Monthly Archives: October 2009

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The B&N Nook – is it the ebook reader we’ve been waiting for?

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Barnes & Noble Nook ebook readerI don’t know for sure, but it’s certainly ticking a lot of my requirement boxes by comparison to the alternatives. Barnes & Noble have dropped a minor bombshell in the form of the Nook ebook reader, which is powered by Google’s Android operating system and open to a whole lot of everyday file formats that the competition don’t touch. Here are some highlights from the Ars Technica rundown:

In contrast to the Kindle’s physical keyboard (and Sony’s on-screen one), the Nook uses a color touchscreen for most of the navigation (it’s listed as a 3.5″ TFT-LCD); it’s laid out as a wide band immediately below the E-Ink screen. Various demos show that this can be used to access a series of settings through hierarchial menus, and it will display book covers, either from the B&N store or in your library, in full color. It’s not clear at this point whether it can also display an on-screen keyboard for note-taking and other text entry.

In other ways, the Nook is a bit of a throwback to the first version of the Kindle. It’s a bit thicker and heavier, but that enables B&N to include a removable battery and an SD card slot for additional storage—2GB is built in. It also comes with free access to a 3G cellular network (this one from AT&T), but one-ups Amazon by including WiFi, which will allow some of its features to operate during foreign travel. It can be connected to a computer or charged via a mini-USB port, and the device also has a speaker and headphone jack.

All of these features may explain why the battery is removable. B&N estimates that the device will run for about 10 days on a single charge if the various wireless options are shut down, but heavy use of the optional features may drain it in as little as two days.

So, the sort of thing you could take abroad and still access new content with. And who knows what sort of capabilities the hacker crowd will discover once they learn to root the OS and add their own applications? Some sort of basic web browser attached to the wi-fi connection doesn’t seem implausible. But the best is yet to come:

Some of these hardware choices may make it a compelling device, but the real differentiator is probably in the software. B&N turned to Google’s Android operating system to power the Nook, which may be why it supports so many file formats, including PDF, EPUB, eReader, MP3, and PNG, JPG, and GIF image formats.

Like the Kindle, the software will synchronize content among a variety of devices, including PCs and Macs, as well as Blackberries, iPhones, and iPod touches. But it also allows users to lend their purchased items to friends with linked accounts. So, for example, you can choose a book and send it to a friend via the touchscreen interface. Once sent, your friend has 14 days to read it (presumably, the work is inaccessible to you during that period).

Finally, someone has remembered that people like to lend books! I rather suspect there’ll be a lot of fiddly legal loopholes and DRM involved, but it’s a step in the right direction.

The snag-point for me (besides the fact that it doesn’t look like there’ll be a UK version particularly soon) is being tied to a specific retailer’s store, but that’s ameliorated a great deal by the ability to read PDFs and other standard formats – it means there are literally thousands of books and stories that you can read for free on the Nook. All you have to do is go fetch them from somewhere and load them on… and a rooted device with the aforementioned basic web capabilities could make that a simple procedure, too.

But the price-point and capabilities are (hopefully) a harbinger of things to come; I think we’re getting nearer to the tipping point that mp3 players went through a while back, when there’ll be a sudden wave of generic hardware that doesn’t tie the user to a particular content provider. Ideally you’d have the option to link to all the major ebook vendors as well as the ability to download free material from the web, and that’s plainly well within the bounds of technological possibility (although the vendors will resist calls to surrender their walled garden exclusivity, no doubt). Will the ebook market grow quickly enough to provide that pressure? I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but the protestations of those who say that ebooks will fail because they’ve always failed before are starting to sound a little shaky to me. [image ganked from The Guardian; contact for immediate takedown if required]

So, what do you think? Would you be interested in a B&N Nook? If not, why not? What features or capabilities is it missing?

Today's Tomorrows

Space Jockeys

I was interviewed twice last week, and both times the topic of space flight came up.  One of the questions one of the interviewers, Annie Tupek, asked me was, “You write about mankind’s future in space.  What do you think is the largest obstacle opposing space colonization today?”

Here’s the short form of my answer to that question:  “…it’s expensive and difficult to get heavy stuff from here out into space. The distances are long and the travel hard. …  We tend to think it’s taking a long time to explore space.  The Wright Brother’s first flight was in 1903.  So in a little over a hundred years we’ve gone from being stuck fact to the surface of the planet to flying all over it all the time with hardly a worry except the TSA search indignities.  We’ve flown past almost every planet and moon in the solar system, landed rovers on Mars, and men on the moon.”

So I decided I’d write this month’s column about what’s happening as private companies compete to get to space. In fact, there’s so much happening, I could write a book about it.  Instead, I’m going to survey the news from LEO, give a little futuristic spin, and discuss one book. Continue reading Space Jockeys →

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Smarter than the new Apple mouse

ratSteve Jobs and company may have radically re-engineered the mouse, but a team of researchers from the States and China have been busy re-engineering the rat, culminating in the quaintly-named Hobbie-J, a rodent who owes her preternatural smarts to the over-expression of a particular gene associated with brain-cell communication speed. [image by stark23x]

Scientists found that Hobbie-J consistently outperformed the normal Long Evans rat even in more complex situations that require association, such as working their way through a water maze after most of the designated directional cues and the landing point were removed. “It’s like taking Michael Jordan and making him a super Michael Jordan,” Deheng Wang, MCG graduate student and the paper’s first author, says of the large black and white rats already recognized for their superior intellect.

That’s one of the best quotes I’ve read in a science article in ages; it’s like something Don King would say. And if you’re now worrying about hordes of intellectual rodents escaping their cages and taking over the world, relax – Hobbie-J isn’t going to be inventing a death-ray any time soon.

… even a super rat has its limits. For example with one test, the rats had to learn to alternate between right and left paths to get a chocolate reward. Both did well when they only had to wait a minute to repeat the task, after three minutes only Hobbie-J could remember and after five minutes, they both forgot. “We can never turn it into a mathematician. They are rats, after all,” Dr. Tsien says, noting that when it comes to truly complex thinking and memory, the size of the brain really does matter.

More interestingly, though, this sort of meddling is a proof-of-concept. What might similar tweaking achieve in animals whose cognitive ability already approaches that of our own? Perhaps a radical group of animal rights activists might boost the brain-power of some primate tribes in order to justify parity in their treatment under law. In other words, maybe animal uplift isn’t as ridiculous an idea as it might initially appear…

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One-click celebrity endorsements!

As much as I have high hopes for the future, sometimes it seems that “the future” is just a place where you can buy a wider and weirder range of things more quickly and conveniently than before. This doesn’t just apply to us consumer types, either; the mechanics of business are being shortened and tightened and streamlined constantly. Speed is everything. We need it yesterday!

So, you’re building a new model of car (or cooker, or genetically modified guard-armadillo), and you need to get some instant credibility for it before your product launch next week. You need a celebrity endorsement, stat! But don’t they take ages to arrange? Not any more…

Brand Affinity’s goal is to automate the process by which marketers offer contracts to athletes, along with the process by which ads featuring those endorsers are created and produced. The Web site promises that those transactions will take no more than 96 hours.

It provides “a quick turnaround for something that would normally take months,” Mr. Brees said. “A company can contact a player, come to an agreement and the next day the ads could be up.”

That fast pace, said Brian Bos, senior vice president and convergence director at Team Detroit — the alliance of WPP agencies that work for Ford Motor — “reduces risk and provides flexibility, because you’re not tied into long-term deals.”

[…]

Athletes are “human capital brands,” said Ryan Steelberg, president and chief executive at Brand Affinity in Irvine, Calif., who share in an estimated $3 billion paid each year to celebrity endorsers.

Although “the days of someone right out of the draft getting a multimillion-dollar shoe deal are over,” Mr. Steelberg said, large sums are being spent on the handful of big sports names, active and retired, who appear in multiple campaigns.

“Relative to the cost of the superstars, you could potentially activate 5, 10, 25” players who are popular in local or regional markets, he added.

Now, that’s a strong modern business model right there. You’re trading in the currency of celebrity, which (sadly) shows little sign of decaying in perceived value, despite being based on a nebulous social concept whose hollowness is revealed on a daily basis; you’re using the web for swift brokerage and expediting; you’re offering a national service tailored to localised needs. You’ve bolted yourself as middleman onto the Long Tail of celebrity. [via TechDirt]

As pointed out in the article there, the biggest plus point of Brand Affinity’s service is its fine-grain duration scale. No need to risk a lot of money and kudos on a season-long campaign with a particular jock or clothes-horse; keep an eye on trending topics for rising names, jump on ’em when they’ve got enough cachet to give your product a boost, and drop ’em like a hot potato when their star slips out of the ascendant. In a world where fame burns brighter for ever shorter periods of time, that’s a system with a lot of appeal for the marketing and branding wonks… the sort of thing Leggy Starlitz might have stumbled into had he spent longer in the States, perhaps.