Kindle the Amazon fire

Go to know that my friend is getting the Kindle 2 so thought of catching up with her the same way we did some time ago for the iPhone

Friend: I’m so excited about the kindle 2

Me: Hows it? Just today morning as a part of our Friday Ideas session, our team was discussing about bringing digital experiences close to real world experiences and book reading was one of them. Someone wondered how was it to read a book using the Kindle.

Friend: Kindle 2 is a pretty neat device - I actually bought it for my husband. It's got a great design and lets you lose yourself in your reading. It's got free Sprint wireless connectivity built in, so it is fairly easy to order a book on Amazon and have it delivered to your Kindle in seconds. Kindle versions of books are a lot cheaper than the hardbacks I buy, often less than 1/4 of the price of a regular book. I do a lot of reading on my iPhone but the glare of the screen really hurts my eyes. Not so with the Kindle, the screen is very easy on your eyes, almost like reading a real book. The best part is you can adjust the size of the text, which is a great usability feature for older readers.

Me: What are your favorite features?

Friend: Text to speech version - You can get your Kindle 2 to read the text to you. I think this is pretty neat. I know that my husband loves this feature the most.

Play MP3s - You can upload your MP3s to the Kindle and listen to them - I expect you will be able to buy amazon mp3s directly from the Kindle in the near future but this is just me speculating

Built in dictionary - You can highlight any word and the have the inbuilt Oxford American dictionary tell you the meaning.

Bookmarks - you can bookmark several different books at once and the kindle will remember where you left off your reading.

Size - it is incredibly light and is as thin as a pencil - for someone who reads as much as I do and lugs a ton of books around, this is the best feature.

But I personally think that there are some missed opportunities in terms of other features that can create an ecosystem around the product.

Me: May be a full blown internet browser, an SDK to build third party Kindle apps :-) Btw I heard people saying that no one will buy Kindle as it’s now available as an iPhone app. What’s your take on this?

Friend: Well iPhones/iPod touch do have a bigger market share than the Kindle. Both devices enable you to stay connected (through cell network and wifi) and both have a great existing ecosystem that is built around them.

The Kindle device is pricey and works well but from a business perspective, the device is not as important as the digital selection of books that is available. The Kindle is a means to an end. If you want to reach a wider audience for your ebooks, then you first start with your device, then target other device enabled customers, and once ebooks themselves gain traction, target the masses (PC users et al).

This strategy is consistent with Amazon's strategy of providing Earth's biggest selection. I think it's brilliant.

So the question really should not be "how many kindles will be sold after the iPhone kindle app is released?” Rather, how many more incremental ebooks can you sell by being device independent?

Apple and Google are also trying to tap into the digital book market but Amazon has existing relationships with publishers and will win in the long run.

Me: Oh. So you are saying Amazon's strategy is to sell more ebooks (makes sense) than focusing on selling and making kindle to be "the ultimate" device. Kindle would be just another device offered by Amazon along with iPods and iPhones on their catalogue. It’s just that Kindle is an in house brand and has special features to be a better reader than iPod. Am I right?

Friend: Absolutely. Amazon is first and foremost a retailer with a huge selection of digital content and a proprietary device. With the latter, they can make sure competitors do not lock them out of their devices.

Me: Great. Also got to know that Amazon gave in to the ridiculous Authors Guild claim to allow authors to block text-to-speech. This was one of your favorite features right?

Friend: That is hilarious. Too bad about the text to speech but that was husband’s favorite feature. My next favorite feature is downloading books in seconds on to my device, which the stupid iPhone Kindle app cannot replicate. I’m not too gung ho about the iPhone Kindle App. Kinda sucks if you ask me.

OK so that was some serious talk. Btw I have neither an iPhone nor a Kindle. I might go for an iPhone some time in the future when the prices come down but would never go for a Kindle. I actually like the device and its features but I’m not a voracious book reader. All my reading is confined to Google Reader which works well on an iPhone. I might get one for my wife provided Kindle allows non amazon ebooks to be loaded onto it. :-) After all we are Indians.

Upwardly Mobile 2

Another powerful mobile app is the Qik web casting on mobile. It records videos using your phone’s camera and in real time uploads it to your qik.com account, enabling you to do a quick and easy way to do a live web casting. Last month I was attending my colleague’s wedding in Guruvayur and I did a live qik of the ceremony for the folks at office. It was a phenomenal experience. Although later I meddled with the video quality setting to make the upload faster only to make the video quality poor. But the first clip did make a sensation in the office.

Mapunity’s BTIS service helps you in getting real time traffic status updates in Bangalore so that you can decide on what route to take when you are driving. They have a very useful SMS based service but I'm not sure how will I be able to remember all those keywords. So they have a mobile app which is still in the alpha version. But I think the app can be only used by people who have an engineering degree in mobile technology. They are really in need of an UX expert to make the app simple to use and if they do the app could be a runaway hit. I don’t mind helping them out if they are Ok with it. Coming back to the matter, if you manage to figure out how to use it, it has a mint cool feature of showing live pictures of on the road traffic powered by cameras kept at different traffic junctions.

Talking about user experience, the ICICI imobile app is very simple to use. Yes it doesn’t even ask for your ICICI web User id and password to login. They have a real cool way of integrating your bank account with the app. I paid some of my bills using this app but again recharging my wife’s Airtel prepaid card is still a problem. Even though I can easily make a payment to Airtel using the app or ICICI online, the prepaid account just doesn’t get topped up. ICICI does re fund the money after two - three days though.

Thanks to my phone, I don’t forget a thing now a days. Previously I used to get SMS reminders from Google Calendar for the events I shouldn't miss out, but now I’ve synchronized my phone with Google Calendar and Outlook. I use Google Calendar Sync to bring in Google calendar events on to my Outlook which has my official appointments and tasks. I then sync my phone with Outlook using blue tooth. So once I setup the sync thing, as I add events on Google Calendar and Outlook it automatically gets updated on my phone which will then remind me by putting the day’s tasks on my phone’s home page.

Then there is mobile.ndtv.com my favorite for reading news; they actually have enough things on mobile for me not to even go to their website. I also use the network18 sites m.ibnlive.com for news, m.buzz18.com for time pass movie gossip stuff and last but not the least m.moneycontrol.com; just to see my portfolio value going down day by day :-( Ah for cricket fans there is m.cricketnext.com too. Network18 has a very good presence on mobile and they are open to trying out new stuff. Oh btw these sites are powered by the company I work for, July Systems. ;-) That’s also a reason behind me being addicted to mobile internet as I'm supposed to be an evangelist of all the mobile sweetness.

PS: Also check out Wikipedia (en.wap.wikipedia.org), dictionary.com (m.reference.com/d), Yahoo Mail (m.yahoo.com/mail), Delicious (m.delicious.com) and Flickr (m.flickr.com) on mobile. Some of them do redirect to the mobile version when accessed using their regular web urls on mobile phones. Some of them don't, which is bad.

Upwardly Mobile 1

I’m becoming an exceptional mobile internet user, day by day. Gone are those days when I used to be content with the features of my Nokia 6510 even though it rang or beeped message only once or twice in a week. The new Nokia E51 has changed the way I see mobile phones. Ahem well the calls and messages are still as bad as my good old 6510 days, but the change now is that I’m checking emails, reading blogs/news, searching for local shops, movie timings, quickly clarifying things on dictionary.com and wikipedia, tweeting and of course the Google maps and latitude. When I’m at home I feel extremely lazy to open my laptop now a days. Everything is now on my phone, ah except typing this story. I’m not yet good at typing things on my phone.

Asklaila.com (asklaila.com/m/blr) is a frequently visited site on my phone to search for shops and restaurants when I’m on the go. Like the other day I was in Koramangala and wanted to know where was Lawrence & Mayo. Just did a search on Asklaila and it showed me the shop address and also gave me options to find other optical shops nearby. It also gives me phone numbers and clicking on them will make a call. I’m not saying Asklaila has a better database than Google Local Search or anything like that (I seriously don’t know) but the user experience on this one is really nice. Well they can still improve if they can also show results that are around the location which I specified. Eg the other day I searched for Chinese restaurants on MG road and I wouldn’t have minded if it also showed me Chinese restaurants on Church Street and Brigade road. Their full blown website does that and it would be wonderful to have the same feature on mobile. Also they could integrate a map view. Or may be integrate it with Google maps app. Or an Ask Laila app with Google maps/latitude integration… I don’t know ;-)

Oh btw, If you are in Bangalore and if you know exactly which restaurant you are going to and you want to call them to reserve a table, then you don’t need an internet connection. Call Ubona at 4070 0000 and tell the restaurant name to the IVR response and it will connect you instantly to the restaurant. It’s powerful enough to understand you regardless of your accent and it works well even if there are multiple outlets for the restaurant you are looking for. It will guide you well through all the locations. Once I tried a restaurant and they didn’t have that in their database. The IVR voice sounded confused. But 5 minutes after hanging up I got an SMS from them saying the restaurant I asked for has been added and gave me the contact details. Ubona’s restaurant search works only in Bangalore and it’s a beta service they are running to demonstrate their software’s capabilities.

Avid mobile internet users would know that Google apps (Reader, Calendar, Gmail) are available for mobile on the regular urls. Google India movies (google.co.in/m/movies) is one page you want to save to your bookmarks, coz it shows all the movies running in your city, timings, theatres etc. Very handy when you are in a sudden mood to go for movies and no access to news papers. But to book the tickets you might have to turn to the movie ticket booking mobile apps like BookMyShow.com’s B Mobile app (Send BMS to
51818). But again BookMyShow doesn’t take booking for PVR Cinemas. Oh listen to this, Last weekend I was trying to book tickets for Delhi6 on PVR’s online booking site and for some reason it was not working. I quickly downloaded their mobile app (Txt PVR to 53030) and continued booking the tickets. It was like a breeze to use the app; very nicely done and extremely simple to use.

To be continued