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First ‘powered by Chumby’ device to be a digital picture frame, Internet-connected TVs to follow

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:23:52 +0000

When Chumby, makers of the boutique gadget of the same name (a sort of cross between an alarm clock radio and digital picture frame, housed in a leather ‘bean bag-esque’ casing), announced that is was porting its widget-based platform to third-party hardware, the emphasis was on Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes. Now it seems that the first ‘powered by Chumby’ device will be something much closer to the company’s own hardware: a digital picture frame, to be released in time for the holidays, reports Forbes.

Chumby, along with an unnamed device maker, thinks it can help re-invent the digital picture frame category with its combination of content-driven widgets and social networking.

Steve Tomlin, Chumby CEO, is quoting as saying: “Selling someone an LCD in a plastic frame with a memory card is not a compelling product… The challenge is to reinvent how to share photos and media.”

The first Chumby-powered photo frame will be able to display content from photo sites Flickr and Photobucket, along with accessing social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as news feeds, Internet radio and weather forecasts. Content can be be pushed to other ‘powered by Chumby’ devices so that, for example, users can share photos with other members of their Chumby social network.

Forbes rightfully points out that the Google-led Android OS is also being adopted by manufacturers of similar products to deliver the same set of features (and more), although Tomlin argues that Chumby offers a better User Interface for such devices. “Chumby is much more of a media device… There will be no browser or desktop full of icons that need to be clicked to launch.”

Internet-connected TVs still remain next on the road map, according to the report, with Samsung and Broadcom said to be partnering with Chumby.

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Why Sony is embracing the ‘open’ ePub eBook standard (Hint: Amazon)

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:08:19 +0000

I’ve argued before that with regards to eBooks and the Kindle, Amazon doesn’t view itself as a hardware company. Unlike the iTunes ecosystem designed to shift more iPods and iPhones, for Amazon it’s actually about selling digital content — the eBooks themselves — as demonstrated by the release of the iPhone ‘Kindle’ eBook reader and the company’s work-around to keep Apple away from any iPhone-generated eBook revenue.

The Kindle hardware exists to kick start and accelerate the uptake of eBooks, and as well as creating Kindle reader software for other mobile platforms, similar to what the company has already done on the iPhone, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon one day license its Kindle platform to competing hardware eBook readers. As I said, it’s clearly about shifting content, and to achieve this, owning the eBook ’standard’ and therefore default store.

To do this Amazon knows it has to create the best eBook reading experience and offer the largest catalog. And it’s arguably leading on both these counts already, in the US at least. Publishers know it. Consumers know it. And Sony – and other competing eBook hardware makers – know it. Hence Sony’s decision to ditch its own proprietary eBook format going forward and support the more open and industry-backed ePub standard.

If Sony can’t stop Amazon owning the eBook standard on its own, then embracing an open format along with other players in the market seems like the best way to prevent the online retailer becoming the dominant force in the e-publishing industry, as Apple has done in the digital music industry, able to dictate prices and control distribution. Something that not only Sony and other hardware makers but publishers across the board are right to be scared of.

And then there’s Apple and that rumored iTablet, eBook reading capability and all.

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The Pirate Bay sold, plans to go legit. Users urged to become capitalists.

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:05:14 +0000

When the Pirate Bay four were convicted of “assisting in making copyright content available” and sentenced to a one year prison term and a fine of $3.6 million, the site’s co-founder Peter Sunde played down the verdict, claiming that it was business as usual. The argument being that the site itself was never on trial, only the four individuals named in the law suit.

Today, however, we learn that, moving forward, it’s far from business as usual as The Pirate Bay has been acquired by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), a publicly listed company in Sweden, for the grand sum of $7.8 million. Profit made from the sale will be used to fund a new political organization set up “to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openness of the nets”, according to a blog post published on The Pirate Bay.

The sale to a public listed company is bound to be game changing for Pirate Bay, and the site’s new owner has already revealed that it plans “to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners”. TorrentFreak also reports that the site will cease hosting torrent files itself and end operating a tracker so as to decentralize the BitTorrent “ecosystem” – reportedly nearly half of BitTorrent traffic comes via The PirateBay – and ensure that users are less reliant on the site’s servers staying up. (Update: Johan Sellström, CTO of Global Gaming Factory, has since denied that the PirateBay tracker will be closed.)

In other words, like other P2P filesharing sites before it – Napster being the most famous example – The Pirate Bay plans to go legit. The problem is that I can’t think of one example where this has worked out in practice. Build a brand around the downloading of free content – albeit of dubious legality – then change the end-user proposition dramatically in the hope of paying copyright holders and staving off law suits – and end-users tend to jump ship (no pun intended).

On that note, the site’s co-founders have defended their decision to sell saying that it was time “to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die.” And on the issue of users jumping ship:

“If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.”

In other words, the way to keep The Pirate Bay alive as we know it is for all of it’s copyright infringing users to become capitalists by purchasing shares in the company that will soon acquire the site. Then they can all get sued collectively instead.

Now that does sound like a plan.

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Pirate Bay offering file sharers their own encrypted private network

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:30:54 +0000

Forget the UK government’s Digital Britain report (out today), which will propose a solution to the “file sharing problem”, or Virgin Media and UMG’s carrot-and-stick solution. Notorious BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay thinks it has the answer: a new service that will offer file swappers their own encrypted virtual private network that will keep any “ilegal” activities away from the prying eyes of the content industry and their trigger happy legal teams.

Dubbed IPREDator after Sweden’s copyright law IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive), the VPN service is currently in limited beta with 3,000 testers and another 180,000 on the waiting list. The service costs 5 euros per-month.

(via The Register)

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The Gadget Show Live: BeBook eBook reader [video]

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:51:31 +0000

With Amazon’s Kindle winning the most mind share (thanks to Oprah) and Sony publishing healthy numbers for sales of its Sony Reader, it’s easy to forget that the eBook market isn’t purely a two horse race. Enter the BeBook from Dutch company Endless Ideas who were touting the device at last week’s The Gadget Show Live.

What sets the BeBook apart from competing eBook readers, the company claims, is support for a wider range of file formats, which on the surface appears to be true. However, after a bit of digging I’ve discovered at least one caveat. While the BeBook supports non-DRM formats galore, such as txt, pdf, doc, html, rtf, ppt, bmp, jpg, png, gif, tif, and even mp3s, which pretty much has you covered for out of copyright books and other non-commercial content, the only eBook format with DRM that’s supported is Mobipocket. That’s probably fine for most potential buyers but does mean, for example, that copyprotected PDFs can’t be viewed on the device.

Video of the BeBook at The Gadget Show Live after the jump…

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I is back (from The Gadget Show Live)

Steve O'Hear — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:20:32 +0000

Just a quick post to say I’ve just arrived back and safe from visting family and attending The Gadget Show Live in Birmingham in the UK, which explains why blogging, aside from on the show floor twittering, has been almost non-existent this week (limited WiFi and patchy 3G coverage also didn’t help). The better news is that we’ve bagged lots of video and images from the show where I got to check in on the latest news and products from Sony, LG Mobile, Flip, Swap, BeBook, and more – the best of which I’ll be posting over the next few days.

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Google helps add 500,000 public domain eBooks to Sony Reader store

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:38:59 +0000

Not sure if this is such a big deal but owners of Sony’s Reader – which includes my dad – can now access over half a million public domain books via the company’s eBook store, courtesy of a new partnership with Google Book Search.

Titles include an “extensive list of traditional favorites”, according to the joint press release, such as “The Awakening,” “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” and “Black Beauty”, along with Jane Austin’s “Sense and Sensibility” and “Emma.”

In their statements both Google and Sony were keen to tout the partnership as testament to their ‘openness’, a direct dig at Amazon’s Kindle, which uses a proprietary eBook format compared to the Reader’s support for the standards-based ePub.

However, as paidContent notes, the real picture isn’t quite as clear cut. Prior to today’s announcement, eBooks downloaded from Google Book Search either as text files or PDFs could already be transferred to and read on both the Reader and Kindle, albeit with the process on Sony’s device being a lot less cumbersome. What’s changed today is that by supporting the ePub format and adding its catalog to Sony’s own eBook store, Google just made it even more user-friendly and, for the time being at least, makes access to free public domain content – if you’re into that kind of thing – a key selling point for Reader over Kindle.

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Usability guru: Amazon’s Kindle is great for reading novels, poor for everything else

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:31:59 +0000

Usability guru Jackob Nielson has given Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader the once over. His conclusion: perhaps unsurprisingly, the device is great for linear reading – think books, and in particular novels – but falls down badly when consuming non-linear content, such as electronic versions of magazines or newspapers.

Additionally, Nielson says that although he has previously questioned the viability of eBook reading devices in general, the Kindle’s e-ink screen technology and his own reading speed using Amazon’s device (less than 0.5% difference compared to the exact same paperback) has changed his mind.

On the Kindle’s linear reading strengths, Nielson gives praise to the device’s dedicated page turn controls:

… turning the page is extremely easy and convenient. This one command has two buttons (on either side of the device). Paging backwards is a less common action, but it’s also nicely supported with a separate, smaller button.

The device thus offers good support for the task of linear reading — appropriately so, as Kindle’s design is centered on this one use case. While reading, your only interaction is to repeatedly press the next-page button.

However, “anything else is awkward”, writes Nielson.

In particular he criticizes the Kindles smartphone-esque 5-way controller. “Repeatedly flicking the 5-way to move the cursor around the screen is extremely tedious. It doesn’t feel like direct manipulation at all. The 5-way owns the cursor, not you, and getting the cursor where you want it requires a lot of work.”

Overall, the User Interface, outside of consuming linear content, is poorly thought through. The reason, says Nielson, is that the Kindle’s design is dominated by the book metaphor.

So, the design decisions that make Kindle good for reading novels (and linear non-fiction) make it a bad device for reading non-linear content. Sure, Amazon designers could fix simple UI stupidities, such as the interaction design for a newspaper ToC. But doing so would simply apply a band-aid. To truly optimize the non-linear user experience, they’d have to completely reconceptualize the Kindle design.

Ouch.

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What Kindle on iPhone says about Amazon’s eBook strategy

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:00:09 +0000

The news today that Amazon has released a Kindle client for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch says a lot about the company’s eBook strategy. Amazon’s Kindle device has often been described as wanting to become the iPod of books, but unlike Apple it’s clear that the e-tailer sees itself in the business of selling content and not just to drive sales of hardware.

In terms of music and video sales, Apple’s iTunes Store exists purely to add value to and increase uptake of the company’s iPod and AppleTV devices, with the major record labels and Hollywood studios receiving the majority of revenue from any content sold. Until fairly recently, content from iTunes could only play back on Apple’s hardware – for movies and TV shows this is still the case – helping to lock customers into the iTunes/iPod ecosystem. In contrast, eBooks bought from the Kindle store are now able to be read on at least one non-Kindle device, Apple’s iPhone, with more to come. This suggests to me that Amazon is taking a large enough cut from each eBook sold to justify potentially diluting sales of the Kindle device itself.

Having said that, Amazon is publicly pitching its iPhone app as being complementary to the Kindle rather than competing directly against it. And in some ways this is true. There’s a high degree of synergy between the Kindle experience on either device. Using technology Amazon is calling Whispersync users can pick up reading where they left off from the Kindle to iPhone and vice versa. Additionally, since eBooks purchased through the Kindle store are kept on Amazon’s own servers, you can access any content from your existing Kindle library ‘over the air’ on the iPhone or iPod touch.

However, aside from the Kindle’s superior e-ink screen technology, which is optimized for readability, there are a number of features that are missing from Amazon’s iPhone app. Most notable is the inability to browse and make purchases from the Kindle store directly within the app itself, instead you’ll need to fire up the iPhone’s web browser or make purchases first via a Kindle or desktop PC. Another omission, reports mocoNews, is access to newspapers, magazine and blog “subscriptions”, which due to copy-protection are currently tied to a single Kindle device.

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We have our HP Magic Giveaway winner

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:51:48 +0000

We now have a winner for our latest HP super duper giveaway. The $6,000 worth of HP and Microsoft goodies goes to T. Smith from the US who named their five favorite digital lifestyle products and services of 08 as:

iPhone 3g
Wii Fit
HP Mini 100
Unibody MacBook
Blackberry Storm

Thanks to everybody who entered. Best of luck next time.

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HP Magic Giveaway on last100 – your chance to win $6000 worth of gear

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:18:42 +0000

If you’re new to last100, you can subscribe to our RSS feed here, or get weekly email updates using the form below.

Note: the contest is now closed. Winner to be announced shortly.

Today it’s our turn to share some magic courtesy of HP and Microsoft. We’re giving away $6,000 worth of gear, including four computers (a 25 inch touchscreen desktop, two laptops and HP’s newest Netbook), a media extender, printer and a bunch of software/DVDs.

That’s a lot of kit for even for the most hardened geek, so we’re encouraging the winner to also share the magic by giving some of the prize away.

For your chance to win, I’m going to keep it relatively simple. Here’s how to enter, along with a few basic rules.

Leave a comment on this post listing your top five digital lifestyle products and/or services of this year. They don’t need to all be products you own, and they could be digital lifestyle services you use, but they must all have been released this year or have had a significant update. It would also be more fun if you explain why you’ve chosen them.
Make sure you leave a working email address in the ‘email’ field of the comments form.
You may only enter once.
If you are the winner and based in the U.S. you must be willing to file a tax return form with Buzz Corps who are administrating the competition. However, they will issue a check to offset the taxes in the U.S. relating to the prize.
Employees, contractors of last100 or their family members are not eligible (nor are personal friends of mine, sorry folks!)
After seven days from this post, the winner will be chosen randomly from all complete entries.
Our decision is final and we reserve the right to change the rules if there has been an omission on our part or we suspect unfair conduct on the part of an entrant.

PLUS share some magic with us (optional)

If you haven’t done already, please consider subscribing to this blog in your RSS reader, or subscribing to our weekly wrapup email (see above). That way you’ll know about future giveaways too!
If you have your own blog, Twitter or Facebook account, then why not give us a mention as well.

Good luck everybody!

P.S. There are more HP Magic giveaways currently running on other blogs…

Stop, Drop & Blog	11-Dec	17-Dec
Living – In Theory
GeeksRoom
Eliax
OSNN	12-Dec	18-Dec
SlashGear
Digital Home Thoughts
Study Hacks – Demystifying College Success	13-Dec	19-Dec
Digital Inspiration	14-Dec	20-Dec
Geekzone
The Digital Lifestyle
CíberPrensa	15-Dec	21-Dec
Unión de Bloggers Hispanos
Last100	16-Dec	22-Dec
JK On the Run
Geek News Central

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Sony’s eBook reader – the numbers are in

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:24:05 +0000

While Amazon remains deafeningly silent over how many Kindles it has sold – except to say that new orders won’t be fulfilled for the next eleven to thirteen weeks – Sony, its main competitor in the eBook reader space, isn’t being so shy.

Claiming to have exceeded the company’s own forecasts, Sony says it sold 300,000 units of its Sony Reader device since its October 2006 launch (WSJ). Interestingly, however, Forrester Research estimates that 400,000 Kindles have sold since its launch in November 2007, which, if true, means that Amazon has done considerably better in a much shorter amount of time, possibly due to better marketing — it’s hard to beat the Amazon brand and e-store when it comes to selling anything book-related.

Although both sets of numbers are nothing to be scoffed at, it doesn’t yet amount to an ‘iPod moment’, notes paidContent. Apple sold 1.3 million units of its music player in the first two years, even if it took considerably longer for the iPod to really go mainstream.

Talking of mainstream, last week my Dad requested a Sony Reader for Christmas after trying out a colleague’s. If that’s any indication, perhaps eBook readers could reach a tipping point sooner than we think?

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