Amazon Kindle the iPod of books ?

Amazon has a new electronic book reader dubbed the Kindle. It weighs in at 10.5 ounces is slimmer than a pencil, sleek in design and holds about 1000 books. Kindle books can be directly downloaded wirelessly using the device, in less than 3 minutes for a book. The device does not use Wifi but acts like a cell phone for downloads.

The cost of a kindle book is usually in the range if USD 9.99 being much cheaper than print version or even ebook versions. As on date there are 230,000 kindle books available for download. You can also download periodicals and Newspapers via a subcriptions at USD 9.99 to 12.00 per month. All purchases made are retained online by amazon and you could delete the same from your Kindle and get a backup when required.

The cost of the device is USD 369.00 at tha amazon store . You can see reviews of the same at Kindle 2 demo

Last year 2008, sales of e-books rose 68.4 percent from the year before to $113.2 million, even as overall book sales fell 2.8 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Much of that growth has been driven by the Kindle’s popularity.

Kindle devices do not support flash, javascripts at the moment. Does not play music and is black and white. Estimate to have sold 500,000 in 2008 according to this article.

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File sharing solutions

Checked three file sharing solutions:

www.yousendit.com
www.mediafire.com
www.rapidshare.com

All the three offer a free service of upload of files up to 100MB. We are evaluating yousendit. I find the following features useful for us. Business Plus Acct- USD 29.95 per user.

– Allows secure file upload , receipt acknowledgement and tracking of the downloads
– Can brand the site in a limited way
– Has a feature for drop box. This URL can be sent to our customers to directly upload files using an email metaphor
– Can also embed this URL into the website so that clients can upload files directly to the drop box

Cloud Computing

Business processes are moving to the web. ( salesforce, CRM etc). There is now a trend of using the cloud for storage and applications ( Amazon, Google Apps etc) . Open source and web based applications are taking on many functions of the desktop. Businesses should start exploring these areas and tools to get the total cost of owner ship down for hardware and software.

We are also seeing the start of computers with minimal hardware but connectivity to the web ( netbook computers ) being used for most tasks . As mail, messenger and internet form majority of normal usage of the computer this may become a trend.

– Google docs will allow businesses to use excel, word and powerpoint type applications for free. Gears from Google will allow you to view ( excel and powerpoint) and view and edit ( doc files ) offline