it. It would take me months to write each song. This method we might call How Not to Write Songs. I was going about it the wrong way, and I notice a lot of entrepreneurs and businesses doing the same thing. They create businesses without an idea, or without a strong idea (which is why you can't understand what the hell they're talking about when they describe it to you). They build form around the absence of an idea and call it a business.

Much smarter to build form around the substance of an idea.

Charlie Rose once asked Bruce Springsteen, "When do you write?" His reply: "When I have an idea." As opposed to when he doesn't have one. What a brilliant use of his time!

John Denver used to say (for you Millennials, he was RCA's second-biggest record seller after Elvis) that, "the songs come when they've a mind to." The idea for "Annie's Song," his biggest hit, came to him while he was on a chair lift during a day of skiing.

Springsteen and John Denver were both wise enough to know that you wait and watch for ideas, you don't force them into being. Well, actually, you can hear instances where each of them did try to force it — and got lousy songs as a result.

Steve Jobs was asked years ago about how he planned to compete with the Wintel monopoly. He said, "I'm going to wait for the next big thing." He didn't say "I'm going to personally create the next big thing." Neither iTunes nor the iPod was his idea. The iTunes idea came from a small company called SoundJam MP, and the genesis of the iPod was a design inside the head of Tony Fadell, a tech consultant who went to work for Apple. Steve Jobs's brilliance was in keeping his eyes open for the ideas, recognizing the moment, connecting the dots, and "creating" iTunes and iPod as a system that worked together, adding Jonathan Ive's designs, and marketing it all brilliantly. He wasn't sitting at his desk banging his head against the wall trying to force an idea out of the universe.

In fact, to the extent that you are punishing yourself for the lack of an idea, or torturing yourself to come up with one, you may very well miss the idea that's right under your nose, waiting to be acknowledged.

There are two simple rules I have learned about ideation: Look and wait.

Look. For years my company struggled to come up with the right slogan for our AIDS Rides. "Challenge yourself and you will grow." Yuck. "The adventure of a lifetime." Yawn. The more frustrated we got, the more the answer eluded us. Then one day we said to ourselves, "These events are impossible. You have to ride for grueling distances. You have to sleep in a tent and raise huge amounts of money from your friends. Most people look at them and think, 'Impossible.'" Having admitted the truth, we stared at that word "impossible" for about an hour. And we noticed two words inside there. "I'm" and "possible." "I'mpossible." Our new slogan. It had been staring us in the face for four years. We just weren't looking.

And as for waiting...This is tragic but instructive. In 1999 someone very close to me committed suicide. My grief and aching sadness wanted expression, and they found it in music. Ideas for songs about the tragedy started coming to me in rapid succession. On long walks. In the car. Without me asking for them. They were asking for me. In about eight weeks I wrote 13 songs, each of them based on an idea, and each of them better than most anything I had forced while banging away on my guitar in my loft years earlier. And they became my first album.

On top of that, an idea came for a suicide prevention event — called, "Out of the Darkness" — that has now raised millions for the cause. That idea would never have come to us sitting in our conference room at Pallotta TeamWorks trying to force an event into being. It came from a confluence of tragedy and emotion and timing. And, as a result, it was authentic, not a contrivance.

The idea may not come when you want it to, but when it does, it will be right on time. And it will be true to who you really are.

So, my advice to you: Go get an ice cream. Go ride your bike, or whatever it is you like to do. Relax a little bit. You can't create the next big idea at will anymore than you can make the love of your life walk into the room in the next half hour.

Look. And wait. And while you're at it, have a little faith — in life, in God, in the universe, in whatever you believe in. The universe is pregnant with ideas. Your passion for them is enough. They don't go where they're not wanted. But ideas have lives of their own. They have their pride. And they don't reveal themselves to the impatient or the distracted.

That song I wrote, "Stranger to Love" — it was actually a good song. For one reason. It started with an idea.

 

Okay I don’t want to go start doing a daily Bros Icing Bros blog here, but we did post the one from yesterday and today we got this one which I guess is better?   I mean I’m not sure you want this to be the most memorable part of your wedding, but still clever.

 

Vote 1 for they already regret this and 10 this will be the proudest moment of their lives

 

Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

 

Does this ever get old?   That’s a real question.    Like how many of these videos can you watch without getting bored?   I think I’m bored…..now.

If you’re a fan of The Big Lebowski (and we fans of the Dude can spot each other at 1,000 yards), you’ll enjoy this segment of John Turturro talking about the creative process behind him developing his classic “Jesus” character.

And the original “Jesus” scene is after the jump.

Comments

If you’re anything like me, at any given time you have a dozen to two dozen tabs open across multiple web browser windows. It’s great to have all these webpages open and ready to click on at any second, but it’s a nightmare to try and remember where each is with so many open. I shudder to think how much time I waste on this each day. Luckily, Mozilla is working on a solution.

A new feature called Tab Candy is in the works. It’s still early in testing mode, as Mozilla’s Aza Raskin points out on his blog today, but it looks to be exactly what I need.

Be sure to watch the video below for a full overview — from the looks of it, it seems as if Tab Candy is sort of like Apple’s Expose feature mixed with their Spaces feature, both of which are baked into OS X. For those who don’t use a Mac, basically these features allow you to zoom out and get a bird’s-eye-view of all your windows (or tabs, in this case) that are open — and you can also arrange open windows (or again, tabs, in this case) in certain spaces so they’re clumped together. This allows you to more easily find what you’re looking for with so many tabs open.

For example, when tabs are organized into a group, you can select that group and see only those tabs you put in there. The other tabs you have open (in another group) are still open, you just won’t see them when you’re focused on this particular group. And you can change the sizes of these groups in the bird’s-eye-view mode to highlight certain ones. “Make the group with your calendar and email bigger so that you can see what’s new just by zooming out to Tab Candy. Hide the group with distractions in a corner,” Raskin writes.

The best part is that you can actually test out Tab Candy right now. If you click on this link, you’ll download a special “super-early” build of Firefox (Firefox 4 beta, to be specific) with Tab Candy. Again, it’s early so there are bugs and performance issues, but this is a very, very good idea.

 

 

Listen I hate ultimate Frisbee.    Because just like with lacrosse and hacky sack it’s a sport for people who can’t play real sports.   So the fact that this is being played in a stadium with a crowd makes me want to puke.  But having said that this still has to be the greatest ultimate frisbee catch of all time.    Actually scratch that.   This may be the best catch of all time in anything period.   I mean sometimes you just got to tip your cap and this is one of those times.    Great play by this bald dude.   Great play.

 

(Hat Tip To Barstool Junior)

NO NO NO A CFA IS BETTER! (Throws chair.)

[via HP]
Pretty sure that’s what they’re saying.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s obsessively detailed deconstruction of the In-N-Out Animal Style Double-Double hamburger. Consider it a sequel to his research on perfect McDonald’s-style french fries from a few months ago. (Via Kottke.)

Although Firefox already has a strong selection of tab management helpers like TooManyTabs, which gives you extra rows and memory-preserving options, or Tree Style Tab, which shifts things to a tree-based vertical menu, Mozilla has rolled up its scaly sleeves and decided to rethink the whole thing. Tab Candy starts off much like Safari's TabExposé, by showing you all the tabs you currently have open in thumbnail form, but from there it allows you to organize them into separate groups (with sub-groups promised for the future), which then act in very much the same way as opening a new Firefox window. Yes, it's folders within the browser, and it's all based on good old fashioned HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so no pesky additional downloads will be required once this Alpha-stage code gets added to Firefox's official release. If you want to give it an early spin, hit the source link below, but don't neglect the video after the break to see what else Mozilla is thinking of cooking up with Tab Candy.

Continue reading Firefox Tab Candy groups your tabs, but that's just for starters (video)

Firefox Tab Candy groups your tabs, but that's just for starters (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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