Nov 21

More kindle

By Stefano Buliani General Babbling, Technology, Thoughts 1 Comment »

So it turns out very few people agree with what I said about the kindle just two days ago. In fact, according to Amazon, the gizmo sold out in five and a half hour (source: Engadget)

Regardless I stick to my initial opinion. 399 bucks is allot of dough to cough up for something that has neither the charms nor the solidity of a book, I can throw a big book to make a big noise but if i throw a kindle it’ll just make me 399$ poorer – a futile point but I thought that with my incredible ability to knock books off my bed-side table had to be mentioned. Moreover I don’t recall ever having to plug a book to recharge it for a few hours to be able to read, if I want to read I want to do it right now.

Jeff Jarvis makes a very good point in his post today about the much advertised blog content availability on the kindle. Why would I pay for something that is free on the net?

I violently agree with him. As I said already I’m very passionate about my book collection and a kindle would be of no value for me from that point of view. Either you give me a device capable of accessing any kind of content on the net (for free) or you provide me with a cheap e-book reader – Not a stupidly expensive internet-impaired Frankenstein.

At least this is my view, but it would seem that there’s a generation out there who is still not used to free blogs on the net and is quite happy to pay for the device and the content. It’s a cultural fact, they just don’t know any better.

update: Arrington bashes the Kindle 

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Nov 21

All in all

By Stefano Buliani General Babbling No Comments »

I think this pretty much sums it all up. I’m having a bad day. No posts today I’m afraid!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4a1z7NLnNk&rel=1&border=0]

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Nov 20

Now this is a big deal

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, Thoughts No Comments »

There’s been a couple of rumors floating around in the last two days regarding everyone’s favorite internet giant, Google.

First came the news about Ebay selling Skype after losing a little bit more than 1 billion dollars over the value of the initial acquisition. Google is of course named among the potential bidders.
Now we hear that Google is getting ready to bid for some of the coveted 700-megahertz spectrum in the auction due to begin on Jan 24th.

Google phone “From the company’s perspective, the overriding factor is how to foster more openness in networks. That is certainly the driving factor in our thinking about bidding on the spectrum.”
The 700-MHz band airwaves, which are being returned by broadcasters as they move from analog to digital signals early in 2009, can go long distances and penetrate thick walls. The auction is seen as a last chance for a new wireless player.
Google is considering funding a bid not only from its growing cash pile but by working with Wall Street. Outside financing would reduce its need for partners, one source said.
Google has said it would be prepared to bid at least $4.6 billion for the biggest chunk of spectrum if regulators agreed to policies to promote open use of such networks.

Now I don’t know about you but I definitely think that this is a BIG deal. Google seems to be gearing up to do something more than just release an open-source OS for mobile phones.
The internet giant could, with these 3 items in its shopping cart, seriously corner the mobile internet market.

Another thing comes to mind. By integrating Skype on all its android-powered mobiles and providing said mobiles with free/cheap wireless connectivity Google could easily score a checkmate against the major carriers.

It’s all good and well but such a move certainly isn’t cheap. Google would have to bring in some partners to finance the entire operation. If instead of picking a partner it will “work” with Wall-Street as the article quoted above suggests it will still have to give away some of the control they might have by being the only player.

If we do some math we have something between 1.2 and 1.5 billion $ to buy Skype off Ebay (just a guess off the top of my head). Anything between 4.5 and 5 billion $ for the band airwaves. To these costs we have to add another hefty sum which Google will have to cough up to maintain Android free whilst building and evolving it.

I think we are looking at a total of around 7 to 8 billion. Let me say it again, this is a BIIIIG deal, Google is betting big here and if something goes wrong – which is very likely as I don’t think giants like AT&T or Verizon will concede without a fight – They’ll be in big trouble. Google’s market cap at the moment is of 195.79 billion $, however with the current volatility of the markets I wouldn’t put too much trust in that number – The statistic we have to keep in mind is that according to its sec filings Google has something around 13 billion $ in cash available, a big sum, but looking at the figures I mentioned above the sum looks a bit stretched.

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Nov 20

More unlocked iPhones for Europe

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, Thoughts 3 Comments »

It seems that the EU really has something against American companies trying to lock their customers with exclusive contracts.
Apple, very much like Microsoft, has received a serious blow when Vodafone obtained a court order that requires rival T-Mobile Germany to sell Apple’s iPhone handset to Germans without a service plan.

Coverage of the matter by Dow Jones differs somewhat from the local German press by implying that the temporary injunction restricts any and all iPhone sales in Germany, rather than just those that would be sold with a contract. But due to the agreement between T-Mobile and Apple that iPhone only be sold with a service plan, it’s likely that both scenarios would produce the same result temporarily.

No doubt both Apple and T-Mobile will fight back. However, if the court order is confirmed and ratified, I don’t expect the potential legal battle to go anywhere.

I am not convinced by either approach. Love the idea of having even more unlocked iPhones around, and with the new rail tracks I can go from London to Paris in a little over 2 hours and pick up my phone there. On the other hand I don’t think Apple’s deal with T-Mobile has anything to do with anti-trust and unfair competition.
Obviously assuming that Apple was actually fair when deciding who to work with and was impartial when judging both carriers’ proposals.

All in all it sounds like Vodafone really didn’t like loosing the battle over the iPhone and instead of working to fight back with better services and contracts is just playing the primary school kid card.

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Nov 19

Kindle ignited

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, Thoughts, WWW 2 Comments »

Amazon has finally launched its E-Book reader, Kindle, available now for 399 $ with access to 88,000 books including 100 of the 112 New York Times best sellers.

The entire idea sounds pretty exciting, especially considering that the big A will pick up all the “phone bills” for its Whispernet service, which is based on Sprint’s EVDO.

Whispernet allows Kindle owners to wirelessly shop the Kindle Store, dowload and receive content and works out the box — no setup required. Newspaper subscriptions cost $5.99 to $14.99 per month and Kindle Magazines cost between $1.25 and $3.49 per month — each is available for a free 2 week trial. Oddly, blogs will cost you $0.99 per month to subscribe. Just running down the specs again: internal storage for 200 titles (more via SD expansion), 10.3 ounces.

Today Seth Goding was advocating Amazon’s debut in the publishing world, or rather, virtual publishing.

I love the idea and fully recognize its potential, definitely the future, I’m afraid not mine. I love reading books, I do read every night and love my collection, which I always display proudly on my shelf. Not quite so proudly right now because I have exceeded the amount of avilable space and have started piling books all over the place, but I’m working on that.

Update: GigaOm has an interesting article I completely agree with. Inexpensive ebook reader and earn money through the books. Whoever is likely to buy an ebook reader is certainly not looking to a technology packed gizmo.

Update: Kindle hardware features

  • It doesn’t use a generic RSS aggregator — it’s Amazon-selected blogs only (and they “want every blog they can get”). Blogs that are aggregated by the Kindle get a revenue share with Amazon, since it costs money to get those publications.
  • The side scroller is, as we expected, a polarized PNLCD (pneumatic LCD). It looks amazing.
  • It’s SD only, not SDHC.
  • It uses the Kindle file format (which is a variant of structured HTML), but also accepts Word and PDF files (but only via email since they need to be converted by Amazon), Mobi, HTML, plaintext, and image files like JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Sorry, no RTF.
  • Oh yes, it supports Audible! Oh, and a little, unused file format called MP3.
  • It has a user-replaceable, 1530mAh battery
  • You can bind five or six devices to a single account, and share books you’ve purchased to those accounts. There’s no simultaneous reading lock, so if you and your significant other are on the same Amazon account you can both read the same book at the same time on your Kindles.
  • Amazon is also releasing the Digital Text Platform, which allows users to upload their own content to the Kindle store for sale and download.
  • The $9.99 price point is the sweet spot, but there are books for sale from the Gutenberg project for under $1 (if you don’t want to download them for free yourself), and upwards of that quoted $10 price point as well.
  • Amazon wouldn’t say who makes the device, just that “it’s an OEM in China.”
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Nov 19

Starcraft 2 still far away

By Stefano Buliani Games, Technology, Thoughts, Video No Comments »

I wrote a couple of posts about the game at the time the official announcement was made. I was and am still very excited about it, can’t wait to take control of my armies again and start wasting countless hours of my life.

Ever since the official announcement Blizzard has worked hard to keep the hype going by revealing small portions of the gameplay at a time on their site. Not that they needed to considering the extremely morbid and dedicated community of fans out there.
During the E3 2007 conference a new gameplay video was released. The video was narrated by Chris Sigaty. Note that the label on the video at the time was “internal alpha”. He does mention it will be playable at Blizzcon though and also says there will be a beta (though it might not be a public one).

In case you needed any more reasons to want to go to BlizzCon, they’ve just announced that convention-goers will be treated to a playable demo of StarCraft II. Of course, who knows how much “playable demo” there is to the game yet, but but Blizzard tells us that “attendees can sample the new units and gameplay elements for themselves in multiplayer battles.” — WoWInsider

So Starcraft 2 may not be “that” far away after all. But I want it now!

Blizzard has now release a Terran gameplay video (embedded low-res here). A high definition release of the video is available for download here (roughly 600MB)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcHeto_NSRo&rel=1&border=0]

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Nov 19

Apple tracking its customers

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology 5 Comments »

Uneasy silence reports that hidden inside the weather and stocks applications on the iPhone there’s some code to send your phone IMEI number and other details to a special Apple URL.

Any attempts to modify the URL to exclude the IMEI information will not allow you to retrieve any information in the “Stocks” and “Weather” apps. It is still unknown if any other applications leak information to Apple HQ.

Here’s what Apple’s privacy disclaimer says on the matter:

When you interact with Apple, we may collect personal information relevant to the situation, such as your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, and contact preferences; your credit card information and information about the Apple products you own, such as their serial numbers and date of purchase; and information relating to a support or service issue.

Please folks at Apple, the whole locked thing was bad enough, and now this.
I’m still a big Apple fan and, although I don’t own one yet, have been toying with the idea of buying an iPhone for a while… iPod Touch it is then. And wireless turned off.

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Nov 19

PayPal to launch "Secure Card"

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, Thoughts, WWW No Comments »

The internet-payments-king is set to officially launch a new Secure Card service tomorrow. Thanks to a deal with MasterCard PayPal will be able to generate a “temporary” credit card number for each of your payments so that you won’t have to give away any private information.

The software apparently works only on Windows and puts a small credit-card icon in your task-bar. Whenever you feel like generating a new card all you have to do is double-click on the icon and a new window will pop up with all the details you need (ie number, expiration data, CVV). The software for windows also goes to all the trouble of automatically filling in any ecommerce form you may be presented – this, obviously, only if you use IE.

“From a merchant’s perspective this looks like any other MasterCard transaction,” said Chris George, director of financial products for PayPal. “And it’s just another PayPal purchase to the customer.”

This is PayPal’s answer to the Google checkout system, which tries to make you shopping online easy by directly storing your personal details and automatically authorizing payments with partner merchants. My vote goes to PayPal, and apparently most people agree with me if we look at the data.

In the third quarter ended September, transactions through Web merchants grew 61 percent to $5.38 billion from a year ago, while overall PayPal transaction volume grew 34 percent to $12.22 billion over the same period.

The idea is absolutely great and they have apparently been testing it in private-beta mode for about a year.

The quirk, oh yeah, there is one. As I said before, the software is for windows, with IE plugin. Redmond says thank you.
I say WTF. I am a mac/linux user, can’t you just see your way clear to give me full access to the service? You are a web company. Born and grown on the web, why do you start developing client applications in 2007?

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Nov 18

FaveBot – RSS aggregation unleashed

By Stefano Buliani Technology, Thoughts, WWW No Comments »

I recently came across FaveBot. The site aims at aggregating and filtering RSS feeds from the most renowned news sites and blogs all over the internet and has recently received a major update functionality-wise.

The site doesn’t exactly look beautiful but its minimalistic simple interface makes it incredibly easy to use.
Once the really brief signup process is completed you are all set to go. Through the “My Trackings” tab you’ll be able to specify search keywords and the categories of feeds you want the site to search in. Results are immediately accessible from the “MyDiscoveries” section.
The categories currently available on the site are blogs, books, DVDs, events, music, news, photos, podcasts and videos.

Another spiffy functionality is the possibility to upload your iTunes library file and let the site aggregate for you all relevant news about your favorite bands.

The only thing I find quite confusing is the fact that while you’re allowed to create multiple tracking filters the results are then all mashed together. the only way to access the outcome of a single search is to click on the number of results in the Trackings summary page.
The site would, perhaps, grow at a considerably faster pace by letting its users add new fees to its database. At the moment the list of feeds to be spidered seems to be “hard-coded”.

The idea looks solid and fairly useful. With just a few fixes and usability improvements it could probably turn into a profitable business in its niche between Feedburner and Digg.

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Nov 18

Its Credit and its Crunchy – part 1

By Stefano Buliani Thoughts, Trading, Video No Comments »

Second part here [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br8mOmH9frE&rel=1]

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