In September of this year, Mashable proclaimed “Apple’s Tablet Will Eat Kindle’s Lunch“.  The article went on to criticise the Kindle device on a number of levels, such as the fact that it’s not in color, and that it doesn’t have fancy multitouch functionality.  While I agree the device will soon be left in the dust, I think Amazon has something much bigger up their sleeve…

Can you believe it’s already been two years since Amazon launched the original Kindle?  Although not the first e-reader, it was the first to enjoy significant market penetration, and today it’s practically a household name.  In February 2009, Amazon announced the smaller, sleeker Kindle 2 device.  It was still lacking some basic features like color (yes I’ll call that basic, sorry Amazon), but it was an improvement nonetheless.

But it wasn’t until March that things got interesting. That’s when Amazon released the Kindle iPhone app, and suddenly you had a whole new group of potential customers for the Kindle book store.  I’m not sure if you’ve been playing along but the foot print of iPhone owners worldwide is quite a bit bigger than Kindle.

This trend continued in November when Kindle for PC was released.  Suddenly every PC owner was a potential customer.  Huge!! With plans for a Mac Kindle app in the works, this can only continue.

So why doesn’t Amazon keep the Kindle software, and the Kindle market exclusive to the Kindle device?  They would sell more Kindles right?  Yes, but in my opinion the revenue potential for the Kindle devices is minor compared to that of the Kindle store.  Not to mention that hardware gets trumped every day by new devices.  With this approach Kindle doesn’t have to worry (as much) about dream/concept devices like the Apple Tablet or Microsoft Courier.  Just make Kindle software for each.

If Amazon roll this out fast enough, and gets the all important user experience design right, it will have a beast of market on its hands.  Kindle is to books/newspapers/blogs/magazines as iTunes is to music and movies… Maybe.  Remember when Apple decided to roll out iTunes on PCs instead of staying Mac-exclusive?  We’ll have to wait and see.

Some key components I see for the success of the software:

* It must be open (i.e. I better be able to read my own pdf files)
* It must remember your place in everything you’re reading
* everything must sync with the cloud, but a local copy should be maintained on all devices
* Commenting and sharing must be enabled.  In this age of social media, if Amazon doesn’t do it, someone else will.
* Users should be able to pull in any RSS feed (currently blog owners have to register their site with Amazon before this works, and the user has to pay $2 to subscribe to the blog – that’s just silly, and unsustainable)
* It should incorporate some sort of web ‘instapaper‘-esque service.  Busy people see stuff they want to read online all the time, but any productivity guru will tell you it makes sense to batch all that reading up instead of buying in to constant interruptions.
* UX/UI design should be spot on!  I hope they don’t skimp on this.  It’s why Apple is so successful with iTunes.

Some potential competitors.

There are plenty of devices with e-reading capability  (like Sony and Barnes & Noble) with many more on the horizon.  If I had to pick the big players in the e-book marketplace of the future, though, I’d have to say it will be one of these three:

Amazon:  Obviously.  See above.
Google:  Will be a big player because of all the books they aim to digitize.
Apple:  You really cannot beat Apple’s product and user experience design.  With the Apple Tablet looming on the horizon, they will make a big splash.  It appears like they will tackle magazines first.

I don’t see any startups swooping in for the top stop, although some will inevitably get acquired for pieces of the puzzle along the way.

What do you think?  Is Amazon crazy or riding the gravy train?  Will Apple eat Amazon’s lunch or buy it dinner?

I saw two videos today that made me think we’re only beginning to see the raw potential that lies in the iPhone. When Apple decided to open the platform up to developers, it was such a brilliant idea! Building a platform and letting others take it and run is a very compelling business model.

This first video shows the Brushes app, and how it was used to create cover art for a recent issue of the New Yorker. Are you kidding me?! A $5 application being used in design for a major publication. That’s just unbelievable. You can read more about this here.

This second video shows a new iPhone game called “Seek n’ Spell”. Players of the game have to run all over a specific geographic area to collect letters, helping them make words to win the game. What really amazes me is how this game involves the physical world and software. The future will be very very interesting.

File this one away with my series of posts focused on Information Overload…

One major gripe I’ve had with Twitter for some time now (and I know I’m not alone here) is the inability to group the people you follow into certain categories. Let me explain.  Currently I’m following (receiving updates from) upwards of 600 people on Twitter.   It can be assumed that they are all worth listening to from time to time – otherwise I wouldn’t have clicked “follow” in the first place.  But the experience of watching a big newsfeed tick by with the updates from all these people is a little daunting, and clearly inefficient.  How can I focus with all this noise?

Right now, some of my main interests are startups, photography, Milwaukee (”represent”), and business intelligence.  Sometimes (almost all the time actually) I’d prefer to read about only one of these subjects, not all of them at a time.  For example, if I’m in a creative mood, I could be eager to see what people are saying about photography or design.  Now, I could do a twitter search for “photography”.  While this might return some decent results, it just shows me a list of recent tweets mentioning “photography”.  This completely negates the time I’ve put into finding people who actually know what they’re talking about.  I’d much rather just see the recent updates from all the people who I consider experts.  And now I can – using the Tweetie iPhone app, with the process described below. [note: This works just as well with Twhirl for the desktop if you don't have an iPhone]

Tweetie is like many iPhone Twitter applications that allow you to see the recent updates from the people you follow.  What sets it apart is that Tweetie allows you to use many different Twitter accounts.

Here’s how it works:
1. Download Tweetie (it’s $3, but worth it)

2. Make a list of topics you’re into.
Maybe include on the list some people on Twitter who clearly know what they’re talking about when it comes to that topic.

3.  Create a new Twitter account for each topic
(in this example, i’ve appended “a_” to the name.  It will help my list of accounts sort nicely alphabetically later)

4. Log into the account created for a topic, and follow the people who say interesting things about that topic. For example, with the account I created for Photography, I followed @simonmcconico, @jakedavidrohde, @RachelK, @photocampmke as a good start.

5. Add your real account, and your “topic accounts” to Tweetie

Now you’re all set!  In my example, I can pop into the Photography account to see what the photography tweeps are talking about…

Or if I want to see what’s going on in Milwaukee, it’s as easy as checking the Milwaukee account…

One critical feature of Tweetie is the ability to reply with any of your accounts.  So If I’m viewing all the Milwaukee updates, I can still reply as @blakesamic.

Just another battle won in the war against Information overload.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Everyday we’re getting slammed with information from every angle, so I’m always looking for better, more efficient ways to make sense of it all. Last week I found myself deleting dozens of email alerts and notifications from Facebook, Twitter, and various banks.  While this information is arguably important, I’ve decided that it’s clogging up my inbox and making me slower to respond to emails from friends and family.  I’ve devised a scheme to solve this problem.

Since I’m increasingly mobile, like a lot of people, I chose to use the iPhone as the centerpiece of my “Communication Segmentation” plan (note: term originally coined by Tad Johnson).  iPhone makes it extremely easy to add new Gmail accounts to your email application, so I decided to make multiple Gmail accounts – one for each of these communication types.  I registered all five accounts in one day, so it would appear that Google doesn’t care if you do this.

1. Personal Gmail: I get all my regular email here from friends and family.  I tend to filter out any kind of advertising, etc. and send those emails directly to the archives.

2. ActionsTalk Gmail: I have a few things routed here now.  Since I set up a Twitter account for ActionsTalk (my startup spotlight website), I’ve got all the alerts for that account going here.  Any new comment alert coming from the site (ActionsTalk.com), and emails from sponsors or startups are also sent here.  Lastly, I used search.twitter.com to set up an RSS feed for any time someone mentions “@ActionsTalk” on Twitter.  I pump that RSS feed through xFruits using their RSS to Email generator and voila… I get an email any time we’re mentioned.

3.  Twitter Gmail: I do all the same stuff with this email account that I did with #2, but this time I have all the alerts for my personal Twitter account fed in.

4.  Facebook Gmail: I’ve got all my alerts from Facebook here like new friend requests, notifications of wall posts, photo tags, etc.

5.  Finance Gmail: I now have all my email from any of my bank accounts sent to this email address.  This includes bill pay reminders, spending threshold alerts, etc.

Bottom line: This system took about 30 minutes to set up.  After about a week of using it, I can say that it has made me much better at reading and responding to emails.  I can clearly see how many of each type I have, and I can deal with them at my leisure. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think in the comments.