I need a qik-enabled camcorder

I’m a big fan of WAN-connected consumer devices: the ipod touch, amazon kindle, Dash.net GPS, and of course the cellphone which is the original in this catagory.   I think out 10 years it will be hard to buy a CE device that doesn’t have a cellular and/or 802.11 connection that comes with it. I think you will see more CE devices with cellphone like distribution and pricing as well: device is free if you sign up for a subscription service. The kindle is a great example of how much better a book reader can be when it is wirelessly connected to a service offering digital books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs.  The service enables you to read books; the connected device is just an enabler.

I’m surprised shutterfly or smugmug hasn’t launched a similar photo service enabled by a digital camera device with an embedded 3g connection. Each time you take a photo it could automatically be uploaded to shutterfly. I’ve seen a version of this with an SD card with embedded 802.11-much better if the device supports it natively.

Camcorders are one area where this connectivity will be particularly useful. An early-adopter version of this is Qik.com which i discovered when Robert Scoble started video blogging from his cellphone using it. Qik is an example of the type of enabling service that couldn’t have existed 10 years ago.  Cell phones got imagers a few years ago, then they got 3G, and it took a while but finally Qik came along to allow folks to leverage both of those to instantly stream breaking news. You launch the Qik application on your cellphone and you instantly are live streaming video to the internet. Problem is the cell phone has none of the key features we are used to in a camcorder: image stabilization, high resolution video quality, noise reduction microphones, quality optics for zoom, etc. Author the video of your kid’s birthday party in Qik, and grandma can watch it live, but afterwards you are left only a very low quality video of such an important event.

Instead, qik should partner up with a camcorder manufacturer and launch a qik-enabled camcorder service with 3g and wifi. Click the qik button on the camcorder and whatever you film is immediately streamed to the net. But when you get back and plug in to AC power and are in range of 802.11, then it automatically uploads a higher resolution version to replace the low-res. Sony does the hardware, Qik ends up with a site that offers video streaming, video archive, etc.   I’d pay a subscription for that.

What cool WAN-connected CE device services are you seeing?

Google’s coming MVNO?

I always thought MVNOs were a good idea.  Leverage the massive investment of the carriers but give consumers a better experience with better devices, better apps, etc.  Those good at operating and managing a nationwide communications network (ATT) are different from those good at developing compelling consumer devices and services (Apple).

The killer has been cost of customer acquisition for these services and the thin margins available when you have to buy minutes from the carriers.

Enter Google.  Enter their free cost of customer acquisition with their existing home page traffic.  Enter Wifi and UMA where 80% of voice calls and 90% of data usage can be sent over wifi for free rather than the leased minutes from carriers.   Enter google checkout for billing.   Enter Android as an OS and developer platform for third party “open mobile” application offerings.   Enter GPS for geo targeting and google’s two screens of behavioral data capture for high cpc advertising.  PhoneWords?

So will we see the GooglePhone MVNO service for $20 a month with unlimited calls and data over wifi and up to 200 roaming minutes?

I’m paying subscriptions for content!

For the first time in many years i’m again paying for a newspaper subscription.   Nobody is more surprised than me.

With the rise of blogs and online news sites, and various news readers for easily accessing that content, i turned off my subscription to the mercury news a number of years ago.    With the rise of alternative news sources, i don’t even find stories from the mercury news to rise to the top of my rss reader much anymore.   They are buried below Original Signal, TechCrunch, O’Reilly Radar, Scobleizer, etc.

The paper version of the San Jose Mercury News was just too much of a pain.  I’d feel guilty when five of them would stack up unread.  Then we’d go on vacation and i’d forget to put on a subscription hold and my driveway would look like an ad for burglers when we returned.   The times when i had the most time to read the paper was when i was on the road, and so i wouldn’t have access to it anyway.   And while my colleagues will often refer to stories in Techcrunch and the NY Times, i haven’t heard a reference to a breaking story from the mercury news for a long time.

So what changed.   I got a Kindle.    I got it for books,  but i’m finding it equally interesting for reading news and blog content…even though it is clear the device was not designed for these media types – no next story button!

Suddenly i’m paying for subscriptions to a number of content sources.  I’m paying for the Mercury News, the NY Times, Time magazine.   I’m even paying a monthly fee for access to Scobleizer and OReilly Radar!   All of this content is available for free on my laptop….but the convenience of having it right at hand, instantly with wireless upload, has made it quite addictive.  There is something in here…

I’d love to know whether the bloggers are getting some of the economics of my $1-2 per month subscriptions to their services or if Amazon is keeping all of it to offset the wireless costs.

The kindle can be further optimized.  I recently read Tim O’Reilly’s post on the top 10 books from 2007.  There were two of them that i wanted to read.   Unfortunately, the links on my kindle were to the website-not to a single click buy page on the Kindle Store…so i still haven’t purchased them.   Seems i can go to O’Reilly’s site and buy the book in PDF, and then email it to my kindle.   Would be so much better if it was single click right from the Kindle store.

Would be great if someone created kindle.oreilly.com and i could put in my amazon credentials and it would set my kindle account to receive content from oreilly’s email, charge me via my existing amazon account, and then send me the daily radar with links that allow me to single click to get other related content sent to my kindle.   single click signup to conferences would be interesting too.   perhaps when there are more than a few of us kindle readers, someone will do that.

When do the kindle economics get to a point where Oreilly gives away a connected reader along with a monthly subscription to their content..because the value of having a user’s daily attention, and $20 per month subscription, is worth more than the couple hundred bucks of the cost of a reader…

Amazon’s huge Green marketing mistake

Amazon Kindle: the Prius for Newspapers and Books

I’m loving my new Kindle but I’m really surprised that the Green aspect of the Kindle isn’t being emphasized more.  

I was on a flight last week and was reading the NY Times via Kindle.  No trees were harmed to bring me my morning news!    The guy next to me had the NY Times in paper form.   He kept looking longingly at my device as his ink-laden fingers kept getting blacker with each page turn.   I suddenly felt like the Prius owner in the carpool lane.  Moral superiority!    Thanks Al Gore!  Thanks Pope Benedict!

Amazon should hire Toyota’s advertising firm and figure out how they turned a compact car into the symbol of Green….  before Jobs does it with the launch of his competing iTablet device in 08.

Does Kindle enable ad-supported book publishing?

Ads in Books….or Ads in Newspapers?

Just read Tim O’Reilly’s article expressing skepticism over whether books can ever be ad supported.  The Amazon Kindle is what has prompted all the recent discussion.  I’m now a happy Kindle owner so I though it toss in some thoughts.  I think Tim is right on books, but i don’t think the Kindle is going to turn out to be primarily a book reading device…

 I’ve had my Kindle for about 2 weeks now.   I’ve been using it about every 2 days.  If I have my laptop, I tend to go to it first.  I still start my day reading email and I can’t get that (yet) on my Kindle.    The Kindle is much easier on my eyes, and when I was running to my flight last Thursday, it sure was great to be able to get my newspapers (via over the air download) AFTER I was on the plane.  The Kindle saved me from  having to spend two hours reading Hemisphere’s magazine.  Thank you Kindle!  I won’t miss Hemisphere’s one bit!

Mossberg got it right again I think in his review of the Kindle:  Great service, ok device.   The click and buy service is great.  If Apple hadn’t raised the bar, the device would have been getting rave reviews.    And if it had an Apple logo on it, I think it would be the hottest item this Christmas.

 The Kindle was created by the world’s biggest bookseller and most of the discussion on it naturally has been around books.   What I find myself using it for most though is newspapers and magazines.   Those are what I need to get new access to every day.  And those are what aren’t at my fingertips (unless I have my laptop).   I know first hand having had a paper route as a kid in Indiana, how much effort goes into getting the news to consumers!

The Kindle device wasn’t even designed for newspapers but fortunately they are supported.  The buttons don’t support “next story” “last story” etc.    I can’t get a couple paragraphs into a news article and single click to the next story the way I can when reading the newspaper.  But when I turn it on and my nytimes is delivered within 30 seconds, I find I can’t put it down.   

Tim talks about $1 cpm and does the math on the number of book readers and concludes the math doesn’t work.  I agree.   But has anyone done the math on blogs, newspapers, and magazines.  Ads are a big portion of those revenues.   I read a lot more page views on newspapers a week than I do on books.   And the commerce opportunities are much better.

 The kindle could be a killer commerce engine beyond media.  Just like links to amazon on a blog talking about a product result in commerce on amazon, the Kindle “could” do the same thing.  But even better since they can close the transaction in one click since they have my credentials already… and I am captive to their device at the time.

 Some example commerce opportunities:

- I’m reading a book on my Kindle and it references another book that sounds very interesting.  I scroll up to that line on the page, click and purchase to “read now”, or click and purchase to “read later”.    An impulse buy.  This desire to stumble through books happens to me all the time.  The book that is being referenced seems always to be more intriguing that what I’m currently reading.  Since O’Reilly has a subscription service, it could be a single click to sign up for a subscription.

 - I’m reading the NY Times on my kindle and an article references a product that is very interesting.   I scroll to the reference, click and buy.   This happened to me last week.  The NY Times had an article on a gadget that I wanted.   I wanted to buy it right then.  But instead I had to “clip” and save the page, then go hunt it down when I got back to my laptop.  I still haven’t purchased it.   I would have it already if Amazon had the click-and-buy for products live on the kindle.   Think of how good this would be for Engadget.    Everything they write about is a commerce opportunity.   Engadget as retailer…  There are semantic webservices from several providers (relevad.com, etc) that can automatically take in text and find the products and generate the right links.  That could just be called as part of the document prep process on Amazon’s servers.  

 - Think about this for O’Reilly Media.   Offer 100% of O’Reilly blogs, books, etc on a Kindle as a subscription…and use the traditional book channel as a means of acquiring subs.    Offer the blog for free with plenty of single click links to O’Reilly books and subscriptions.  Offer the first couple books for free and in between each chapter put an ad page with a single click to subscribe to their subscription service.   You get my attention once, and that is an opportunity for me to opt-in to pay to subscribe for you to have my attention every day. And make it free to send a book to a friend via Kindle (Kindle’s current lack of ability to forward content to a friend is a huge missed viral opportunity).   With a subscription, offer access to the “ask the author” through the Kindle’s “ask an expert” service.   Why Amazon supports that on the device but doesn’t allow me to forward a blog post or a news article is a confusing product decision.  Have Tim launch a “read what I’m reading” where you get the best of what Tim read yesterday.

 - Think of the same for Harvard Business School Press.  They have a wealth of cases, articles, books, blogs, etc, all in paper form.    Why not offer me access to the blogs, articles and cases, with links to the subscription service which gives me access to the books and to ask questions of the authors.  Perhaps Tim O’Reilly can take his understanding of how to run a subscription media company and leverage this to help other media companies convert to the “attention” world.  Amazon offers free 14 day subscriptions to major newspapers via Kindle-all that auto-renew if you don’t proactively turn them off.   I think most free trials will convert.  I wonder if Tim has seen the gym membership effect- where you get a bunch of subscribers who never churn off but yet use very little of your services.   Wonder if he has data to show that an all-you-can-eat business model for a publishing company produces higher overall revenue.

 - I’m reading the auto section of the NY Times and click to get the product brochure for a new car.   The attention of that user who is an auto purchase intender is worth way more than $1 cpm.

Newspapers are already ad-supported today.  With the improved conversion opportunities on the Kindle, they can be even more so.  Amazon is charging for blogs.   will that finally allow bloggers to have a business model other than running conferences?

Will be fun to watch how this progresses.   Ted Turner saw the new medium of cable and did something completely different with CNN.   Does Kindle create a new medium that can be leveraged similarly?   Will Amazon open up the “platform” and let companies innovate on it?  Will O’Reilly leverage their understanding of subscriptions and new media and inexpensive attention access to be the “electronic amazon” where I subscribe to 0′Reilly and get access to the library in the sky…

 Perhaps nothing will happen in this area until Jobs gets on stage and launches the iTablet + iTunes/iLibrary in the spring which will effectively by an iphone with an 8.5 x 11″ touch screen and the service I describe above.   It will leverage all the iphone apps and developer community, have web-browsing, allow me to take notes for meetings…and read books and read newspapers.   The content owners will kick themselves for not moving sooner and will end up playing along.  Then everyone will wait for days in front of an apple store to get the device…and think it was obvious and Steve is a genius!  

Solution: Harnessing wave power via the Wave Hub

Using wave power as a source of energy is a concept that has always intrigued me.   If you can shake a faraday flashlight a few times and generate enough power to light a flashlight, then surely the power of the waves you see on my kids’ favorite show, the Deadliest Catch, can generate sufficient power to light and heat our homes.

I’ve seen a number of startups with innovative ways to generate power from waves, but the major problem has been that a startup needs to be vertically-integrated to take that innovation to market.    A wave power project needs regulatory approval, environmental impact reports, a mechanism for transmission of the generated power to shore , deals to sell the generated power, expertise on deep sea installation, AND their innovative mechanism of power generation.  For a startup with just the last item, all the prior items make it expensive to launch.

Enter the Wave Hub.  This is a UK project where companies can lease space on a hub that has everything a startup needs to try out their wave generation buoys.    A sort of Darpa Challenge for wave power.   I love this idea.   Can we get Darpa to do something similar?

iBook not coming soon from Apple

Now isn’t that a much more catchy title for a post than “Amazon launching second generation ebook reader”. I doubt that latter title would have gotten you to even open this post.

I’ve been a bit surprised that there isn’t more excitement about the upcoming release of the Amazon Kindle. Kindle is a new ebook reader from Amazon with one very big innovation-it has a 3G radio in the device so any book, magazine, or newspaper that is available in Amazon’s ebook format is instantly available on the device. It is 1/2 the thickness of your typical paperback novel. Getting on a flight and want to read the latest Economist or todays New York Times- no problem, just pull out your Kindle. On vacation and you finished your novel and there are no Barnes and Noble’s around-no problem, just fire up your Kindle. Over a week of battery life between charges. Environmentally friendly-yes, no more trees killed for your daily paper. No more vacation holds on your New York Times subscription-it follows you when you are on business trips or vacation. Easy on your eyes- yes, it has the MIT EInk display technology. Sure it is black-and-white only, but how many novels are written in color? Are there a critical mass of titles available?-yes because Amazon has enough volume with publishers to get them to play along. Pricing?-who knows but certainly will be less than the $599, er $399, er $399 + $100 store credit, iPhone.

Seems like a great set of features to me. Why not more excitement?

Perhaps it is the awful beige packaging of the prototype used for FCC certification.

Perhaps it is the thud that the Sony Reader made in the market when they launched because nobody could figure out how to get content into it.

Perhaps it is because we don’t trust anyone other than Steve Jobs to launch a new catagory of consumer electronics devices. I met up with the GM of a major consumer electronics company yesterday and got an early look at their upcoming devices. I saw some major innovations going on there, but found myself thinking that nobody would care. I’m wondering whether the Kindle will suffer the same fate. Wrap any of those devices that I saw with a white plastic package, put a lower case “i” in front, and have Steve Jobs pull them out of his pocket on a stage in San Francisco in January and it would be a completely different story.

So until Steve is ready to launch the iBook, please join me in getting the Kindle. We may be the only two people who do….

Solved: iphone-izing your web application

Hearing about and seeing great things out of Joe Hewitt’s iphone toolkit

http://www.joehewitt.com/iui/

Enables you to easily make your killer web app look like a killer iphone widget.