Mitch Ratcliffe blogs about the constantly changing boundary between media and life, the businesses that live on that border, and the meaning of all this change to society and the economy.
I've been writing for Ziff-Davis, ZD Net and their many facets for almost two decades. It is just a few months short of 19th anniversary of the first time my byline appeared in MacWEEK, in fact, as I write this last posting at Rational Rants.
Based on the ever-vague guidance provided by Amazon.com in the form of obscure comments from CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos and fluffy PR releases, such as today's holiday sales update, I'm continuing to update my educated guesswork on the number of Kindles sold.
I recently had the pleasure of presenting a vision for the future of publishing to a group of publishing professionals in New York. Can't say where it was, yet, but suffice to say it was worth saying and that the message was well received by the thoughtful, albeit skeptical, audience.
Last week, Mike Arrington announced the death of CrunchPad, his mythical $250 tablet for surfing the Web. This week, Arrington's former partner in the project, Fusion Garage, announced it will sell the device starting this Friday for $499, calling the product "JooJoo.
Mike Arrington has announced his CrunchPad web tablet, covered here, is "dead", blaming his manufacturing partner for cutting him out of the deal. In the frothy market that is media tablets, just as in other frothy markets Arrington has stirred up, this is a story suspiciously full of holes that make CrunchPad sound like a stunt all along rather than a real project.
The market knows best, right? Markets are bloody paths to progress.
Based on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' comments on the third quarter results for the company, Kindle sales are accelerating. Bezos is quoted: “Kindle has become the #1 bestselling item by both unit sales and dollars – not just in our electronics store but across all product categories on Amazon.
Platform expansion is the logical counter to new competition at the device level. Amazon, facing the introduction of BN.
Yesterday, I posted a long analysis of what I thought was right and strangely wrong about the Barnes & Noble Nook. Matt Miller today got a clarification about my main concern, which was that Barnes & Noble seemed to have said, according to several published reports, that Wi-Fi would work only in its stores at launch and be "opened up.
In addition to this posting, please visit this clarifications posting to get the whole picture. It would be nice to say, as Matt Miller has, that the e-book and e-reader market was revolutionized today.
Fortune Magazine swallows the AT&T pitch hook, line and sinker in a story titled "Bandwidth hogs — iPhones and other smartphones." Writer Jon Fortt dishes up a steaming dish of bull shoveled straight out of AT&T PR:Now the wireless providers hawking those Internet-enabled mobile devices are experiencing the digital equivalent of being proprietors of an all-you-can-eat buffet: It seems like the perfect business until the sumo wrestlers show up.
What's the technology I'd least like to lose, the thing you'd have to pry from my cold dead fingers? Well, you will have to pry a Moleskine notebook and pen from my hands when I am dead.
I've been pondering this note, sent to me by a friend on Facebook last week:Facebook needs to recode their ads... It's one thing when the ad for singles waiting for me is accompanied by a picture of my lovely wife...
I queried Russ Grandinetti, vice president, Books, at Amazon about the lack of clarity about how many devices can access a Kindle book or how many times a buyer can expect to download a title from the Kindle Store. He referred me to Drew Herdener, director of communication at Amazon, who replied with the following: Russ forwarded me your note.
I've posted a couple excerpts from the book I am working on, about the future of books and reading. It's a different topic than Rational Rants' mandate, and with so much news and opinion every day to comment on, deserving of its own place and community.
