Good Luck Reading a Book on a NetBook
Misc May 29th, 2009
I’m a big fan of netbooks, but they are not the magic device for all one’s needs, and they should not be. PC World has jumped the shark with a bombastic title: Bye-bye Kindle, E-reader Screens Coming for Netbooks. It’s all about start-up Pixel Qi’s new screen which can operate as traditional backlit color LCD or as a black-end-white e-paper that hardly consumes energy and most importantly reduces eye-strain. PC World jumps to the conclusion:
E-reader makers have reason to fear such innovation because people will be able to buy devices with more functions for about the same price.Â
I beg to disagree. But rather than speculate, I’m challenging authors Dan Nystedt and Martyn Williams to do a test: hold a 3-pound netbook for several hours, in different positions, not at their desk, while trying to enjoy an e-Book.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Pixel Qi demonstrates 3qi display, merges e-ink with LCD (engadget.com)
- Pixel Qi’s Magical Hybrid E-Paper LCD Coming This Fall [Displays] (gizmodo.com)
- Bezos: Color Kindle “multiple years” away (crunchgear.com)

Tags: e-paper, e-reader, ebooks, epaper, ereader, ergonomics, kindle, netbooks, plastic logic, situational devices, xref
Amazon’s PaaS with a Twist
Business May 27th, 2009
If you think this is yet-another post on Platform as a Service, you’re wrong.  I’ll be talking about much simpler things here:
- PaaS – Pasta as a Service
- TaaS – Tea as a Service
- GaaS – Groceries as a Service
No kidding. Well, maybe a bit, but this is about real business – also the focus of a recent article by Fortune: Amazon’s next revolution, discussing the early days as Earth’s Biggest Bookstore, then moving on to other businesses, and now Kindle-izing our reading habits while revolutionizing the publishing industry.
So let’s talk about retail, from the consumers’ point of view, examining how Amazon changed our shopping habits and is on the way to becoming the default vendor for just about everything we buy.
Read on …
Tags: amazon, amazon subscription, Google, googlezon, groceries, online retail, paas, price comparison, retail, subscription, xref
Space Shuttle Lands Both in Florida and California – Reuters
Misc May 24th, 2009
Or perhaps Florida annexed California (never mind that little piece of land separating the two).
Space shuttle Atlantis lands safely in Florida
- says the headline. Then the actual article:
The shuttle touched down at the Edwards Air Force base in California.

I let Google decide 
Tags: atlantis, california, Florida, Humor, reuters, space shuttle
The $199 Palm Pre that’s Really $299
Customer Service, Misc May 19th, 2009
…And I am not even talking about TCO, calculating life-time cost with subscription. No, just plain simply purchase price, with a dirty industry trick: rebates.
The long expected Palm Pre will be available from Spring on Jun 6th, at $199 with qualifying data plan, and after a $100 rebate. And therein lies the rub – it will cost $299 for many.
Fellow Enterprise Irregular Winnie Mirchandani has a long-going series on business processes that badly need “angioplasty“. Processing rebates is certainly a most convoluted process – unfortunately often by design. Why? It’s simple, 40% of rebates never get redeemed, says Business Week:
The industry’s open secret is that fully 40% of all rebates never get redeemed because consumers fail to apply for them or their applications are rejected, estimates Peter S. Kastner, a director of consulting firm Vericours Inc. That translates into more than $2 billion of extra revenue for retailers and their suppliers each year. What rebates do is get consumers to focus on the discounted price of a product, then buy it at full price. "The game is obviously that anything less than 100% redemption is free money," says Paula Rosenblum, director of retail research at consulting firm Aberdeen Group Inc.
What this old article fails to point out is that it’s often not the consumer’s fault who forget to send in rebates. Sure, we’re sometimes lazy to do the paperwork for a $5 discount, but you would dot it for $100, wouldn’t you? Yet it’s often the ugliness of the rebate process with built-in traps (did you cut out the UPC code from the right corner on the box, did you circle the right amount..etc), or just the ignorance of the rebate processing company (yes, that is a thriving business in itself) that robs you of your rebate check. And don’t for a minute think it’s only from Tiger Direct and other retailers who thrive on the rebate-scam. Brand-name trusted vendors aren’t any better. Since we’re discussing the Palm here, here’s my rebate experience from Handspring (the former Pal-spinoff that later reunited with the parent) from a few years ago:
Sent in not only paperwork, but an actual, working older Palm III as trade-in unit (This condition was so ridiculous, later Handspring changed it to providing serial no’s of the trade-ins.) The $100 rebate never arrived, not even after numerous phone-calls and emails. They demanded copies of everything, which I sent – but how do you copy the trade-in unit? My loss: $100 rebate, $50 trade-in value for the old Palm (that’s what it sold on eBay at the time), postage and about a full day of my time fighting the bureaucracy.
Did that stop my from buying Handspring / Palm products? Not when they were the only game in time, so I bought two more Treo’s. But guess what: Palms are not the only choice if you want a smart phone, and obviously I am still not a Palm-fan…
Back to the angioplasty, one way to streamline rebate processing is to make it an all-online process, removing the intentional hurdles. I can’t see why in the 21st century this is such a big deal. Costco sets a positive example, with simple online rebate entry, prompt payment, and online audit available for years.
But the real angioplasty would be to kill the the whole process. Forget rebates, it’s time for true transparency: call it what it is, $299 or $199, if you want to promote your product, provide a temporary discount, but forget rebates, which are just a Big Fat Lie.
(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay abreast of news, analysis and just plain opinion on Cloud Computing, SaaS, Business grab the CloudAve Feed here.)

Tags: angioplasty, business process, customer disservice, Customer Service, deception, handsrping, palm, palm pre, process angioplasty, rebate, rebates, retail, smartphones, treo
Texting Driver Causes Trolley Accident
Misc May 9th, 2009
When California banned holding a cell-phone while driving, it unintentionally left a loophole: texting was not specifically banned. You’d think it’s common sense, but apparently it’s not, and it took another heated debate and another law to ban texting while driving.
Today we’re seeing proof from Boston while it’s really bad: a 24-year old trolley driver was texting his girlfriend when he rear-ended another trolley in front of him, that got stopped by a red light in a tunnel. He may have looked down for just a few seconds it takes to type a word, but by the time he looked up he could not slam the brakes hard enough.
The speed of the incoming trolley is not known, but it sent the other trolley 100 feet forward in the tunnel. 49 passengers were injured, none in a life-threatening condition.
Full story at the Boston Globe.
Tags: boston, SMS, text messaging
SC Swat Attack Brings Craigslist Down
Misc May 6th, 2009
Knee-jerk Henry (Henry McMaster, the Attorney General of South Carolina) must have sent his swat team to bring down Craigslist, as this is all I find on everyone’s favorite classifieds site:

Just My Usual PC Rant…
Software May 5th, 2009
<rant>
My shiny new Dell Mini 12 on startup from hibernation:
“Resuming Windows” – how long do you think it should take? 30 seconds? A few minutes?
Forever. That’s all it does. Stuck. Forced shut-off, start again.
Now it’s “Checking for updates to Adobe Updater”. No kidding. 6-7 minutes later Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 is updated. But now McAfee is updating itself.
No wonder I hate desktop software.
</rant>
Tags: adobe, dell mini, desktop software, hibernation, netbook, pc, sofware updates, Windows, windowssucks
The proliferation of affordable netbooks is good for everyone – consumers, that is. Computer manufacturers loath it (high volume, low margin business) and so does Microsoft: they can’t exactly sell $100+ worth of software on a $200 machine. So they come up with all sorts of 

Startup Entrepreneurs who did not make it to the recentÂ
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