Vancouver’s First Cloud Camp is in two more days!
What will you do at Cloud Camp? You will learn how to take advantage of cloud computing to do things you could not do before, to save money, to be more flexible and agile. You can get your questions answered about security, privacy, and compliance. You can learn about and understand the differences between public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid clouds. Hear from your peers who are building and developing on the cloud about how they have stopped buying and installing and maintaining physical servers.
CloudCamp is a free full-day “unconference” where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing.
End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to attend and participate.
We’d like to ask your help to spread the word. You can do that by:
- Sharing us on Facebook
- Letting your LinkedIn contacts know you’re attending the event
- Tweet about us using the hashtag #Cloudcamp or full phrase “#Cloudcamp Vancouver”
- Email your friends and invite them to come.
The URL for sign-ups is: http://www.cloudcamp.org/vancouver.
Sign-up closes Friday night at midnight
Details are below as a reminder:
DATE/TIME: This Saturday March 13, 2010, 9:00am
LOCATION: Discovery Park, 887 Great Northern Way (map)
COFFEE and LUNCH is provided and/or feel free to bring your own.
COST: FREE! (bring your friends!)
AGENDA: (this may change)
9:00-9:30am Registration
9:30-9:45am Welcome & Intros
9:45-10:00am Lightning Talk
10:00-10:30am Unpanel
10:30-11:00am Organize Unconference
11:15-12:00pm Session 1
1:00-1:15pm Lunch
1:15-2:00pm Breakout Session #2
2:00-3:00pm Breakout Session #3
3:00-3:30pm Wrap-up Session
Evening – ad-hoc dinner/drinks somewhere??? (at your own expense!)
We would like to thank our sponsors who have made this event possible.
Venue: Discovery Park
Gold: RightScale, Backbone Systems
Silver: Peer 1, Tropo, Agreement Express, Layer 7
Media/Promotion: Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, BCTIA, TechVibes
Thanks from the Cloud Camp Vancouver team.
I was asked recently what I had learned from my informal survey of the local BC cleantech sector. This was my response and I was encouraged to share it more widely. I’d love your own thoughts on the following.
Dear (Friend):
You asked about my view on the cleantech sector after I took some time to survey it. Let me answer by starting with the big picture and the thing that prompted me to look at cleantech in the first place. Then I will be better able to answer your question at the bottom.
First, the global view.
Globally, we are standing at the confluence of two exponentially increasing tides. The power of one may help us address the risks of the other, but only if we engage them both head-on. One is the curve of resource usage, the other is the curve of technological change.
Curve 1: Overshoot and collapse and “peak everything”
We have used up half of our forests and half our our fish stocks on the planet to-date and given our “peak everything” 3.5%/yr compounding resource usage curve, we will use the same amount of resources in the next 20 years as we used in the last 260 years. It is widely understood that we have already exceeded the capacity of this planet to support our continued growth as a species by between 20-30% and are already going to have to plan for a “controlled crash.”
Curve 2: Double exponential technological advances
Simultaneously, technology is developing at a double exponential rate such that we can not even comprehend what our world may look like by 2050 from a technology perspective. A brief reminder: 30 steps taken 1 foot a a time moves you forward 30 feet. 30 steps taken exponentially moves you forward 1.07 billion feet. It’s hard for our brains to grasp. The next 10 years will be like our last 100 in terms of new technology and that is accelerating. If predictions by people such as Ray Kurzweil come true, we could have nano solar devices providing 100% of humanity’s power requirements by 2030, the wealthy and maybe even middle class will be iiving long healthy lives free of disease and many of them will be integrated into computers and robots. If we choose our technologies wisely, even the poorest will have the benefit of low-cost desalination and solar power.
In terms of scenarios, it will already probably be either a huge cliff, a controlled step-down crash, or in a miracle of miracles, a bounce off the bottom and a move to a regenerative world. Hopefully we still have those options.
Actions we need to take:
We need to understand and act on the knowledge that comes from both of these curves.
Regarding the first curve, we need to stop the denial, anticipate the issues, structure responses that address both the rational and irrational causes of inaction, address our flawed, emotional, homeostatic tendencies, and work towards creating a regenerative world, rather than the destructive negative overuse cycle we are in. We know a lot about why we do not act. We don’t need “more information”, we need to build plans that take into account our very human responses to things. Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter’s work is key here.
Regarding the second curve, we need to stop sticking our head in the sand about technology and embrace and channel technological development. Relinquishment of technologies won’t work. That would be like standing idly by saying “I will have no part in that river coming dangerously close to the village” when that river is doubling in volume and power every year. We can’t stop it, but we can channel it. We need to slay our sacred cows by revisiting nuclear power (which is emissions free) and genetically modified foods. We need to use every advantage we have to both increase resource generation and regeneration and also to decrease resource usage per person. This will require structuring government incentives for radical expansion of green technologies. The Sustainable Development Technology Canada program is a great start. We need more. We need to think like Vinod Khosla who says “if we do not address maintech (building materials, concrete, water, chemicals, coal, oil, efficiency) and solve them at low-cost, that can get to market unsubsidized in China and India and scale to the whole planet, then we won’t solve our problems”. Since we don’t know where the innovations will occur, we need to structure capital to create massive “optionality” and R&D across the board, focusing on those areas that are most ripe for change / disruption / innovation and that are causing the biggest problems. Sadly, I think we should also continue to support companies and organizations like Space X and the LifeBoat foundation, both of which are trying to get off the planet in case we really make a mess and can’t live here any more.
We need to work the top line by increasing resources
We need to Increase outputs and resources and regeneration through restoration of forests, soils, forests, fisheries. We need to boost agricultural outputs (again) by raising land and water productivity and studying ways of producing protein more efficiently that with the standard corn-fed cattle approach. This includes continued research into genetically modified foods.
We need to work the bottom line by decreasing our resource usage per person
We need to also lower our resource use/person by restructuring economically through things like cap and trade, removal of subsidies on things like oil (we spend $700B annually across the globe subsidizing the exact wrong behaviours), restructure the energy landscape by decommissioning coal, shifting to renewables, pushing for all of the efficiency we can get now and every year going forward. We need to get MUCH better at urban design since in 30 more years, 80% of the planet will live in 3% of the surface area in cities and that means urban transportation, bikes, water use, city farming, squatter gentrification. We need to implement “third world” solutions in our own backyard – micro finance, entrepreneurial education, population stabilization (which happens automatically as people move to the city).
National leaders…aren’t leading
Global progress on our bigger issues is stalled. Copenhagen was widely regarded as a failure. Nations are too slow to act. China and the US refused to take material action at Copenhagen and that means that no other nations will follow. The US is frustrating cap and trade. Canada is also lagging. Within our borders, our provinces and territories are too heterogeneous and their populace has too many diverging interests.
We have structural capital issues that are impeding our ability to bring investment into Canada that will continue to haunt all forms of technology development, including cleantech, and they need to be addressed. The Section 116 problem has never been resolved and makes it difficult for investors to invest in Canada without great hassles. We need to fix this as it continues to scare US venture capital away and is causing a hollowing out of Canadian companies as US investors must move our companies south in order to invest in them. It’s easier for a US company to buy out and move a Canadian company than to simply invest in it.
This revolution will happen provincially, regionally and municipally:
BC is already the 10th largest “cleantech market” in North America. We have top-notch universities that pump out research, we have core resource and mining people, law, and organizations in place that can be repurposed for cleantech company creation, financing, and implementation of things like carbon projects. We already have an excellent industry association leadership in the BCTIA, the Premier’s Technology Council is already very supportive of cleantech, and we have programs such as the newly launched CleanWorks BC marketing campaign intended to attract foreign investment to BC. We also have a large number of excellent cleantech companies here and we have strong core competencies in hydro electric power, power transmission, storage and battery technology, wastewater management, and bioenergy.
The Lower Mainland as a region and all of the cities inside it will be key. You can make a difference at the regional level. Cities are massive producers of the problem and they’re also massively incentivized to solve the issues for themselves – they are almost self-contained zones.
In Vancouver, we have a mayor who sees the benefit of working on all three pillars of sustainability: “people, planet and profit” as it is often referred to. He is building ties with Governor Schwarzenegger from California and Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room Initiative , among many other things. In short, he is trying to put Vancouver on the global map as a “Green Capital” in the world.
So what do we need to do next?
We need capital fixes. There are many others who know much more about this but I know that we have capital gaps. The exits are long and difficult for investors (10 years) for many of these green technologies and so many companies suffer or fail as do their investors.
We need to continue to back primary research at the universities that feeds into our technology landscape.
We need to build more funds that create small companies that can fail faster – allowing us to create promote “optionality” or the creation of as many options as possible.
We need to build a more unified province wide Cleantech BC association that unifies traditional energy, renewables, materials, efficiency, and water all into one cohesive strategic plan.
We need to survey our assets in the universities and our companies, scan the market for current and latent need and then really support those clusters where we can excel and build networks of inter-related and successful companies.
As a province, we need to realize we are competing globally, not within Canada.
As a province, we need to redefine “cleantech” to include all of our “maintech” – the stuff that will move the needle. That will require vision expansion and coaching. This means expanding our idea of “cleantech” from renewables to greening of the entire supply chain and all materials and energy usage.
We need to continue to push these changes bottom up because waiting for national governments (Canada, US, or otherwise) will take too long and be too ineffective. The only exception to that is major cap and trade policy and other regulation which mostly needs to happen federally. But even without it, cities and regions can adopt their own and enforce them locally as they’re doing now. It’s less effective but it’s a step until the national dithering is resolved.
The province must address issues of forest, agricultural land, fisheries and water restructuring in order to once again focus on maximizing sustainable, regenerative yields. One area I’m significantly concerned about here is water rights. It appears that we are selling off our water rights to foreign interests and that needs to be reversed. Peak water is right behind peak oil as a critical issue.
My final summary?
We have a lack of national leadership on the major environmental challenges ahead of us as evidenced by Canada’s embarrassing performance at Copenhagen, but that is countered by highly motivated provincial, regional, and municipal leaders. And we have a province filled with excellent cleantech companies, entrepreneurs, and teams that are highly capital efficient.
So, while my survey of the sector has tempered me with its long, difficult, unpredictable company builds and exits, the people working on those companies have excited me with their passion, vitality and energy for finding and creating solutions to our big challenges. That passion and energy is one of the key reasons I have decided not to return to the US and to instead, stay here and work to build BC’s local technology sector. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get to it.
Aside from the continuing use of the annoying “save the planet” meme (the planet will be fine – it’s really “save the humans from an ugly step-down crash”) this is a great talk that Adam Werbach just gave recently tothe Teens Turning Green conference. Adam is the Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, author of “Strategy for Sustainability”, and the former President of the Sierra Club.
I’ve excerpted the beginning below. Click here for the full speech transcript over on Care2.com.
You were born to save the planet.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and it has all been leading up to you. 4.4 million years ago an ancestor we now call ARDI roamed the land of Ethiopia, and her life was leading up to you. The last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, thawed, leaving the redwood forests to our North, and all of this was leading up to you. The Earth needs you right now.
Your generation was born to save the planet.
Have you ever wondered when things started going wrong? Our ecological systems are in decline, one-third of fish species stand at the verge of collapse, the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide drinking water to over a billion people, are rapidly melting, the chemicals we’re putting in us, on us and around us are forming complex endocrine disrupting compounds that are in every one of our bodies. Every mother who is breastfeeding in America today is probably passing a man-made chemical to their child. There’s something fundamentally wrong when mothers need to worry about chemicals that they’re passing to their children.
We’re born with better sense than that. You learn basic rules in kindergarten. Don’t break your friend’s toys. Share. Wait in line. Don’t hurt anybody. Robert Fulghum wrote a little book called All I Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten. But then we grow up. We forget all of that. The plague of Middle School is visited upon us. We get focused on soccer practice. And bands. And ballet. And sex. And STAR tests. And SATs. And college.
I actually want to write a sequel to Fulghum’s book. We could call it: All I Need to Forget I learned in Middle School.
Whenever it started, the bad news seems to keep on coming.
Ten months ago the last wild jaguar in the United States was killed. The last one. They called it Macho B. Biologists had been seeing Macho B for years. The Arizona Department of Game and Fish killed it accidentally in a bungled attempt to save it, because the Federal Government had refused to give the jaguar Endangered Species Protection.
This is happening in your lifetimes. This isn’t something you need to wait for a Kens Burns Documentary to hear about, the crash in biodiversity in our last wild places is happening now.
Click here to read the rest.
FINALLY, my jet pack is here.
I haven’t outsourced my inbox yet like Tim Ferriss has. I still do it myself. So every time I hit Inbox Zero, I thank my friend Alex Samuel from Social Signal for her tweeting about her own inbox zero success. I used to have 3000+ emails in my inbox and another 20,000 somewhere in the archive. I finally found a way to clear it. It requires Gmail, a to-do list of some kind and Gmail’s awesome keyboard shortcuts, and some Apple keyboard shortcuts.
Ensure you already have a good to-do list manager of some kind, that you can use to sort and prioritize tasks. I use a basic google sheet in a dedicated Site-specific browser too called Fluid (so it looks like a desktop app and it has an icon in my dock), but you can use anything. The keys to success are in these principles:
- Email is not a to-do list. Period. Get tasks out of there.
- Archiving = peace of mind. I never really understood the value of archiving until I realized that it is a way to file…without the psychological overhead of filing. It is a way of saying “get this out of my inbox and put it away in case I need it again.)
- The important thing is to either archive, action/archive, or put on list/archive everything.
- Eliminate (in this case archive) everything you don’t need to action as fast as you can
- Delegate (with short emails) nything you can as fast and succinctly as possible)
- Put tasks into the task list, then come back and keep sifting.
So once you have your crazy full inbox and your to-do list:
- Go to the oldest email in your inbox and open it.
- Scan the contents and using standard GTD thinking, do one of the following:
- Task?
- Command-Tab to your task list
- add the task as an ABC or to-delegate item
- Command-tab back
- hit the magic “]” key. (<- This archives the message and takes you to the next most current email.)
- <2 minute action?
- Command-tab to app to take action. If you need to send an email and don’t want to lose your spot in the email inbox in Gmail, hold SHIFT and then hit COMPOSE NEW MESSAGE. It will pop open a window on top. When you’re done and have sent it, the window will close, leaving you right where you were before.
- Take action. If that means writing an email, do it in five sentences or less.
- Command-Tab back to Gmail if necessary.
- Hit the magic “]” key to archive the message.
- Archivable? No action required?
- Archive and next with “]” key.
- Repeat as fast as possible until Inbox Zero.
- Celebrate.
The beauty of the ] key and the command-tab and the shift-compose is that with a few keystrokes, you can can clear hundreds or even thousands of messages in a few hours. My first pass? I cleared 3000 messages in a few hours. It can be done. And when I was done, I had a complete list of all of my tasks again. I wasn’t living with some tasks in email and others in a to-do list which is always a recipe for lack of prioritization anyway.
Have you hit inbox zero? How do you handle it? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear it.
Honda’s new one person Electric motorcycle.
WANT.
More info here.
Techvibes and I released “BC’s Cloud Computing Ecosystem – A Comprehensive List” today. Please leave comments, tell me what I missed, make suggestions, debate my definitions of cloud, or whatever else. More than anything, please come and join the conversation. And if you click through the link at the bottom, it will take you from the article to the actual list itself which is stored on Google Docs so we can keep it current.
And if you’re interested in cloud computing, please remember to sign up to attend the full day Cloud Camp Vancouver being held on March 13 at Discovery Park on Great Northern Way. I’m co-hosting it with local cloudies Trevor Orzstynowicz and Jenny Yang, both of whom are building cloud companies here in Vancouver.
Check out the graph that “Sleep Cycle” generated for me last night. Cool.
Watch these in this order. They’re like peanut butter and jam. Perfect.
Kevin Kelly tells the epic story of technology from the birth of the universe until now.
Then Bill Gates asks for his one big wish for humanity’s technological development: an energy miracle to help the poorest 2 billion people on the planet thrive.
Business, Cloud Computing, Cognitive Science, Community, Complex Systems, Energy, Governance, Health & Fitness, Life Lessons, Policy, Politics, Sustainable Development, Technology, Transportation, Urban Planning
(EDIT: I said Milton Friedman who is of course, no longer with us, may he rest in peace. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)
Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six english report on the state of the world. It’s awesome. Read it. I agree with all of it and particularly getting rid of the phrase “global warming” because idiots then say “well it was warm today here in Arizona so Al Gore is OBVIOUSLY a lying idiot.”(sigh)
Key quotes are below:
What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.
At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.
Here are the points I like to stress:
1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.
The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.
2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.
3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.
4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.
via Op-Ed Columnist – Global Weirding Is Here – NYTimes.com.
Business, Cognitive Science, Community, Complex Systems, Computing & IT, Energy, Environment, Governance, Media, Technology, Travel, Urban Planning
Check out the newly launched Climate Action Plan Indicators tool from the City of Berkeley that is based on Vancouver’s own Visible Strategies‘ “See-It” application.
It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.
Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!
Business, Cloud Computing, Community, Complex Systems, Computing & IT, Energy, Enterprise Software, Geolocation, Governance, Media, Policy, Politics, Sustainable Development, Technology, Transportation, Urban Planning
I found an awesome PPT deck today called How to Optimize Your SaaS Revenue Streams – Rackspace SaaS & Cloud 2010.
Its authors Lincoln Murphy and Justin Pirie do a great job of articulating the high level difficulty of building a Saas play and explain it in simple terms. Great 100,000 foot view.
It really is THIS hard.
I wanted another Subaru until I saw THIS baby! Forget the Subaru. Maybe an old Yugo?
I thought that this quote below from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, at the Mobile World Congress was critically new and interesting in terms of being a piece of evidence that we’ve tipped over from desktop to mobile as the dominant delivery channel:
Earlier Schmidt used his first ever keynote speech at the world’s largest mobile phone trade show to give the industry a call to action, suggesting that telecommunications companies should embrace the new world of smartphones and cloud computing, not fear it.
He said high levels of connectivity and cloud computing – the idea that devices can be made smarter by relying on the computers on the internet to carry out complex tasks such as voice recognition – have brought the industry to a turning point.
“The confluence of these three factors mans something very fundamental is happening. A phone is no longer a phone, it’s your alter-ego,” he said. “It does not think as well as you do, but it has a better memory. It has a more accurate idea of where you are. It can take pictures better than we can remember things.”
He said Google is switching to a ‘mobile first’ model, with more and more developers thinking first about how the applications and services they have created will work on a mobile device.
“Culturally it is time to figure out a way to say yes to the emergent new services and ideas that will not come from Google but from those literally millions of companies and programming shops that will be built on this new platform.”
“Now is the time for all of us to get behind it. What I would suggest to you here, right now, at Mobile World Congress is to understand that the new rule is ‘mobile first’; mobile first in everything.. it’s time for us to make mobile first the right answer.”
I like that phrase: “Mobile First”. I think I’ll use it.
Cool looking little commuter concept car from Rinspeed. Cute! It’s like a pug. Imagine owning a pug dog and a Rinspeed? They’d be the perfect Yaletown accoutrements.
Rinspeed UC: Want to Get More Miles Out of Your Electric Car? Take It on a Train | Technomix | Fast Company.
I wrote back in March 2009 about my hopes and dreams for a tablet from Apple, all of which came true on January 27, 2010 with the release of the new iPad. But in late fall 2009, I decided to get into ebook readers since I was reading a lot more books for some research. I ended up purchasing the Kindle DX, the largest of Amazon’s ebook reading devices. I also downloaded Kindle for PC to run in Parallels on my Mac, and also ran the Kindle for iPhone application. Here is a table that shows some of the key differences. And I’ve added in the iPad to begin comparing it to the three I have already been using now for many months. I thought that my own learning might be valuable to others looking at making the same decision.
I was asked, “what are you comparing though – the value of the device / software as a reader or as a multi-purpose tablet?” Another person asked me “is this a platform competition? What if I leave the “reading” app and go outside? Doesn’t that still count as using the device?”
I admit I struggled with that until I realized what I was actually trying to figure out was the following: which combination of stores and devices will let me do as much as possible in as few devices as possible while maximizing my access to great low-cost ebook content? So to that end, as I started to compare options, I shifted from “is it a good reader” to “is it a good device to let me see all the content I want to see, regardless of application or viewer?”
Let’s look at use cases:
Multi-day: On a multi-day business trip, I already take my laptop, Kindle, and iPhone. So the question I am really trying to answer is: can I use the iPad as a replacement for the DX I always carry on trips like that for reading on long flights, and since it can do more generally, will it become a full-on replacement?
Day trip: Currently I mostly head out on day trips with just my DX and my iPhone. It’s okay but honestly I don’t want to read a book on the iPhone, it’s too small. It’s okay for taking teensy-weensy notes but not much more. Typing notes on the DX is like poking sharp needles into your eyes. It’s really lame. And besides, those notes are only allowed in the books themselves. It also has no wifi and my US version doesn’t have cellular coverage in Canada. So all in all, it really just ends up being like carrying a novel around that I can read in between meetings. Could the iPad be the “tween” device that lets me take slightly longer notes if I want? Why not get a netbook so I don’t have to lug around my 7 pound MacBook Pro? Because, like Steve Jobs, I hate netbooks. I hate their tiny poor-quality screens and cramped little keyboards. And sure, you can hack them to make a Mac but I hate hacking things. I just want to unveil them out of the box and have them magically work.
Pure reading: I use the Kindle a lot for reading at home or at the cafe. I can toss it in my backpack, go for a coffee and sit and read and write notes and think. But the slow speed, clunky highlighting, and annoying clipping limits do grate me a bit. It was the best I had and it was a great luxury so I have certainly enjoyed it. And it has been nice to be able to have all my books with me. There is also a blissful simplicity in having a device that sucks at absolutely everything except reading a page of text. It acts as a constraint to let you focus better. But I really think that’s a bit of human post-hoc rationalization and reframing – the same thing we say about “the good old days when things were simpler” which is nowspeak for “we had no food or water or money and the war was on but life was still good.” B.S. that’s just wearing rose-coloured glasses to reframe your experience. The current Kindle if you look at it truthfully can’t “flip through pages” quickly. It’s a painful 3-5 second lag per page. The 5 way toggle is clunky. Everybody I hand the device to tries to “swipe” the pages and then looks confused. It’s SLOW. The PDF viewer is horrendous and unusable for powerpoint decks. It sucks at everything on earth except basic text pages. So I love the books, I love reading on a tablet in a cafe or at home, but I hate the actual user experience of this particular Kindle DX. It’s a blessing and I’m not giving it away until I have a replacement but my iPhone Kindle app spoiled me. It’s so fast and smooth and elegant…just too darned small.
For my uses above, I want the iPad. It is a reader but it’s so much more. It has wifi and 3G so no matter where I am or which country I’m in, it will function without me having to worry about 3G coverage. And it’s just so lickable and fast and clean and iPod-like. I’m already sold. But it may not be the answer for you. Here is a table to help you examine it for your own needs. I’ve also added in the Kindle for iPhone application (which I’m hoping will be expanded to become the Kindle for iPad application) and the Kindle for PC application. The Kindle for Mac app is not out yet. Hopefully it will be better than the PC version which is poor.
|
Apple iPad
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Amazon Kindle DX
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Kindle for iPhone
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Kindle for PC / Mac (coming soon)
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reader Price
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$499-829 USD
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$429-$489 USD
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Free
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Free
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Screen size (diag)
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9.7″
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9.7″
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3.5″
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variable
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Resolution
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1024×768
@ thousands of colours
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1200×824
@ 16 greys
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480×320
@ thousands of colors
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variable
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Weight
|
about 1.6 lb
(5 iPods)
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approx 1.2 lbs
(4 iPods)
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approx 0.3 lb
|
|
Storage
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16/32/64GB flash only (no hard drive!)
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4GB internal hard drive (3500 books)
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depends on model
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n/a
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Battery life:
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Apple says 10 hours. I don’t buy it. Call it “a day”
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Days. I often get 2-4 days of reading out of it
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Ha. Don’t get me started. Google “iPhone Battery Life”
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n/a
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Screen type
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LED backlit multi-touch IPS with wide viewing angle. Great for everything.
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Non-backlit e-ink display that is easy on the eyes, and very energy efficient. e-ink is COOL. But slow and
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standard iPhone screen
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n/a
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Readability
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Demo looks good; looking forward to using it; unknown in bright light
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Very easy on the eyes; EXCELLENT in bright light/sun.
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Easy to read; just too damned small
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depends on your screen
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Application fit and finish and quality
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Demo looks great. If it works as well as it demos, then Apple’s reader is pretty awesome.
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Clunky app from Mac Plus circa 1990; home screen is an awful set of pages in a list. Reading once you’re in the book is great though.
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Tight, clean application
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Dog’s breakfast slapped together in an afternoon. Missing search field; wacky text line resizing; feels half-baked
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Read Amazon store books
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Yes, via Kindle for iPhone or iPad
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Yes
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Yes
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Yes
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Read iBook Store books
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Yes, via iBook app
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No
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?
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No
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Total Paid Books available
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Current:
400,000 Amazon
Uknown? Apple iBooks
Out of print:
1 Million+ Google
= 1.5M?+ books??
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Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.
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Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.
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Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.
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Read Text files
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Yes, in other apps
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Yes
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Yes, in other apps
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Yes, in other apps on the PC
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Read PDFs
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Yes, in the email app
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Yes, but poorly. No pan or zoom. Rotate only works with some docs. Landscape PDFs from PPT are horrible and “2 paged” in landscape mode. Small print PDFs are illegible. Slow.
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Yes, in the email app. Small but readable and zoomable.
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Yes, in your PC PDF viewer
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Read .doc files
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Yes, in the email app
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Yes, with conversion
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Yes, in other apps
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Not in the Kindle app
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eNews?
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Soon. NYT to start, others to follow.
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Yes but it’s a horrible “news reading” experience, with limited graphics and horrendous indexing
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No
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No
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Wifi
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Included
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n/a. I actually think this was clever of Amazon for their first move given the device’s limited complexity and UI.
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Included
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depends on PC
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3G cellular
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optional: requires higher end model starting at $629USD and $15-30/mo
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included free in purchase price of books
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Included in phone; Kindle app uses it
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depends on PC
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Screen rotation
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Auto; no option to turn off
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Auto or fixed
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Auto
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n/a
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Hardware speed
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freaking fast if the video demos are accurate
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Mac Plus era painful (2-5 seconds per action – kill me)
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fast; love it
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depends on PC
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Native book store DRM restrictions
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Unknown; hopefully Steve will push for lenient or no DRM like with music before it
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limits to # of downloads, # of clippings/highlights, number of devices, ALL of which are undocumented and set by individual publishers
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see left
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see left
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Native bookstore eBook format
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ePub format (same as the 1M+ old books Google is in the process of scanning)
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Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based)
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Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based) |
Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based) |
Audio
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Full iPod (woohoo!)
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clunky beta audio book and mp3 player not worth using
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n/a
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n/a
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Font
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multiple to choose from
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single font type
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single font type
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single font type
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Font size
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variable
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variable
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variable
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variable
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Interaction tool
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Multi-touch
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clunky 5 way toggle
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Multi-touch
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Mouse/Keyboard
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Dictionary
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Unknown
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Included
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n/a
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n/a
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Search library
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Coming
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Yes
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No
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NONE!
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Search book
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Coming
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Yes
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No
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NONE!
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Highlighting
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Coming
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Yes but limited in VERY stupid ways
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multi-touch highlighting; nice!
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NONE!
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Annotations
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Coming
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Yes, with built-in keyboard that is horrible to use.
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Yes, but there’s not much screen real estate left!
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NONE!
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Colour?
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Yes
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16 greys
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black, white, sepia
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16 greys
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Video can be embedded in book
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Yes
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No
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No
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No
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Web browser
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Safari and it looks like it screams
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Beta crappy test browser that barely loads pages
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n/a
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n/a
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Best Use Cases
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Apple fanatic who wants a multi-purpose tablet, browser, email, video, content watching thingamajig. Me. Fan-boys/girls. Kids. Gamers. Movie-lovers. Book-lovers. *Education. Web-surfers. The market for this thing is stinking huge. Edu
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Book lover who just wants to read huge volumes of text on a super light, very easy to read reader that doesn’t have to be recharged all the time and who doesn’t want to fuss with complicated technology.
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Good for catching up on your reading in those spare moments in between meetings.
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Good for scanning books quickly on very large screens. I use it on a rotated 24″ screen in portrait mode and it’s great for that!
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Summary (Device)
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This multi-function mobile device is a game-changer and will add huge new revenues (and hopefully great margins) to Apple’s top and bottom lines. Best for people who don’t mind the added complexity (and weight) and shorter battery life to have a lot more functionality.
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The world’s best ebook (only) reader with an excellent collection of current books that you can access quickly and easily in 100 countries with no fuss. This is a great device for book-lovers wanting a portable book.
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good for 2nd or 3rd reader to supplement a primary reader.
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Poor attempt at a PC app; should have been finished before being released.
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As you can see there are really a few decisions that are sort of coupled and that depend on your own needs:
- Which is the better reading device?
- What are the best sources of content for my needs?
- How many devices do I want?
- What do I want to do with them?
The Device: iPad vs. DX
Amazon is not a hardware company. They only launched the Kindle because hell, they HAD to. Their hardware had some very specific design criteria (long battery life, easy on the eyes, and low cost) and the further (unfortunate) constraint that hardware is not in their DNA like it is at Apple. They’re a low margin high velocity retailer, not an Apple clone. Having said all that, I love Amazon. I love their service. I love their efficient systems. I love the fact that whenever I look up a book on their service, it’s almost always available for $9.99. I love that they make it so easy for me to read and because of them, I’m reading a LOT more. I love them despite the Kindle hardware, not because of it.
Apple is a hardware, software, services, content, engineering, design company and that shows up in this beautiful tablet. Unequivocally I would trade my Kindle DX in and use the iPad instead. Because then I could read but I could also do a lot more. Their device is hands down a better device. I do not buy the marketing messaging from Amazon that their e-ink screen is “easier on the eyes”. I doubt that’s been proven. They’re both operating at similar pixel densities (130-150 pixels per inch) and my understanding has always been that it’s pixel density plus good anti-aliasing that makes the difference, not “lack of backlight”. The second reason is that the Kindle feels like operating a painfully slow Mac Plus from twenty years ago in grey scale. It takes forever to flip pages, jump through chapters, highlight large sections of text or generally move at the speed of thought. You can’t think/do. You think, do……wait….wait….wait…..oh rats, I wanted to do something ELSE. It’s painful.
Winner for devices: iPad without question in my mind
eBook Store: Amazon.com vs. iBook Store
Interestingly the eBook Store is not as coupled to the device as you might initially think. The iPhone is the single largest ebook reading platform for Amazon.com’s titles because so many people have them in their pockets and have downloaded Amazon.com’s excellent little “Kindle for iPhone” application (which is much much better than their half-baked “Kindle for PC” application.)
Amazon has north of 400,000 titles in their own custom .azw file format but they’re the most popular and most current titles on earth and they’re adding to that list rapidly. Because I read current work, this is the most important source to me today. Barnes & Noble and Sony don’t come close so I never looked at them once I had figured that out. So as long as Apple let’s Amazon play nicely by letting them release “Kindle for iPad” that operates at full pixel density (and you don’t have to just run the “Kindle for iPhone” app in 2x double-pixel mode (which would make it awful), then my first preference probably for most of 2010 would be to read Amazon titles on my Kindle for iPad application on the iPad. Next, Google is scanning a million out of print books and making them available in ePub or PDF formats. This is great news for iPad users since it will use ePub and presumably will be able to access these books. I’ve looked at a couple (from the early 1700s actually) but they make up 0.1% of my reading so they’re almost not relevant. Great humanitarian project, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not the material I want as somebody on the bleeding edge of technology and business. Thirdly, Apple’s iBook store will take a while to get going, as it did with their iTunes catalog. But they have the money and the people and the will so I think it will happen and be great. So I think that at least for 2010 I’d end up reading books from both the Amazon store and the Apple iBook store on the iPad. Best of both worlds!
But in the long run, “defaults count”. The store that is shipped on board the device will have the greater network effect and will eventually overtake the Amazon store (which would require a separate download if Apple doesn’t block it entirely at some point.)
Winner: Apple & Amazon.com! (since I’d be buying titles from both) but with Apple pulling ahead in the long run (2-3 years)
What will Amazon do to counter the iPad?
They are trying to build a developer community around the Kindle. I think that with the current crappy hardware, that’s a non-starter. It’s just not an interesting device to build apps for. I think developers would build for anything BUT the Kindle. And that really blows up Amazon’s key message about it being a single-function device.
I think that they have the will and finances to build a next generation colour e-ink display and to keep pushing on the idea of faster, lighter, more energy efficient, and non-backlit. That’s their key set of design priorities. I think it remains to be seen how many people will be attracted to that vision vs. spending the same amount of money to get a device that not only looks better for books but also does everything else. I never think of these things as either/or. There will be room for Kindles and Nooks and all the other dedicated ebook readers. But I think the iPad will eat a major part of what would have been their market share, very quickly marginalizing them to the edges of the market. If they do continue to push the boundaries of the technology, it could be interesting. But good hardware is just not in their DNA (yet) so it could take a very long while.
Amazon seems to be best when they can build massive global systems that efficiently distribute “stuff” (virtual or physical) at low margins and huge volumes. They are the world’s largest e-tailer and they’re insanely great at that. I know they’ll continue doing that. The Kindle will hopefully just continue to be a set of applications that run on all devices.
Black Swans
Here is a perfect world scenario for me but it’s a bit of a black swan – a low probablility, high impact event. Apple and Amazon strike a deal and Apple can ingest all of Amazon’s content and ditch their proprietary DRM (just like Apple did with the music labels over a four year period) until eventually you can read all of Amazon’s, Apple’s, and Google’s ePub books in the iPad reader with minimal or no DRM. Please Steve, make it happen.
My final decision
I’ll order an iPad as soon as one is available, (not sure if it will be the wifi or I’ll wait for the 3G) and then if I can read all of my Kindle content on there it will probably become my tablet of choice and the Kindle may go away. I know that it will be a more effective device for carrying on day trips and for hanging at the cafe. I’ll just have to remember to bring a charger since I don’t believe Apple’s battery claims.
In the meantime, where is my DX so I can sit down and do some reading? Man this is slow, and clunky and OLD feeling today. Sigh. Makes me realize how true this Onion story is.
(photos courtesy of this excellent post from the GDGT team here and thanks to the LeoLaporte/Twit team and Ustream for their feed here.)
Holy cow, did I ever call this one right back in March of this year. Scary right. Apple has reinvented the mobile industry…again.
Apple’s new iPad is a radical game-changer, a disruptive competitor to Amazon, a disruptor to the software business and a great leap forward in terms of user interface. It’s freaking awesome. This will be Steve Jobs’ legacy:
- Apple update:
- they just had their larget quarter ever
- their gross margins are up over 40% while the rest of the industry is collapsing while fighting it out in the netbook category
- They have over 140,000 apps in the app store that have been downloaded over 3 billion times.
- They’re now a > 50B company.
- Apple is the world’s largest mobile product company: bigger than Nokia, Samsung, or Sony. Holy crap.
- 125M credit cards that have downloaded over 12 Billion products.
- The iPad
- “netbooks suck at everything”
- we decided to create a tablet
- 9.7″ diagonal
- custom processor
- <1/2″ thick; less than 1.5 pounds;
- auto-rotation, GPS, compass, 3G, WIFI
- all new iTunes
- all new iPhoto
- all new calendar
- all new address book
- It’s a full on replacement for the old “day-timer”
- multi-touch everywhere
- 10 hours of work time and a month of standby time
- insanely fast graphics
- run all 140,000 existing iPhone apps at regular 1x size or at 2x full-size;
- new apps can be built to run at full screen
- soft keyboard is almost the same size as a real keyboard
- plugs into a projector and a portable keyboard and has its own cover
- iBooks
- 5 major publishers on board, more coming
- beautiful display
- iTunes like bookstore built in
- Editorial notes from me:
- as a user of the Kindle DX, I can’t wait for this. I hate the low speed and crappy hardware of the DX but love having my books with me eveerywhere I go.
- They have only said “we have 5 major publishers on board” but haven’t said anything about how many titles they have. Amazon has 400,000 and counting and content is king.
- I would also be happy to use the “Kindle for iPhone” application from Amazon if they release one. I can see having my e-books split across the two libraries which is slightly annoying but not the end of the world.
- iWork – all new iPad apps for $9.99 each (WHOA).
- brand new apps
- multi-touch
- incredible app for a portable device
- Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote for presentations.
- [I'm floored by this $9.99 pricing. They've just disrupted the entire personal productivity software pricing model.]
- Accessories:
- we have built a dock so you can plug in and type and recharge
- we have a great case built for it
- Pricing:
- DATA PLAN
- USA:
- $14.99 = 250MB/mo (good for most people) with no contract; cancel anytime you want [this is great because so many people were so pissed off at AT&T)
- $29.99 unlimited
- Both include free use of AT&T wifi hotspots
- Cancel anytime is a great feature
- Rest of world:
- July 2010 pricing coming soon
- but you can use a micro SIM to run it on your own local carrier with our permission before July
- IPAD (wifi only pricing / wifi + 3G) [kind of like the iPod Touch / iPhone]
- 16GB: $499/$629
- 32GB: $599/729
- 64GB: $699/829
SUMMARY thoughts:
As usual, Apple has knocked it out of the park. They have built on their successes that came before: iPhone, app store, iPhone economy, app store, iTunes, and now iPad. This is the beginning of the next arc for Apple and will add another $50B/yr to their revenue. You can see their follow-on areas to add: video camera for skype/camming.
The price models illustrate the best pricing strategy I have seen. They chose the price to go to market with $499 and also had margin requirements (knowing Steve and team from a distance) and as evidenced by their increased margins from this last quarterly earnings call. They then engineered it to be producible at that margin and at that market price. It’s staggering.
This will cause yet another Cambrian explosion in application development and a (temporary?) bump in the publishing realm as all of the struggling newspapers move their content onto this platform.
Fan-boy glow aside, this is a technology and business game changer across mobile, netbooks, and laptops and will fundamentally restructure things AGAIN like the iPhone did.
I”m shocked at how well Apple has consistently executed on their business from the Macbooks to the iPhone/iPod Touches, the App Store, the iTunes store, and now the iPad. This is the beginning of something huge for Apple.
Nice work Steve and team!
Sign me up!
For more information see:
Here is a photo of the Club Fat Ass “Fat Ass 50 New Years Run” hosted by none other than Ean “Action” Jackson, who not only started this run 17 years ago but also managed to run it as his 100th ultra. And thanks to Sibylle Tinsel-Jackson, the Chief Fat Ass, for all the organizational effort as usual.
Congratulations to everybody who came out. Check out the full race report.
Note: Blue the dog and I didn’t do the 50, we did our own custom length of 24k and ended up at Delaney’s for a mocha to warm up from the rain and wind!
