Enjoy!

- Rupert Murdoch, The Cable Show 2009, Washington, D.C.

The business model traditional media firms have counted on for decades has been rapidly slipping away. Many are struggling to get a footing in this new digital world - one that is fundamentally different from their far more predictable analog one. What Mr. Murdoch is grasping for here is a solution that will let him fit the new reality he’s confronting into the traditional media framework he has become so invested in. Unfortunately, the thinking behind that approach is more wistful than strategic. The publisher-centric model is dead, and has been for quite a few years. Any media company that wants to succeed in the future will need to come to terms with what it really means to be a publisher in our digital world:

Consumers are in control:

People today want access to content on their own terms. You can’t bundle content together as a publisher and expect that that’s the way people are going to consume it. Aggregation doesn’t take place in the middle any more - it happens at the edge. People will pick their own ‘best-of-breed’ for each topic they have an interest in. They may like the bias of their local news provider for sports coverage, certain blogs for political or financial coverage, and a set of mainstream news sources for global news coverage. Now that people have a choice, bundling doesn’t work anymore. Each stream of content a media organization produces will need to live or die based on it’s own merits and the audience it can attract. For media companies today, it isn’t about being big. It isn’t even about being good. It’s about knowing who their audience is and bringing them compelling and unique value. If they fail at that, their brand alone won’t be enough to carry them into the future.

Content isn’t scarce - attention is:

Attention is the currency of the digital age - not content. The digital world has opened publishing up to all comers. The ‘gatekeeper’ role of the analog world has gone away, never to return. This means that consumers now have many choices vying for their time and attention. They have - by necessity - become very selective where they choose to spend it. If any media firm wants to maintain and grow an audience, they need to aggressively compete for that limited attention. The biggest mistake any of them can make is to think that what they produce is irreplaceable. There is an incredible body of insightful and compelling content being produced by individuals and small organizations from all around the web. NO media organization - no matter how big or popular they are today - can afford to ignore this new reality.

Visibility is critical:

If you want to remain relevant, you need to remain visible. You need to reach out to where people are and fit in to the ways they want to consume content. Demanding that your audience must come to you on your terms is simply arrogant. And expecting them to pay for the privilege is probably a fatal mistake. If anybody is really considering yanking their content off of Google, perhaps they should talk to Howard Stearn first. Howard was one of the biggest names on radio. He had a multi-media brand with enormous draw and influence. When he decided to make the jump over to Sirius - the satellite radio station - people couldn’t stop talking about it. He was given a 500 million dollar payday to effectively abandon his ‘free’ audience and move behind the pay wall of satellite radio. Some percentage of that audience - his real core fans - were willing to pony up the money and follow him over. But most simply found something else to take his place. It might not have been as good, but it was there and it was free. When all was said and done, Stearn effectively cashed out of being relevant. When he recently talked on his program of retiring at the end of his contract with Sirius, nobody even shrugged. It really didn’t matter anymore. Out of sight. Out of mind. Out of luck.

Leverage matters more than size:

There was a time in the media world when ‘big’ was ‘good’. Size gave media organizations reach and distribution. It gave them the scale they needed to be cost efficient. It let them attract the talent they needed to produce compelling content. And that let them grow their audience in ways they could easily monetize. It was a model that built on itself, making the strong even stronger and discouraging competition. For decades, it worked brilliantly for them. Owning a media channel in a large market was like having a license to print money.

But then the world turned digital.

Today all of these large, vertically integrated media companies are struggling to survive. They are run by bureaucracies that lack both the will and agility to adapt. They recognize that the world around them is changing, but are effectively paralyzed by their structural ties to the past - the scope of change demanded by the digital world is simply too painful for most to contemplate.

But rushing in to the void are countless smaller competitors that are perfectly positioned to thrive in the new world order of countless competitors and razor thin margins. Some of them are simple editorial teams, picking out the best content already published on the web, adding their own brief comments, and linking over to the original sources (eg - www.engadget.com). Others are focused on narrow niches, but explore them at a depth that the general media can’t match (eg - www.gamesindustry.biz). Still others are based on new revenue sharing models that compensate writers based on the traffic they generate instead of paying high salaries to full time journalists (eg - www.seekingalpha.com). And others are just offering new and innovative ways to share ideas and publish information (eg - www.twitter.com).

What all of these upstart media businesses have in common is that they are looking for ways to leverage the scale of the internet instead of trying to compete with it head on. By exploiting this leverage, many of these young media companies will be able to find success while their more traditionally structured competitors struggle.

For many of the big media organizations, today’s market reality is a tough pill to swallow. In the content rich digital world we live in today, what they are producing - no matter how good it is - simply isn’t as valuable as it used to be. Supply and demand operate in the digital information market the same way they do in physical markets. A growing supply of news means fewer clicks per source. And it also means less revenue per click. There’s no way around the math.

So why is Google doing so well?…

Despite the protestations of Murdoch and others, it isn’t because they are somehow stealing everyone’s content. Any media company that wanted to could opt out of all of the search engines tomorrow if they thought that would solve their problems. But they know it won’t. The fact is, Google is doing well because they are in the position of distributing everyone’s clicks to them. Google is in the wholesale end of the click stream business where scale does matter, and that gives them the massive volume they need to make the tiny per-click margins they get pay off. Rather than being a gatekeeper, Google now fills the role of concierge - directing people to the things on the web they are looking for. The media companies, in contrast, live downstream from Google in the far more competitive retail end of the click stream business. And with the collapse of their gatekeeper model, this has become a far less lucrative place for them to do business in.

So what easy options do media organizations have these days?

Not too many…

If they decide to opt out of Google, they will become invisible. They’ll need to spend huge sums marketing themselves just to stay on the map. And if they try to charge for access to their content, some people may pay but most will simply replace them with sources that don’t. And if they decide to stay search-able and free, they’ll need to cut their cost structure significantly to align it with what are likely to be significantly reduced revenues. The facts on the ground have changed, and things are not going back to the way they used to be.

It’s clear the media companies don’t think any of this is fair, but to those on the wrong side of the shift, disruptive change rarely is. Being part of a digital world is the cold reality all of them must come to terms with. As painful as it may be for them, today’s media organizations will need to take some bold steps to shed their legacy operational model, streamline their cost structure, maximize the value of their existing assets, embrace technology without reservation, and aggressively pursue the new opportunities being digital offers.

But first they need to stop blaming Google.

The clock is ticking and they have a lot of work ahead of them…

In Part 2 of this post, I offer some advice to media organizations on what they should do to fundamentally transform their businesses and better leverage their assets and capabilities in the digital world.

This show was an eye-opener for me. It was the first time I saw anyone take science, math, religion, geography, the arts, and culture, and weave them together into a seamless historical fabric. It took the disciplines I had been taught as isolated subjects throughout my entire educational career and combined them in a way that was so much greater than the sum of the individual parts. By demonstrating how the progress that took place in each of these seemly discrete disciplines was actually interconnected, Burke brought a context to the fields of knowledge I possessed that made them so much richer. Even more important, CONNECTIONS helped changed my thinking on a topic of critical significance to our future.

How we approach the process of education in our society…

If you think about it, give or take a few outliers, the entire population of the planet will have been completely replaced a century from now. And the one thing that everyone can depend on is that change will be a continuous and accelerating part of that process. It will sweep away old roles and institutions, and introduce new concepts and capabilities that would be difficult for us to extrapolate from what we know today.

In large part, it is the job of our educational systems to empower us with the wisdom, knowledge and tools we will need to operate effectively in this future world we can barely imagine. If you look at the state of education in the world today, it would be fair to say that it is struggling to keep up. While tools and subject matter have certainly changed over the past 100 years, the process and framework at the heart of how we educate has seen little innovation.

I’ve embedded an excellent talk given at a TED Conference a few years ago by Sir Kenneth Robinson - a deep thinker on the nature of creativity. During the presentation, Sir Kenneth focuses in on the shortcomings of our current approach to education - specifically the way it seems to elevate the importance of conformity while devaluing the role of creativity.

There are two great quotes from this presentation that I would like to call specific attention to. The first concerns a willingness to take chances:

What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

The more our world changes, the less we can look to the past for clear answers. Success in the future will be far more dependent on our ability and willingness to creatively apply the knowledge we have to new situations that lack a precedent of action.

The next rather long quote talks specifically to the nature of intelligence and creativity in people:

We know three things about intelligence: One, it’s diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

The importance of a multidisciplinary understanding of the world that Sir Kenneth references in this presentation was also the key point made in the CONNECTIONS series. The truly great inventions and discoveries didn’t come from a linear progression of research and reason. They freely crossed the boundaries of academic thought, often forming from the chaotic confluence of passion, creativity, insight, and intellect. They came to be not as a single moment of brilliance, but as a series of smaller breakthroughs that ultimately culminated in something profound and transformational.

This process defined the course of our history.

And it will also define how well we deal with our future…

This entire presentation by Sir Kenneth is both insightful and thought provoking. While I recognize that this video is fairly long, it is well worth watching in it’s entirety.

That was clearly what Sony had in mind when they built the PlayStation 3. Their PlayStation 2 game console was the undisputed market leader, easily besting both Microsoft’s original XBox and Nintendo’s Gamecube. Sony wanted their new console to deliver a knockout blow to their rivals, and went all-out on both hardware and design. They took the incredibly advanced “Cell Processor” multi-core CPU (developed jointly with IBM & Toshiba), a custom graphics chip set developed by nVidia, a RAMBUS designed memory interface, and a BluRay disc player for both games and movies, and packaged it in a sleek, curved, glossy case offering digital audio and HD video as standard features. It was a far cry from the boxy, plastic look of consoles past. Sony was so confident in the PS3 that they were willing to give Microsoft nearly a year lead in the market with their XBox 360 - and a $100 price advantage - to make sure they could bake all of this technical goodness into their console.

And they didn’t even consider Nintendo to be in the competition.

But to the surprise of many people, things haven’t worked out quite the way Sony planned. In fact, neither technical firepower nor case design have proven to be a factor in the success of any of the current generation of gaming consoles.

So how have things turned out in the marketplace?

Sony’s PS3, the most powerful of the three main gaming consoles, takes third place with 20 million units sold. Microsoft’s XBox 360, built using high-end but more mainstream components, takes second with a little under 30 million units sold. Claiming first is Nintendo’s Wii, a relatively modest technology platform estimated to have sold somewhere between 35 and 40 million units.

In short, low-tech and boxy handily beat hi-tech and sexy.

While price may play some role in this - the Wii sells for just $249 compared to $399 for the PS3 - I don’t believe it’s the main factor behind it. Microsoft lowered the XBox 360’s price to $199 almost a year ago but hasn’t seen any real gain in market share as a result.

What really propelled Nintendo from also-ran to market leader was their decision not to fight the battle on Sony or Microsoft’s terms. Instead, they decided to risk everything on an unproven, innovative design with the potential to shift the market in their favor. While both Microsoft and Sony built their consoles with the traditional hard-core gamer in mind, Nintendo choose to focus on expanding the gaming market to include an entirely new demographic - casual gamers.

Nintendo’s innovative wireless Wii controller changed the nature of console gaming. It swapped out complex button presses for intuitive gestures. It turned traditionally sedentary game play into a physically challenging social activity. It created a buzz that helped them build awareness and momentum. It gave game developers an exciting new model to design games around. It promised a whole new way to look at gaming.

And most importantly - it delivered on that promise…

Nintendo’s launch of the Wii console is a case study on the power of disruptive innovation. They were able to jump from last place to first, with their Wii beating out two technically superior products funded by companies that placed massive marketing muscle behind them. But despite it’s success, Nintendo can ill afford to become complacent. There is a new competitor with an equally disruptive approach now entering the gaming arena.

Apple…

Gaming on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch is really starting to take off. Apple has already sold over 30 Million of these devices, all of which are capable of playing fairly innovative games based on multitouch and motion sensing.

Apple’s approach to gaming is unique and compelling for more than just the innovative interface their devices offer game developers. Each iPhone and Touch comes with a built in software storefront - the App Store. The App Store lets any user shop for software right on their device, buy it with a single click, and have it downloaded in a matter of minutes. Apple handles all of the fulfillment and administration associated with the transaction for a percentage of the sale price. This gives even individual developers a way to reach a mass audience - all they need is talent and a great idea. It democratizes console game development in a way that no other platform vendor has attempted to do.

Apple’s approach to gaming will also let them grow the audience for gaming to what I’d call the opportunistic gamer - someone with a few minutes to kill while waiting in a line or sitting in a cab. Both the iPhone and Touch are multifunction devices you are likely to carry with you all the time, making them ideal platforms for this type of gamer. And as a potential marketplace, the opportunistic gamer probably represents the the biggest demographic ever targeted by any platform.

At the end of the day, success in the gaming arena will depend on innovation. This innovation can happen on many different fronts - technical, social, and commercial. We are just at the beginning of what will likely be a period of rapid innovation in the gaming world. Some will be evolutionary. Some revolutionary.

And a rare few may be disruptive enough to transform this entire industry…

For a timely case study, consider what’s happened in the print news industry.

A decade ago, newspapers were high-margin businesses. Because entry costs were high and distribution was physical, they could effectively operate as localized monopolies with little competitive pressure. Outside of a few nationally recognized publications, most newspapers served a particular city or region, and local businesses saw them as the most effective way to advertise to the regional demographic they wanted to reach. When they combined this with the classified advertising component of their business, newspapers enjoyed an operating model that was both predictable and highly profitable. That, in turn, attracted larger media conglomerates who started buying up these local newspapers, often at incredible valuations.

It was a great time to be in the newspaper business.

Fast forward to today. The newspaper business is on the brink of collapse. The industry has spent the last several years struggling unsuccessfully to recreate itself into something that is both relevant and financially viable. The key factor in this reversal of fortune has been - no surprise - the accelerating adoption of the internet. It isn’t that everyone in the news industry missed what was happening here or simply chose to ignore it. Most understood the corrosive effect the internet was having on their traditional business model and created their own web properties to try and offset it. What they quickly found out, however, was that the revenue they can produce from online advertising is no where close to what they are used to getting from print advertising. This has left them in a ‘no win’ position. They are sitting at a significant tipping point in the business being asked to choose between a new revenue model that can’t sustain the business they’ve built, and a current revenue model is just plain unsustainable.

And that’s the dilemma all incumbents ultimately face.

During periods of disruptive change, the only solutions that are rational for an incumbent to consider are ones that contain some recognizable form of themselves at the new “end state”. They don’t have the luxury of being able to envision optimal future states, and working backwards to reconstitute the assets they have into a form that can be successful there. They need to work from where they are and find a way to move forward.

But their obligations to the present can be overwhelming…

The additional irony here is that the options they can realistically pursue are likely limited by the very elements that made them successful businesses in the first place. This is the point where the advantages they had as incumbent’s can come back to punish and even paralyze them.

• Solid Revenues - Revenue is something that may be pried from a company’s hands, but is almost impossible for them to let go of it on their own. They’ve typically developed an operational cost structure that depends on it - one that’s optimized for the current business model and could be difficult and disruptive to change. If a company is publicly traded, they have shareholder expectations that they are obliged to consider, and that puts pressure on them to optimize for the near term even at the expense of the long term. Before making any significant changes to their business/revenue model, a company will need a reasonable understanding of the current market dynamic. Unfortunately, while it may be possible to predict that a tipping point is coming, timing when it will arrive is really just guesswork. And that means most companies won’t make any significant changes until after a tipping point has been crossed. By then, it may be too late.
• Top Talent - The ‘Top Talent’ at most firms is the driving force that effectively runs the business. They provide both the strategic vision and tactical execution a company depends on to succeed, and they are typically well paid for doing so. The challenge here is that these individuals have a vested interest in maintaining the model that rewards them so well. They will instinctively direct their considerable talents toward optimizing and preserving the status quo, and not risk taking effective action until failure seems imminent. During periods of disruption, “Top Talent” can move rapidly from being an major asset to an expensive liability.
• Access To Capital - Any firm that tapped into the debt markets or accessed credit lines or private equity has taken on an obligation to service that debt. Debt is an anchor that ties a company to the past. It requires a level of cash flow beyond immediate operational expenses. It is normally tied up in longer term projects, some of which may no longer be relevant or economically viable. It may have operational triggers attached to it that may force early payment or changes in rates. In times of change and realignment, debt is a liability that can destroy an otherwise viable business.
• Economies Of Scale - When a company points to their “Economies Of Scale”, what they usually mean is that they have optimized their processes and relationships to cost effectively deliver very specific services the market is looking for. Almost without exception, optimization comes at the expense of flexibility and adaptability. So when a marketplace is in transition, optimized organizations can find themselves at a loss for how to respond, and become extremely vulnerable to more nimble rivals.

While I used what’s happening in the newspaper industry as an example of struggling incumbents, this isn’t a situation that is unique to traditional industries. In fact, many technology companies find themselves in very similar situations.

Sun Microsystems, the company that powered the first push to the internet, never recovered from the market crash of 2000. After building a reputation and business model based on proprietary hardware and software, they were never able to adapt when the industry shifted to high performance commodity systems running open source software. Even though they have remained technically innovative with developments in areas like JAVA and the NFS file system, they never regained commercial viability. The rumor circulating now is that they will likely be acquired by IBM. If that doesn’t happen, I could easily see them shuttering the business.

Even the massive, technology savvy firm Microsoft is struggling with changes that are happening in the marketplace. Each of their key business franchises is under pressure from significant long term shifts that are taking place. Many corporations are starting to view the internet & browser as their real operating platform - not the desktop operating system and office suite. They have shown little interesting in doing costly upgrades to Microsoft’s Vista or Office 2007, while their investment in web delivered platforms and services remains reasonably healthy. Microsoft’s server business is being threatened by open source technologies, specifically, Linux, MySQL, and Lucene, that offer exceptional performance with no licensing fees. And the big macro trend - cloud computing - is maturing rapidly. It has the potential to overtake the traditional software industry and reshape it significantly. Microsoft has jumped into this space with their own Cloud-based platform called Azure, but it isn’t clear that this could become a viable replacement for their existing business models. What essence of what Microsoft is struggling to respond to is a an irreversible move to low cost or free software and services. This shift is starting to erode their pricing power, and is commoditizing any proprietary value that may have delivered in the past. This hasn’t reached the tipping point quite yet, but it is coming. When it arrives, it will likely undermine their entire business model and threaten their survival in any form that resembles the Microsoft of today.

Change like this is a constant. It ruthlessly prunes anything that lacks value, and provides an opportunity for the new and innovative to grow and flourish. There’s a quote from American social writer and philosopher Eric Hoffer that speaks to this so eloquently:

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

The disruptive change he observed in this quote isn’t something new. It’s the force that has shaped our history while bringing the promise of opportunity to our future.

And its happening faster than ever.

In an excellent article Follow the Money in yesterday’s WSJ Online, three prominent venture capitalists discuss this topic in the broader context of investment opportunities in the clean energy space. While the article is definitely worth reading in it’s entirety, there is one quote from it I’d like to focus on here.

In talking specifically about the need to build out our power transmission infrastructure, Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures had this to say:

By the way, we don’t need government to build transmission. If we solve the eminent-domain problem, there’s enough money in transmission that private industry would build all of it. They [governments] have to give you right of way and eminent-domain rights. So, it’s not that difficult a problem to solve, and it’s not about money.

Everything Vinod says about private capital being more than ready to build out the grid is completely true. I’ve verified this with my friend Edward J. Terillo, a former energy analyst who knows this space intimately. Money is sitting on the sidelines waiting for the chance to do this build-out.

What’s holding this money back is that these proposed power lines need to run somewhere - and nobody wants that ’somewhere’ to be anywhere close to them.

The center of politics when it comes to rebuilding our aging power infrastructure isn’t in Washington. It’s in ‘Anytown, USA’. Most people probably don’t pay much attention to the specifics of this issue. They may not know the difference between traditional power lines and the proposed ’smart grid’, and have no real understanding of the stress our current national power transmission system is under. But what they will pay close attention to - and in serious numbers - is the mere suggestion that new power lines might be running through their neighborhood. What they absolutely know is that a power line running anywhere near their house will reduce its value in a significant way.

And they will do everything in their power to oppose it.

Mr. Khosla points out that one solution to this is for the government to grant these companies “right of way and eminent-domain” so that they can make these investments unencumbered. Based on that, he believes that getting our power distribution infrastructure upgraded is “…not that difficult a problem to solve”.

I don’t see it that way.

While mandating ‘rights-of-way’ may be sound in theory, what it means in practice is that the federal or state government will need to co-opt the rights of local townships and force them to permit these build-outs on lands within their jurisdiction. It also means that homeowners impacted by these mandated rights-of-way, while probably being marginally compensated for any land taken from them, would be unlikely to receive compensation for any negative impact it may have on their home values. I can’t imagine that there are that many people in Congress or the state legislatures that would want to have their name tied to any legislation like this.

But even assuming that these government bodies could marshal the political will to wrest control of these lands from local municipalities (not a given by any means), they would still need to determine where any new power lines sould be run. And that is where this process would really spin out of control. A broad collation of local rights groups and environmentalists will certainly launch a range of challenges to tie the planning process up in court. Individual homeowners that are impacted by these lines will be able to do the same. Politics will come in to this at every level, with federal agencies going out of their way to present plans that won’t disproportionately impact any specific demographic, while local politicians will look to protect their electoral power base.

And somewhere in that mess, the actual engineers might have something to say as well.

Perhaps a more practical solution, when all costs are considered, is to run the grid underground when it passes near or through any populated area. On a per mile basis, it costs about five times as much to bury the lines as it does to run them on towers. However, taking that approach may stir up far less opposition - utilities lines of all sorts are buried all around us - and might even end up costing less on a full project life cycle basis than delaying implementation by decade or more and dealing with the cost of endless court challenges. We should probably also think more about local/edge based power generation - especially solar - and how that could change the demand profile a national level grid would need to handle.

Figuring out an approach that works for everyone is going to be tough. There are a lot of different interests with a stake in this, and political minefields are everywhere. Attempting to impose a federally mandated solution will meet fierce opposition that will cut across party lines. It will require all sorts of deal-making and back-scratching to get any type of agreement in place.

And it will take time.

As Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” And that will prove to be especially true when it comes to the politics of power…

Why?

Because with the release of Kindle Reader for iPhone, Amazon has just added 10 Million potential new ebook readers to their ecosystem. The reader is free, so there is no commercial reason why everyone couldn’t download it. I would also propose that there is a high correlation between people with iPhones and people that already have accounts on Amazon. That is a powerful combination, and one that will hopefully convince more authors and publishers to jump into the digital arena and make their books available on the Kindle.

Setting it up is a snap. I downloaded the application and entered my Amazon account ID and Password. That was all I needed to do. It came back with a list of Kindle compatible books I had already purchased and let me load them. Kindle for iPhone is more than just a stand alone reader - it also works well as a companion device to the Kindle 2 reader. When I opened a book on my iPhone it let me sync to the most recent page I was on on my Kindle 2.

The reader itself is simple to use. It opens to the current book you are reading at the page you left off. You can also touch the HOME button and pick another book if you want to read something else. The display is well laid out and easy to read. You can turn pages just by flicking your finger on the screen in either direction. You can also add bookmarks or change the font size to something readable for you.

It’s simple and easy - exactly what Amazon should be doing here.

This could be the game changer I’ve been waiting for.

The Packaging:
The first thing I noticed was the attention to detail that went into the packaging - it was almost Apple-like in its design. The outside of the box looks like a standard Amazon cardboard shipping package. On the “Tear Here” tag on the side of the box, the words “Once upon a time…” are printed - a nice, subtle touch. Opening the box, there is a covered tray holding the Kindle itself, the charging cable, and a thin, fan-fold “getting started” brochure. When you remove the cover from tray, the Kindle 2 is sitting on top, and has some basic instructions on it’s screen for charging it up and turning it on.

All in all, the new Kindle makes a great first impression.

The Device:
Unlike the slightly awkward feel of the previous generation Kindle, the new Kindle 2 feels refined and balanced. It has traded in the angular look for a smooth, rounded, very modern appearance. The ergonomics are really good. It’s easy to hold and use the device with either hand, and it is far more difficult to accidentally press any buttons. The new 16-grayscale display is great upgrade, especially when it comes to e-content that contains images - newspapers, periodicals and web content (more on this later). Even for books, the new display felt easier on my eyes than the monochrome screens of both my Sony reader and the Kindle 1.

Navigation:
Navigation on the Kindle is handled via a small five way joystick, Next and Previous Page buttons, and Home and Back buttons. Collectively, you can use them to navigate any menu or page. For the most part navigating books is dead simple, but moving through non-book content isn’t always that intuitive. That said, once you figure it out it isn’t difficult to do.

Buying Content:
Purchasing content is simple. One option is to shop online at Amazon.com and purchase books, newspapers, magazines, etc from the Kindle store. These purchases can be sync to your Kindle over Whispernet without needing to attach the reader directly to your computer. The other option is to buy content right from the device itself. Though lacking the refined shopping experience of the web, it is straight forward to find books you are interested in and to then purchase them with a single click. They are downloaded immediately. You can also download the first chapter of any book for free, letting you browse the catalog until you find something you’d may be interested in buying.

You can also purchase subscriptions to publications that will be delivered automatically to your Kindle. You could have the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal download daily to read on your daily commute or even when you’re traveling. While incredibly convenient, some of these subscriptions are quite expensive when compared to the cost of their online or physical counterparts. They also don’t have advertising (which I don’t understand) and lack some of the content found in the other formats as well. They come with a 14 day free trial, and I would recommend trying it out before you buy it to see if it works for you.

Adding Your Own Content:
Beyond purchasing, you can also put free content or content you already own on the Kindle. Every Kindle is assigned an email address in the form of name_of_your_choice@kindle.com. You can attach PDF’s or office documents to an email message you send to this address and they will be delivered to your device. As a part of the emailing process, Amazon will convert these attachments to a Kindle friendly format on the fly. There is a $0.10 charge for emailing documents to your Kindle, but that is probably about the same amount you would pay in consumable costs to print out a normal sized document on paper. I haven’t tested the limits of compatibility here, but it does seem to work well. You can connect the Kindle to your computer and move files to it directly, but Amazon hasn’t make a conversion application available yet that will let you convert files on your own. I would love to see them make something like this available, but I’m not sure if it is in their plan.

Though I haven’t done it yet, you can also add your own MP3 files as well as your own picture files to the Kindle 2 for playback on the device. It’s an interesting addition, but will probably be redundant for most folks, and a poor substitute for an iPod.

Accessing The Web:
Kindle also delivers the web to you - sort of. Every Kindle comes with Whispernet, a digital cellular connection (an EVDO Sprint connection here in the United States) that is used for delivering content to the device. Amazon does provide a very crude browser that lets you use it to connect to the web to do basic surfing. It works fine for simple sites like Wikipedia or Google, and does a serviceable job on news sites like CNN. Unfortunately, any site more complex than than probably wont work. I did a quick test of GMail, but that didn’t seem to work. Navigation runs from poor to painful to unusable based on the site, making this suited for light browsing at best. I’ll need to spend more time with this to map out what can reasonable be done - especially testing sites that are designed for more limited mobile devices.

An interesting, and controversial, new feature of the Kindle 2 is the inclusion of text-to-speech capabilities. This allows the Kindle 2 to read a book to you, albeit in a somewhat stilted, mechanical voice. The quality of the computer generated voice is actually quite good by technical standards, but it offers no where near the engaging experience a well read audio book can deliver. Unfortunately, this feature has also stirred up folks in the Authors Guild, who claim that text-to-speech conversions create a derivative work that Amazon has no rights to and thus see it as a violation of their copyright. I’ll post on this one separately, but Amazon has agreed to give authors control over enabling this feature for any books they publish.

The Reading Experience:
At the end of the day, the Kindle 2 is a device designed for reading, and at that it excels. The keyboard at the bottom, which I though would be a distraction, becomes more like the palm rest on a laptop and essentially disappears once you start to read. The screen is extremely readable - even under less than ideal conditions - and the font size adjustments easily let me compensate for the shortcomings of my aging eyes.

Conclusions:
While the Kindle 2 is pricey at $350 (US), you do get a lot for your money. The ebooks available for it are relatively inexpensive and you have a reasonably sized (and growing) catalog of digitized titles to choose from. There are also basic web capabilities built in to the Kindle, and the convenience of ‘on demand’ access to books, newspapers and magazines will guarantee you’re never in want of something to read. The Kindle 2 is far from perfect. Navigation can sometime be confusing, web browsing is really primitive, limiting what you can actually do online, and it offers no easy way to convert your own content for display short of the email option. There are no showstoppers in this list, and it goes a long way to making a ebooks a mainstream delivery model.

That said, ebooks aren’t for everyone. Some people I know seem to have an almost emotional attachment to the physical manifestation of the printed word. On the other hand, I much prefer the more streamlined experience of reading on these types of ‘virtual paper’ devices, and have been an ebook advocate for a long time.

If you feel like I do, Amazon’s Kindle 2 is definitely worth a look.

[View with PicLens]

Their latest video - “2019″ - was produced as part of a presentation Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elopat gave at last week’s Wharton Business Technology Conference. It’s an extrapolation ten years into the future of existing technology and trends. While some of it is clearly fanciful, there are some really innovative, practical concepts on display in it as well.

The model of touch based, surface computing is a clear theme of this future vision, along with the concept of having embedded displays everywhere - in walls, tables, and even a coffee cup. I do believe that as the cost and power consumption requirements associated with these types of technologies drop, we will see more ‘computing smarts’ built into everyday objects. A decade is a long time when it comes to technology, so I definitely believe we will see many of these concepts play out in that time frame.

What’s interesting to me is that some of the interface designs on display here could translate directly into software implementations taking place today. That said, anyone that’s seen the latest versions of of Microsoft’s Office, OS, and Mobile software offerings will see the clear disconnect between this vision and the reality of what is being delivered. I’ve never understood why a company that can be this creative in abstract visualization seems to struggle so much in translating that creativity into the products they make.

Whether it be through the efforts of Microsoft, Apple, Google, or a yet to be launched start up, the future of computing will definitely be more organic, intuitive, and pervasive.

This video is just a hint of what could be. The real possibilities are endless…

My company, InfoNgen, has been named a finalist in the 2009 SIIA CODiE Awards in the category of Best Content Aggregation Service:

For those not familiar with them, the CODiE Awards were established over 20 years ago by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), as a way to showcase the software and information industry’s best products and services.

According to the SIIA’s website:

The CODiE Awards hold the distinction of being the industry’s only peer-reviewed awards program, which provides member companies with a unique opportunity to earn praise from their competitors. Now in its twenty-fourth year, the CODiE Awards program has raised the standard for excellence and serves as prestigious representation of outstanding achievement and vision in the software and information industry.

There are a lot of people at InfoNgen who have worked very hard to get us to where we are today, and it’s great to see their effort recognized by our peers in the technology space. And though we’re excited by what we’ve been able to accomplish this past year, we’re even more excited about some of the new features and capabilities we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. This is a fantastic time to be involved with textual analysis and information discovery.

We have a lot of good things planned for 2009.

NOTE: If you’d like to do a review of InfoNgen, just contact me (email, twitter) with your details and I’ll get in touch with you right away to follow-up.

It works with a range of blogging services, as well as most popular self-hosted blogging platforms. Getting it to work with my Wordpress setup was a snap. I just needed to give it my blog URL, User ID, and Password, and I was up and running.

Buttons along the bottom if the interface make it easy to add images, select categories and tags, and even to geotag your posts. There aren’t any fancy extras here. iBlogger sticks to the basics functions you need for mobile blogging, and it seems to do them all well.

I’m going to spend more time with iBlogger. I’m impressed by it’s simplicity and ease of use, and would like to see if it has a place in my workflow not handled by Twitter.

iBlogger is only $.99 at the iTunes store.

If you’re looking for a mobile blogging tool, it should definitely be on your short list…