For anyone who’s using one of these, the first thing you need to know is the default admin credentials. These weren’t provided to me anywhere, and it took me a while on Google find them.

Default username: cusadmin
Default password: password

Once in, the interface is pretty straightforward, though there are some quirks in the field validation. If you want to change the IP address of the router to a different IP range (including changing the DHCP range), then you need to first disable DHCP, save the config, and then reload the page. If you don’t do this, then you’ll get an error about the DHCP range not matching the subnet. Once that’s done, you can change the IP subnet the unit uses to something far more appropriate than 192.168.0.1.

• They made Half-Life (enough said)
• They made Half-Life 2, and they gave us the gravity gun at the start of the game, rather than holding out on it till the end as some kind of nonsense reward for playing through their game.
• They released Portal, after buying the developers who made the original Narbacular Drop
• They only release games when they’re ready. Sometimes that takes a looong time, and sometimes, not so much.
• They developed Steam, which has changed gaming forever.

“Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer’s use or by creating uncertainty.”

It’s physically tough, remarkably affordable, presents the best integration of content digital acquisition, and can’t hope to compete with other better tablets.

In a word: Amazon. This is exactly the device Amazon would release, and I commend them for playing to who they are, rather than just delivering an iPad knock-off. Amazon’s in this game for the long-haul, and this looks like a fantastic first entry. They’ve addressed the UI issue with aplomb, but I’d still like to see something creative with a color e-ink display down the road.

I recently came across a post from Justin Wise, asking for product suggestions that could help remote workers. It got me thinking about the things I have to do intentionally, as well as the things my office counterparts struggle with. I’ll share briefly some of the things I’ve learned, and then respond to Justin’s request for products that would help.

What Works Great

• The industrial revolution. I am at least “way more” productive when working from home. Email bows beneath my fist, and my task list is consumed like wheat before so much fire. Some of my counterparts in the office frequently complain at the sheer amount of stuff I can get done, leaving them in the dust (office dust too, which is worse than home dust). Last month we started trialing “home working days”, where the guys on our tech team work one day a week from home, to see if they can get more done in those days.
• New kinds of new ideas. Having more time to think and be creative means I come up with new ideas, new ways to solve old problems and so on, typically on a larger scale than I did in the office. I was a great problem solver in the office, but the ideas I got then were helpful on a more micro-scale; they usually arose to solve the problems of the moment. Now I find myself dreaming and crafting new futures, rather than just new ways to get through today & tomorrow.
• Prioritizing. When you get to hold everyone at arm’s length, you can control the flow of chaos to a much better degree, and can decide exactly what will get your attention, and when.

What is a Challenge

• Clear communication. Not being able to just walk into someone’s office, or talk to whomever you want when you want means you must be more strategic and intentional in your communication. It means you can’t just rely on email. You need to schedule face time with people, use video chat and instant messaging. More than anything else, you need to use clear, direct and unambiguous language when you’re writing. What we’re learning though is that just about everything that you must do to communicate better when working from home applies to working in the office as well. If everyone spent the 20 seconds it takes to schedule face time with someone, rather than just barging into their office, imagine the important work that we could all GET FINISHED.
• Team building and encouragement. This is the single most important challenge that I’ve found to date. How can you build a cohesive, well functioning, tight-knit team when you are not physically there?  And how can you avoid treating people like the tasks they accomplish, rather than the human beings they actually are. In the past, when I was my team’s direct manager, we saw a huge boost in their productivity in the two weeks I would spend in the office, and then a notable decline over the next 3 months until I returned. I put this down 90% to the team atmosphere, and 10% to the “when the cat’s away” issue.  The best way we’ve found to alleviate this so far, is to have a local team manager on-site, who then reports to me as Director. The current manager and I have excellent rapport, and it seems that together we’re finding success building the team, encouraging individuals, coaching them towards career goals, and so on. 
• Trust. This is a fascinating challenge, because working from home means you HAVE to learn how to trust things to others. In many ways, you could consider this a strength to working from home, but if you’re like me and you like to control things (to ensure quality, of course), then it’s a challenge. You need to learn how to raise up teams and individuals who understand your goals, purposes and vision. When I first started working from home, this was manifested most often due to things that needed fixing, that I couldn’t physically touch. I had to trust others to be my hands and feet, to get things done. The chief difficulty here is that I could have fixed it faster myself had I been there… but if I had, then John would have never learned, and I would never have developed my patience. Faster isn’t always better. In my current responsibilities, the issue is in letting someone be my mouth, which I find much harder. If Sarah is chairing a meeting in my absence, do I trust that she will effectively communicate the things that I need her to communicate? Will she use my language, or hers? Will she communicate the essence of what actually matters, or will she fluff around on details? If your team can’t communicate what you need them to, the way you need them to, I wager it’s your fault, not theirs. You need to up your game, get your team on the same page as you are… and then get out of the way so they can have a shot at it. Jump on that WebEx call, but mute your mic, and let things play out. Trust them. If they’re not deserving of your trust, I’d question if you deserve to be their manager. (This has been and remains a very difficult issue for me… what I write here is what I aspire to, and have not necessarily mastered.)

What’s Missing

• Better presentations combined with video. Sometimes you really need to be in that room with a whiteboard and action cards and your presentation-software-of-choice… but you can’t be. We’re trying recorded video messages from department directors as a more interesting way of communicating otherwise mundane news to the wider staff, but even then, sometimes your face isn’t enough. I need a tool that lets me combine my video, with other video and graphics, presentation elements, animations etc. to get my message across. Maybe Movenote fills that void? Not sure yet. 
• Super-wide-angle webcams for video conferencing. We have a couple of conference rooms in the office that are routinely used for video conferencing. They can see me fine, but I struggle to see the relevant people in the room. It’s not feasible for us to give everyone in a meeting their own camera, or to invest in a 360 degree camera and the associated software. In very large rooms we’ve set up multiple laptops with webcams so remote people can get multiple views of a room… but this isn’t perfect, and doesn’t work in a small room that’s full of people. Super-wide-angle lenses and webcams would be very helpful here, to let me see everyone standing or sitting around the table.
• Better screen management tools. I typically have video open on my primary monitor, and then content relating to the discussion on a second screen. When doing data comparison or project analysis, I find myself wishing for a third monitor. I need something to help me manage the content of my displays. I’m fairly attached to keeping things fullscreen, but if it works well enough I can be convinced. Google+ Hangouts with Extras looks like it might be useful, letting me combine a Google Doc with video chat.

In October, you gave many people a sneak peak at a new product option, The Raiser’s Edge Mobile. This mobile application is being developed for iOS, Android and Blackberry devices, we were told, and will let us access our own Raiser’s Edge database from outside the enterprise using mobile devices. I believe this is a huge leap in the right direction for Blackbaud, and I am very encouraged to see that this functionality is very near useable. However, developing a mobile app is easy; anyone can develop a mobile application, and connect it to a SQL database. Adding mobile functionality to The Raiser’s Edge will not set you apart, in many ways it won’t even bring you up to par. It’s 2011 (almost 2012!) now, and mobile applications were so 2009.  What you really need to bring to the mobile space, is the tools for us to build out our own solutions against The Raiser’s Edge: you need to release a mobile platform.

We’re told the initial release of The Raiser’s Edge Mobile will focus on getting relevant information into the hands of mobile solicitors/fundraisers/stewards; those folks who make the money flow in, but who aren’t in the office themselves. This would include predominantly read-only access to constituent biographical information, relationships, giving history; and maybe some edit capabilities for notes and actions. I commend you on starting small but effective; this model will let you get a limited set of functionality (and a limited set of security concerns and liabilities) out in front of a subset of your users, allowing you to redesign, tweak, and respond as necessary.

The future may include dashboards, basic reporting, and eventually a suite of applications to allow event management, volunteer scheduling and other broad functionality. According to one product designer, the distant future may include web services and mobile development.

This is where you’ll go wrong, where your legacy will bite you, and where you have the biggest opportunity to stand out. 

The mobile ecosystem is the development platform of today, not the future. And the culture surrounding the mobile ecosystem contains the target audience for consumers as well as developers, right now. While you’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out what The Raiser’s Edge 8 should look & behave like, an entirely new medium has sprung up around you and made RE8 all but irrelevant. Your new “Blackbaud Mobile” product for the UK shows that some of you are aware of this situation, but your insistence on developing a set of functionality for mobile to essentially mirror RE7, shows that the cultural aspect has not yet hit home.

I can hardly blame you, 30+ years of enterprise development imbues you with certain tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. I believe you’re seeing this play out with your Infinity platform. On paper, Infinity is excellent: it provides web service endpoints for everything, role and security access for everything, robust scalability & tailoring, the promise of on-prem or hosted Saas models, and just about everything else that we would have wanted from a big enterprise application, 5 years ago. In conversations in Charleston, it was presented to me as your answer to Salesforce.

But I have to ask, how many third parties are actively developing products against Infinity? How many hobbyists?  How many Apps have been built that sit on top of Infinity services? Why can’t I find Blackbaud Infinity on Twitter?   Where is the huge interest and excitement around Infinity? I believe Infinity is an excellent platform, but you’ve designed it, built it, rolled-it-out and marketed it like an old-school enterprise vendor. And that’s a problem, because today you’re competing with old-school enterprise vendors, new-school enterprise vendors, fresh start-ups with no baggage, and even garage hobbyists. When all my organization’s VPs and our president can’t pull up any given bit of fundraising data that they want, from their iPhone, you’re doing it wrong.

And you can’t hope to do it right, by doing it all yourself. You must open up a mobile API, and encourage an open, mobile platform for app development to arise around RE7. This will attract developer interest like nothing you’ve done in the past. You see, enterprise developers fall into 2 camps: those who develop enterprise applications; and those who develop enterprise applications AND care about software. The ones who care about software write about it, and create conversation, and develop hobbyist apps, and have a following. You can win quiet enterprise developers, but if you win noisy enterprise developers, half the job is done for you. And then there’s everyone else: the same everyone else who developed the majority of the apps in the iOS or Android app stores, the same everyone else who gives to charities, who’s involved in a church, who knows someone who knows someone who has a problem they need to solve.

You need to attract interest, and it’s really not hard to do so if you play the game right. So, release the interfaces that power the RE7 Mobile application, when the application launches. Get it out there, warts and all. It’ll turn heads, guaranteed. Every time you add a new method or new level of functionality, get it out there. A mobile API for RE7 is not a value-add to the Raiser’s Edge Mobile… it in itself is the product you need to be releasing, right now. The Raiser’s Edge Mobile must be your demonstration of what can be accomplished using the tools you’ve authored. Tools that any developer must then be able to use, to create their own interpretations of what is necessary for their organization to accomplish their fundraising goals. Which is what this is all about anyway.

This opens up the possibility of a “Raiser’s Edge App Marketplace”, which only helps to solidify the choice of The Raiser’s Edge as the best fundraising software on the market. Now not only due to your domain knowledge, but due to the rich functionality that is available and continues to become available thanks to the free market. I urge you to open that door in Q1 2012, rather than at some undefined point further down the road “when it’s ready”. The market is ripe, so you need to respond now.

All the best!

Jonathan Puddle

The first, is Schooley Mitchell Telecom Consultants. 

When I asked my predecessor what John Lake did for us, he said “Oh, John’s a great guy. He’ll help you out with just about anything you need. Call him and introduce yourself, trust me, it’ll save your butt.” He was right on the money, over the years as we’ve negotiated internet contracts, web hosting changes, VoIP projects and more, John has been right there at my side offering guidance and a much-needed second opinion.

In the dark reaches of time, all phones and office equipment at Catch The Fire (then TACF) was managed by our Facilities and Maintenance team. I’m not sure when they first started working with Schooley Mitchell, but I found an email this morning from 2004, introducing John to us in IT, under the auspices of “Telecom and internet consultants that look into all that sort of stuff for us and have saved us tons of money.”

In 2005 John was instrumental in us choosing Q9 Networks as our main server collocation facility, when we performed a major upgrade to our video streaming service.  In the intervening years, John has fought hard for excellent pricing from many service providers, and has always been just a phone call away. He’s steered us clear of a couple of dodgy providers, and even when not negotiating contracts directly, he’s been a sound counselor when I’ve been out of my depth in a new territory or industry segment.

If you’re looking to “staff/contract your weaknesses”, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Schooley Mitchell for anything in the telecomms space. They’re a smart, loyal, up-to-date bunch of people. Cheers!

I’d like to suggest that Windows 8 is entirely ready for you to use (with certain caveats) but that you won’t WANT to continue using it, because it’s design is fundamentally flawed. And that flaw lies in it’s greatest potential strength, Microsoft’s big gamble: that there need be no distinction between a desktop OS, a mobile OS, or a 10 foot OS.

In many ways Windows 8 looks and feels like Windows 7, which is great if you like Windows 7 (which I do), but changes begin as soon as you hit the Start/Windows button. What used to give us a Start Menu (which saw little major revision since Windows 95) now gives you a very mobile-inspired “Start pane“, which Microsoft wants you to think of as the primary interface of your computer. The visual style is called Metro: it’s very clean, it’s smooth, it’s touch-optimized, it’s highly reminiscent of the Windows 7 mobile OS as well as the improved Xbox 360 interface. And taken on it’s own, it works very well. 

Some have complained that it’s not very intuitive without touch, I think that’s nitpicking a bit. I got used to the Metro forms and methods very quickly, and came to like a lot of the design and interactive decisions. All of the pre-loaded shortcuts that you see in the image above load “Metro-style apps” which are applications with UI’s written according to the Metro design spec, and which open up in this full-screen, Metro world. Some of them are simple proof-of-concepts and others don’t work great, but the concept is solid.

Where it all starts to break down, however, is in any application that isn’t written with a Metro style. And that’s not because it’s not touch-friendly, or because it’s not sleek and sexy like Metro… but because it tears you out of the Metro experience that you are meant to love. Loading any non-Metro app, or indeed clicking on the “Desktop” button available on the Metro Start pane, throws you back to the tried-and-true Windows desktop.

At that point, you are reminded that you can launch applications simply from your desktop, or from the start bar. You’ll be tempted to fire up Internet Explorer, and start browsing the web. What’s wrong with that, you might ask? Because there’s also a Metro-styled Internet Explorer, and that’s the one you should really be using. Or is it? I don’t remember. I know that I was browsing the web in the Metro IE 10 (which is actually really good), and then I downloaded an application, which took me back to my desktop. After it installed I wanted to keep browsing the web, so I hit the Internet Explorer button on my desktop… but now I’m not where I was before. It’s a different browser, with a totally different session.

Those kinds of problems start to rear their head more and more often, the longer you spend time in Windows 8. I lasted just shy of 2 work days, before the changes between Metro and old-school-desktop just became too jarring. I spent the first day predominantly using the old-school-desktop, and it worked great but wasn’t much of a departure from Windows 7. I spent the second day predominantly using Metro apps, like Metro IE 10, Metro Remote Desktop, Metro Twitter and so on. Which was also great, except when it was throwing me out on street (desktop) when Metro came to end of it’s functionality. After a few hours, I couldn’t bear to click on the Start button anymore, because I knew I’d be faced with a beautiful interface and an even more exciting idea, only to be yanked back from the thrilling precipice of destiny by the drop-forged-steel chains of The Windows Desktop.

Before Windows 8 can really become viable, Microsoft has got to decide between Metro, and the old school desktop. There’s simply no way around it. On phones and 10-foot UIs, Metro will clearly be awesome. I’d like to suggest that it could also rule on the desktop. It will present a great number of challenges, but if Microsoft hopes to move back into the realm of personal-computing-thought-leadership, then it’s time they made some hard calls like this. I LOVE the idea of being able to develop an application once, and have it usable on all Windows powered devices. That’s huge. And to get there, I’m willing to bid farewell to the desktop concept, even if I’m still using a desktop PC. Who’s with me?

…

…

For those interested in some of the technical failings and successes, I made the following notes:

Windows 8 stuff:

• I installed some software that needed the .Net runtime. Windows is now aware of .Net, and can simply enable the Windows feature. I was told “the application wants to enable Windows features”, so I clicked OK, and then “Windows needs to connect to Windows Update to download the necessary features”. That’s brilliance… simple, integrated, and no more asking for the install media.
• I had no problems installing and using OpenVPN, PDFCreator, PDFSAM (PDF Split + Merge), Spotify, Crashplan, WebEx, Google Video Chat, Skype, or Propellerhead Reason 6. 
• Almost all the drivers for my Dell Latitude E6410 were found during install, a notable improvement from Windows 7 in my case. I was able to use Windows 7 drivers without any trouble, for those that were missing. NVidia’s Windows 7 drivers installed totally fine.
• The Metro area runs fullscreen, but only displays on one monitor. You can easily move it from one to the next, but individual apps running in Metro are stuck in that one-monitor environment. This is totally stupid, and could be solved if they made Windows 8 be ALL Metro, ALL the time.
• You can’t have a Metro app open in one monitor, and ANYTHING ELSE in the other monitor. If you’ve ever made Adobe Flash player video fullscreen, and then clicked momentarily on something on your second display, you’ll know what I mean: the Windows fullscreen overlay can only handle one thing at a time, as soon as you want to work on your second display, the fullscreen state is lost. Metro suffers from this as well, and it’s stupid. See the above point.
• The current version of Google Chrome won’t let you re-arrange tabs… and not only that, but if you attempt to, it permanently pulls that tab into it’s own window. Which is a game killer for me. So I installed Firefox, which is generally functional, but suffers from strange GUI rendering problems. Also… Firefox is a crap browser. That was the single biggest reason I went back to Windows 7 after only two days.
• Performance wise, it’s running very fast. Boot up and shut down times were both between around 20-30 seconds for me, which is not quite as good as I get from Windows 7.

IE10 stuff:

• There’s a “correct as you type” spelling feature, which is cool, but I suspect is the cause of strange misspellings and word omissions in things I’m writing. I need to re-read just about everything, and I often find entire words missing (more than usually happens due to my own errors).
• When using WordPress, I can’t insert images into my posts unless I switch to Compatibility Mode.
• In Metro IE, self-closing popups (such as for authentication) work nicely: they appear, load, then disappear, returning you to the Metro IE tab you were on that launched the pop/tab/window. My description of this process is poor… you’ll see it and you’ll like it.
• My company’s video site, CatchTheFire.TV doesn’t play in IE10 at all (in either compatibility mode OR normal mode, Metro and otherwise). That’s a bit of a problem. 
• Google Video (part of our Google Apps suite) doesn’t load at all in Metro IE.
• I gave IE10 a fair shot, and it’s really not a bad browser; I’d place it a firm second behind Google Chrome. However the side loading issues that I ran into (which weren’t wide-spread, but were catastrophic when they occurred) meant I had to install another browser.

The good news is that Windows 8 is remarkably stable/useable already. Getting OpenVPN to work was a cinch, but I’ll describe the steps anyway as a couple of details weren’t immediately obvious.

1. Visit OpenVPN.net to download the client. Head over to the Community Downloads page to find it. For my installation I used the Windows Installer of version 2.2.1. Note that this installer includes the GUI, so you don’t need to go anywhere else for that.
2. Download and run the installation package. I didn’t change any of the options during install. You’ll be prompted to elevate to administrator, as you typically are when you install applications.
3. Once installed, you’ll need to copy your VPN settings as you would in any OpenVPN installation.

Now that you’re ready to go, click on the Windows Start button (or hit the Windows key) to bring up the new metro-style start pane. Scroll/swipe your way to the furthest right pane, where your list of installed applications now sits. You should see OpenVPN GUI as the newest installed app. Before you click that bad-boy, you need to do one final step.

Right click the OpenVPN GUI app (or do something magical if you’re on a touch interface) and the Metro options bar will slide up from the bottom. Click Advanced, and then “Run as administrator.” If you’d not yet figured out how to remove applications from the Metro app list, you should be able to figure that out now from this screenshot ;)

OpenVPN GUI should now open, with elevated rights. It’s normal behaviour is to hide in the system-tray, so you’ll still need to double-click on it to launch your VPN.

Note that the above steps will only launch the app with elevated settings that one time. If you want to configure the app to run with admin rights automatically every time, which I assume you do… then you’ll need to go back to the Metro start pane, right-click the app again, go Advanced and now “Open file location”.  This opens the directory containing the shortcut. Right-click the “OpenVPN GUI” shortcut, hit Properties, and on the Shortcut tab hit Advanced. Check off “Run as administrator”, click OK, Apply (you’ll be prompted to give permission for this app to run as Administrator), OK, and you’re done. Running OpenVPN GUI from the Metro start pane will now prompt you to click OK as you’ve been used to in the past.

Enjoy!

If you didn’t attend the conference, then know that it was a fairly straightforward 2 day affair, with morning keynotes and daytime workshops/sessions. It was hosted by the Victoria Park Plaza, and made use of their great facilities on the lower 2 floors. The first evening featured a drinks reception and afterparty-of-sorts at a bar across the street.

The Conference

Overall, Blackbaud threw a solid event. They’ve obviously got experience in assembling workshops and sessions, and knowing which of their customers can take the stage to help showcase their solutions. I obtained full value from the event by the end of the first workshop, to be honest. The keynote sessions were good, but not great: Tony Elischer was the main speaker and while he certainly had good points, he was a bit too all-over-the-place for me. The session on the second day with an ecommerce expert was decent, but I found the afternoon panel discussion to be mind-numbingly boring. I’ll excuse that in this case as someone like myself wasn’t necessarily the target audience, for a talk on social networking trends. The vendor Marketplace was small but effective, and I’ve already made some great connections with the vendors there. Two of them offered products that I have a need for immediately! Not working directly with Blackbaud Europe, I didn’t spend a lot of time with the Blackbaud people in the Marketplace, but I did connect with one account manager about Blackbaud Mobile.

Big Reveals

Blackbaud revealed 2 big things at the conference. One was an entirely new product, called Blackbaud Mobile, and the other was a mobile interface for The Raiser’s Edge, letting you access your existing RE data from your smartphone or tablet.

Blackbaud Mobile is a robust mobile and social giving solution. If you’ve ever seen a donations short-code (“Text GIVE to 5555″, for example), then you’ll understand the first part of Blackbaud Mobile: generating those SMS codes and numbers. That’s truly the easy part, and there are a number of vendors offering that today, albeit with various flaws and difficulties. Add to SMS shortcode generation:

• the ability to send outgoing SMS messages
• QR code generation, so you can slap a QR code on your poster or product
• social embedding, so you can add your SMS shortcodes and QR codes easily to your Facebook pages, Twitter, etc.
• HTML embedding, so you can do the same for your own pages
• campaign creation and management, so all of the above can be segregated
• analytics on the whole lot, so you can see what methods and mediums are working for each of your campaigns.

I’m pretty excited, it’ll be my first major speaking opportunity, and it’s on a topic that I’m truly passionate about. These Leaders conferences are fantastic, and this year’s event is really open to everyone involved in church ministry, leadership or otherwise. I highly recommend you consider coming up to Toronto in January!

We’re using The Raiser’s Edge for all of our larger constituent management, but we felt we owed it to the pastors to get them a best-in-breed tool, which we’d then integrate as necessary with Raiser’s.

Update: I will be speaking on this very subject, at a conference for pastors and church admin teams in January 2012. You should totally come! Click here for details.

Update: I apologise if there are no line-breaks in this. WordPress is messing up my formatting today.

Update: I’ve chosen to include a sanitized version of our Needs Assessment. The link is further down… it will NOT match your needs exactly, but feel free to use it as a template. Please don’t distribute it online yourself.

I spent some time looking online, and a number of blogs were hugely helpful in our early research phase, especially that of Joel Lingenfelter. After a few weeks, we settled on the following products to examine:

• Fellowship1
• Shelby Arena
• Church Community Builder
• ConnectionPower
• ThinkMinistry MinistryPlatform

I’ve always loved reading, but becoming a father to 1, then 2 boys, and taking on new responsibilities at work had certainly eaten into my reading time. The impassioned plea by Julien caught my attention; you really need to read it in it’s entirety, but here are a few quick points that I took away:

• All the wisdom in the world is contained in books
• You’ll learn new skills and make you better at your job
• You’ll develop a habit of completion
• The internet is FULL of crap
  
• Increasing the pressure (taking on an impossible task) is the best way to ensure you’ll succeed

The Call of Cthulhu - H.P. Lovecraft
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
The Children of Hurin - JRR Tolkien
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
The Epic of Gilgamesh – Introduction by NK Sanders 
The Aeneid – Virgil
The Food of the Gods – H.G. Wells
Homecoming: The Memory of Earth – Orson Scott Card
Homecoming: The Call of Earth - Orson Scott Card
Homecoming: The Ships of Earth - Orson Scott Card

That’s 18 books, which means I am right around my target. I haven’t managed to stick to 20 pages a day, but when I’ve had the chance (such as while travelling) I’ve been reading a lot more than 20 pages. Since getting a Kindle for my birthday, my reading has jumped quite a bit, as has the number of books I’ve been actually buying, rather than borrowing.

I’ve started traveling more regularly for work, and at the start of this year I set myself a goal of reaching 26 books. That works out to roughly 20 pages a day, so I tend to need multiple books on a 2 week work trip. That’s a nonstarter for me, so I asked (begged) my wife for an Amazon Kindle for my birthday. She arranged it, a few friends chipped in, and I happily read books now in predominantly digital form. This week I read Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft. It was deranged and brilliant!

But this post isn’t about the Kindle, it’s what Amazon needs to follow up the Kindle with… and I can’t think of a better name for it, than the Ignite. This will be Amazon’s entry into the tablet market, and as others have started to point out, it offers the best hopes of competition against Apple. I’m not saying it will unseat the iPad… that’s an argument not worth making, but it could provide the best alternative to the iPad. As I mentioned, Ars have written about it, posting some research from Forrester. There’s a lot of weight gaining behind the theory that Amazon is the best positioned to offer a product like this, in terms of market clout, brand recognition, trust, ecosystem and so on. Amazon has rated in the past as the most trusted company in the United States, and it’s one today that has built a strong and growing portfolio. Many people will be unaware of anything people the “online book store”, but even that store today operates in local varieties all over the world, selling everything from books to music to computers.

Beneath that, lies Amazon Web Services. If you’re unfamiliar with Amazon Web Services, then you need to go and talk to just about any web start-up, and almost everyone else, to learn that “AWS is the internet.” Not quite, but almost. AWS is an absolutely game changer in the technology space, and is building up strong revenues for Amazon, and continuing to build incredible trust in the Amazon brand. This is all further cash in the bank for Amazon, which lets them take a gamble on a risky move into the tablet & PC space.

As Ars pointed out, Amazon are well positioned to take a loss on hardware sales for a tablet, which other manufacturers are not likely to want to do, and Apple refuses to do. Apple makes money hand-over-fist compared to other manufacturers, largely because they control the hardware chain. To come to Apple’s party, you’ve got to pay to play, and Amazon have the resources to do that. I also think they’re ballsy enough to do it too. Microsoft sunk (lost) a billion dollars into the first Xbox, but are reaping rewards now on the Xbox 360. Having secured a 1st or 2nd place in the market, depending on which area of the market you look at.

What Amazon needs to decide upon, is who to make their hardware, how to handle the screen, and what to do with the OS.

Hardware

The Kindle hardware is lovely, simple, well formed and fits it’s purpose exactly. I would bet that Amazon can pull off a similarly well-done job for a tablet… but if they need a hardware partner (manufacturing process, design, supply chain), I suggest they look no further than Nokia. Nokia has proven they can make beautiful, durable hardware devices, and they own unbeatable brand recognition. Remember how Amazon had the most trust in the US? Well Nokia came out tops in the same study… in Hungary, and Italy, and Sweden, and Poland, and Russia, and Taiwan, and Thailand, and CHINA. Nokia also has a problem… their old software sucks (Symbian) and their new software (Windows Phone) is the wrong choice. Nokia needs a win, and by becoming Amazon’s hardware partner they could get that win.

Screen

The Kindle’s screen is absolutely boss. It is THE defining feature of the device, and it is one of the main reasons I have no interest in buying an iPad. The Kindle does what it needs to do perfectly, and the screen is the main enabler. Running on an e-ink display, power is only needed to change the content of the screen, not to keep it running. There’s no backlight, meaning it’s just like reading a book; there’s no light being projected unnaturally into your eyes. The low-power usage means I only have to charge it every couple of weeks. I regularly forget that it even needs charging at all… is that a fault? Amazon needs to capitalize on this success, but must bring colour and touch to the ball game. The obvious best-choice there is the Pixel Qi (pronounced Chi) as Ars pointed out. This bad boy can run as a “dead” e-ink screen or at the flip of a switch, change to glorious HD colour. Flipping a switch is lame, so Amazon will need to come up with a clever gesture or other method to manage this change. One of the main reasons I’m holding out on the iPad, is because it’s battery life sucks. It just does. Contrast “I charge my iPad daily” with “I forget that my Kindle is an electronic device”. Amazon, do the right thing, and make me forget my tablet is electronic.

Operating System

In the tablet world, this will be deciding factor more than anything else. The assumption is that the device-which-should-be-called-the-Ignite will run Android, because it’s the next best bet. I’m on the fence on this one, but I can’t really see many great options for Amazon. The likelihood that they’ve been developing an amazing OS for the last 5 years in secret is fairly slim… but they could always pick up Web OS for a bargain. Android is probably the best bet in this case, but it remains to be seen if Amazon can polish it nicely. HTC have done a fantastic job with their polishing of Android… so if Amazon can take a page from their, and really make it their own, then it has a good chance to compete.

If Amazon enters at a low price point, with great battery life (reliant on a cunning screen), with a friendly, usable OS, then I think they’ll be off to the races.