Pattern Finder

Unscientific Study: Amazon Kindle Seems to Be Popular with Air Travelers

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The media has recently been full of stories of the imminent demise of Amazon's Kindle, an e-book reader, due to increased competition from Sony, Barnes & Noble, and others. However, based on a personally conducted, unscientific in-flight sample, I'm not convinced that's true.

Back in June 2009, when I bought my Kindle 2, Kindles on airplanes were a pretty rare sight. Then, when I was on a flight in November 2009, I was sitting in an aisle seat reading my Kindle when the woman at the window pulled out her Kindle several minutes later. Yesterday, flying from Boston to Salt Lake City, with a sample size of two rows (my row on the left side of the plane and the row immediately in front--a total of five people), three out of the five of us were reading Kindles. I have yet to see a Kindle competitor being used on an airplane.

Kindle 2: What I Like About It

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I got a Kindle 2 for my birthday--my mother sent me money for my birthday and I decided to spend it on a Kindle--and I like it a lot, for a variety of reasons:

• It feels and looks good: It's a clean design, and has a nice heft to it without being heavy.
• The screen is easy to read: The electronic paper has nice contrast, and the matte finish means you don't get glare in your eyes.
  
• You can adjust the size of the type: For someone who has to now use reading glasses all the time, this is a godsend.
• You can buy books instantly: Being able to buy books instantly from Amazon.com is a big plus. You don't need to finagle with downloading books to your PC and then remembering to transfer them to your PC.

I knew about these features, and they helped convince me to buy it. However, now that I've been using it for over a week, there are some pleasant surprises as well:

• It's as pleasant as reading a book--This is a function not so much of the Kindle but of the cover I got for it. Initially, I went for the official Amazon.com cover--black leather, emblazoned with the Amazon logo--but I didn't really take to it. It had a funny smell and the back of it would flop away from the back of the Kindle. So I swallowed hard and bought another cover: the Mocha M-edge GO! Jacket for Kindle 2. For the same price, it's ten times better. The cover is more rigid, the back of it clips securely to the Kindle, and the leather is top grade: it looks and smells gorgeous. (Trust me, I know what I'm talking about: my family used to be in the leather tanning business). The upshot is reading the Kindle is a more sensual experience than reading a mass market paperback. I love books, including the feel of them in my hand, and I was worried that the Kindle would be a diminished experience. Actually, now everything I read on the Kindle is a leatherbound book.
• Even the "Off" screen is fun--Rather than presenting you with a blank screen when it's off, the Kindle displays a picture of a literary great (e.g., John Steinbeck, Oscar Wilde) or a famous etching (e.g., Durer's St. Jerome in his Study). Each time you turn it off, a different picture comes up. This packaged serendipity makes the Kindle just as much fun turned off as it is turned on.
• The Amazon connection lets you drill into a subject--With the Kindle, you get the Amazon recommendation system on steroids. I've found--and bought--a lot of great physical books on Amazon.com due to its recommendation system. The Kindle means you don't need to wait for UPS to turn up with your book--it's instant gratification. I somehow found Stephen King's book On Writing and bought it for the Kindle--and then wandered over to Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life and bought it as well. So if you get engrossed in a subject, the Kindle makes it easy to find and get relevant books. The only downside is the money you spend.

However, I don't want to give the impression that the Kindle 2 is all milk and honey. It could use some improvements as well. I'll blog about them in a later post.

My Productivity Tools Aren't Making Me Productive

HELP!

Auugh! I'm going through a period where my productivity tools aren't making me productive. Maybe the group name should be changed to "time sink" tools:

• Microsoft Outlook: A month or so ago, Outlook 2007 decided to create new Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Notes files without telling me. So someone would book an appointment, the appointment would turn up in e-mail, I'd accept it, and the appointment would go "poof"--it wasn't in the Calendar. (It was lurking in the new, invisible Calendar.) After some near misses--"So, are you going to be on the customer call in ten minutes?" "What customer call?"--I eventually figured out what had happened and began working with two Calendars open: the one that I'd been using for three years and the one magically created by Outlook that received all new appointments. No one seems to know why Outlook decided it didn't like the old files. The fix is to export information from the old file into the new file. Umm, yup, that's what I want to spend time doing.
• Microsoft Live Meeting: Last week, I created a Live Meeting invitation and then couldn't get into the Live Meeting. I spent 45 minutes trying to fix it (downloading the latest software, altering parameters) and then punted: I hijacked a Live Meeting one of my co-workers had set up earlier in the week and used it. That worked. (There was some humor in all of this. I'd set up the Live Meeting for a demo by Sun Microsystems of its StarOffice suite; when I apologized to the Sun attendees for the failure of the "Microsoft software" there were loud guffaws all around.) It turns out the password that I'd used for the last three years was no longer valid--Live Meeting passwords now had to include some uppercase letters. So when I created a meeting, instead of Live Meeting telling me that it couldn't verify my credentials, it blithely sent out invalid invitations. Umm, sounds like a design flaw to me.
• BlackBerry Storm:I finally up-reved the software on my BlackBerry Storm cellphone a week ago, and it blew away my Enterprise Server password so I could no longer receive e-mail as well as blew away most of my ringtones. (It took me awhile to figure out that my phone was ringing--when it wasn't). That took me about two hours to research and fix. Umm, that was a pain.

Over the years, I've had the motherboard fail on my desktop PC, the LCD screen stop working on my laptop, newly installed software blow away other software...the list goes on. This recent flareup will fade away and I'll have to battle other problems down the pike. I just wish it weren't so.

Pattern Finder is Available for the Kindle

For those readers who use an Amazon Kindle, this blog is now available on Amazon at the Kindle Store: Pattern Finder. And here's what it looks like on a Kindle 2: 

Zentact: Social Software or Spam Generator?

There was a post on ReadWriteWeb yesterday about a social networking tool called Zentact. It's a recently announced service that lets you tag people within your list of contacts with relevant terms. For example, for someone tagging me, they might use terms such as "analyst," "Burton Group," "search," and "Williams College." Then, when browsing the web, if you ran across a page that discussed Burton Group, Zentact would notify you and make it easy to send a quick note saying, "Thought you might find this interesting." The pitch is that it "transforms contacts into relationships."

The service strikes me as useful if used with restraint; I'm worried that it will become popular within the PR community and that my Inbox will get filled with even more drivel. Time will tell....

Tracking Down the Elusive BlackBerry Storm

My Verizon cellphone is now over two years old, and I must admit I have my eye on getting a BlackBerry Storm to replace it. Bill Pray, a colleague of mine, said he got to try one out last week in Utah and liked it. Based on Bill's comment, I figured that at least demo versions had been sent to all dealers, but when I went into my local Verizon Wireless store in Andover, MA on Saturday, the owner said he didn't have any--and didn't appear to believe me when I said there had been a sighting in Utah. He did say he planned to order as many as he could, since he already had 15 orders for it. At that point I decided I'd keep my eyes open and see where it first turns up. I spotted my first one today at a Vodaphone store in downtown Amsterdam. (See the picture to the left; it's the middle one.) I'll be in Zurich tomorrow, so I'll try to make a sighting there; next is Manchester, UK on Friday; and then London over the weekend. I figure I'll have multiple sightings in London if I stroll down Oxford Street. I'll keep you posted.

So What's Your Web Site Built With?

Here's a nifty tool I found via DeWitt Clinton (Williams '98): BuiltWith.com. You enter the URL for a website, and it tells you what technology the site uses.

For chuckles, here are the results of some analyst sites:

• Burton Group
• Forrester Research
• Gartner Group
• IDC
• Outsell
• RedMonk

Here are the results of some high tech retailers:

• Amazon.com
• BestBuy
• Circuit City
• Crutchfield
• PC Connection
• Radio Shack

Here are the results of some mainstream retailers:

The Wired Army

With Google and pundits claiming that all the great new technology comes from the consumer sector, they're missing another source: the U.S. Army.

• Soldier Flex PDA: A ruggedized PDA that contains Ethernet, USB, and Bluetooth technology; weighs less than a pound; contains no glass; and can receive battlefield information, increasing what the Army calls "battlefield awareness."
• Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) System-Equipped Helmets: The helmets contain sensors that measure the impact of an explosion; the digital data can then be transferred to a soldier's medical file.
• Electro-Textiles for Battlefield Awareness: Wired fabrics that support networking and communication; rather than carrying a bulky computer, the soldier wears it.

Testing Out Windows Live Writer

Burton Group is in the process of putting together group practice blog (for example, the Application Platform Strategies blog is at http://apsblog.burtongroup.com), and we just had the CCS phone call about blog logistics.  Being basically lazy--oops, I meant to say concerned about keeping my productivity high--I wanted to see if I could use Windows Live Writer to write one post and send it to both blogs. (Pattern Finder is hosted on TypePad, and the practice blogs are as well).

I must say the install was painless, and I'm impressed that the software figured out that I already had a TypePad account for Pattern Finder.  

For Me, Firefox 2.0 Definitely Starts Up Faster than IE 7

After my post on Thursday about why I was sticking with Firefox, Peter Gurevich, the Performance Product Manager for Internet Explorer, left a comment on my blog asking me to get in touch with him to see if he could offer any pointers on how to make IE 7 faster.

So, figuring that facts would help -- and having been a Customer Support Engineer in a previous life -- I ran some tests. Happily, after claiming in public that Firefox was faster at loading, I wasn't hallucinating. Here are the results, which I've sent along to Peter:

IE 7 vs. Firefox 2.0: Firefox Wins for Me

I've been running the released version of Internet Explorer 7 since it was released, and I downloaded Firefox 2.0 yesterday. If IE 7 had blown me away, I was going to de-install Firefox. I've used Firefox since its early days, due to its speed and tabbed UI. But I keep IE around because some sites don't work well -- or even function -- with Firefox. I was amenable to going back to IE because I find it a bit of a pain to switch back and forth.

But, unfortunately, while IE 7 certainly got into the general ballpark of Firefox, it didn't blow by it. And, at least for me, IE 7 loads incredibly slowly, while Firefox 2.0 got even zippier. So I'll continue to lead a schizophrenic existence. (I'm still futzing around with which Firefox theme to use -- I used Qute in the past, but it doesn't work with 2.0. The theme Mostly Crystal leads at the moment.)

The Luxury of Two Screens

I've recently started using two screens on my desktop PC, and I must say it's addicting. I have two Dell 1905FP UltraSharp Flat Panel Monitors (recently discontinued). The 1905FP is an Active Matrix TFT LCD with a maximum resolution of 1280x1024 pixels (which is what I run it at). With two of them side by side, it's definitely a widescreen experience.

I can do this because I'm running WindowsXP and have a graphics card with two outputs (VGA and DVI). (Right click on the Desktop, click Properties, click the Settings tab, and select, "Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor.") Although only one has the Start button and the desktop icons, they both function as my desktop. This means I can run two programs side by side -- for example, edit a Word document on my left hand monitor while looking at a PowerPoint presentation on my right hand monitor.

This is especially convenient when writing a report. I can type in Microsoft Word while using the other screen to check facts on the Web or look at a PowerPoint presentation. The only downside is that I loose my cursor from time to time -- I have to circle it like mad so I can see its movement via my peripheral vision and find out where I last left it.  Still, it's not as bad as it could be. A fellow Burton Group employee has three monitors hanging off of his PC at home (he installed a second video card). As my wife said when I told her, "Boy, I bet he loses his cursor a lot!"