The Amazon Kindle Could Dramatically Improve US Education

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”

$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.

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.

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.