Today, Amazon announced the widely anticipated Kindle 2 with a ship date of February 24th. I immediately ordered one. I bought my first Kindle in Dec 2007 and absolutely love it. As a frequent business traveller, I just bring my Kindle instead of packing half a dozen books with me. Usually I’ll buy a bookContinue reading “The Amazon Kindle Could Dramatically Improve US Education”
Category Archives: Gadget Watch
My Amazon Kindle is Almost Here
Received from Amazon today:
\”We now have estimated delivery dates for the Kindle order you placed on 12/17/07. We are now estimating that your Kindle will arrive between January 25 and February 1, 2008. We\’ll contact you again to let you know when your order is shipped.\”
$100 Laptops, $2500 Cars
In this morning\’s post I mentioned low cost cars coming from India. Today Business Week reported that Ratan Tata\’s new $2,500 car, called the Nano, is being met with \”extreme enthusiasm\” and is going to put India on the map in the auto world. CrunchGear indicates that Tata plans to introduce the Nano to other low income areas like Africa and South America in the next four years.
Recharging Cell Phones Wirelessly, Using Radio Waves
Wow. Every once in a while you read a story that sounds too good to be true. Check out this Business 2.0 Magazine article about Powercast, a company that has found a way to recharge devices without wires.
Don\’t overlook free products and services online
Blake Snow has a nice post about 20 free products and services that he uses online. He lists several that I have not used before. I\’ll need to try them out so I can add them to my recommendations for entrepreneurs list, and make sure they get added to StrategyTree.com, my wiki for entrepreneurs.
The Future of Cell Phones: Point, Click, Learn
Here\’s a great NY Times article about how Japanese cell phone users are able to point their specialized phones at buildings and monuments and get information about the location. More than 700,000 locations have information or advertisements associated with them already. or A San Francisco-based company called GeoVector is involved.
Rural Broadband Penetration Too Low
A friend forwarded to me a good article from the Rural Policy Research Institute on the need for broadband availability in rural communities and the frustrating lack of private sector initiative to provide it.
RIM extending BlackBerry server functionality
RIM adds instant messaging to BlackBerry server
Corporate apps devleoped under Blackberry MDS Studio are being made available to Blackberry users. Instant messaging has also been enabled.
This is a great platform. Through T-mobile, we just bought 8 Blackberry 7290 phones for $99.95 each. The data service (unlimited text messages, email and web browsing) is like $19.95 per month and the phone plans are decent.
Apple finally does a subscription model
I think this portends things to come in the music space. An all-you-can eat subscription is SO compelling. Yes, people want to \”own\” their music right now. But that will change. If you can \”rent\” all the music in the world for $9.95 per month, tens of millions of people will do it.
We won\’t even think about \”owning\” vs \”renting\” in the future.
Steve Jobs always attacks the subscription model. But he also said no one would watch video on a 3\” screen. It\’s all part of his strategy to mislead the competition.
Music phones to slice into iPod growth – Yahoo! News
Music phones to slice into iPod growth – Yahoo! News
Here\’s a quote: \”King estimates sales of phones equipped with MP3 music players will balloon to 796 million in 2010, accounting for three-quarters of all handsets sold, from 94 million this year.\”
