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Last week Amazon announced a Software Development Kit (SDK) for their Kindle e-reader.  They are calling it the Kindle Development Kit (KDK). According to Ian Freed, Vice President of the Kindle group, “We’ve heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle.  The Kindle Development Kit opens many possibilities–we look forward to being surprised by what developers invent.” (full press release can be read here)

The KDK will be initially released in a limited beta.  The revenue split will be 70% to the developer and 30%, with an additional scheme for application delivery fees and ongoing delivery of any dynamic content or data.  Three pricing options have been announced (from the KDK page):

Free – Active content applications that are smaller than 1MB and use less than 100KB/user/month of wireless data may be offered at no charge to customers. Amazon will pay the wireless costs associated with delivery and maintenance.

One-time Purchase – Customers will be charged once when purchasing active content. Content must have nominal (less than 100KB/user/month) ongoing wireless usage.

Monthly Subscription – Customers will be charged once per month for active content.There are a few other restrictions/guidelines outlined on the KDK page as well.

So what does this mean?  It means altering your perception of the Kindle.  If the creativity of the developers of mobile applications on other platforms is any indication (e.g.- Apple, Palm, Google, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Nokia, etc.), in the next year you will be able to do WAY more on your Kindle than read today’s New York Times and items from your Kindle library.  Kindle becomes an already accepted wireless mobile platform with a well-recognized name.  It is priced under the bulk of netbooks and many smartphones (admittedly, it also does NOT have touch or color, but I don’t think the designers at Amazon are standing still on those fronts…).

This comes as a frontal challenge to the highly anticipated Apple tablet (side thought: if e-readers were THE gadget at CES this year, are tablets likely to be the hot item next year?).  As of today (January 25, 2010), it is not public just what the focus and capabilities of the Apple device will be.  Apple changed the whole idea of phone as mobile platform and enabled the developers for that device to stretch it and innovate in ways no one foresaw at the beginning (I’m reminded a little of the market for third party add-ons and ActiveX controls to Microsoft Visual Basic and early web development).  Apple’s good at drawing its established customer base into the “next big thing/flashy object” and expanding it.  I expect to see good sales of their device initially.  However, Kindle is likely to remain at a price advantage, even if the Kindle v.next has touch and color capabilities.  Apple has NEVER been afraid to charge top dollar for its products, and apparently a large portion of the consuming public is willing to pay.  However, the growing fuzziness over devices in this area (overlap in function, price, purpose, available applications, etc. for netbooks, e-readers, smartphones and all the ‘tweener’ devices….) may take some time to shake out.  Kindle has the advantage of being in the hands of a large number users today, and Amazon is just opening up the device to be enabled in other ways.  It’s shaping up to be a very interesting competition.

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Thanks to the opportunity provided by my current class in the MCDM program, I have put together my first video.  This has taken place despite my absolute novice skills in video editing (interestingly enough, shooting the scenes was fairly straight-forward for me).

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Analyst Laura Martin needs to lighten up. In assessing the evolution of content from TV-only to TV/Web mix (face it, my mother will NEVER watch her soaps on her laptop…) it is easy to see that the demand for quality content remains, regardless of device. The top-end owners of Hulu content (ABC=Disney, Fox=News Corp., NBC=GE…for now) are all invested in seeing profit from the venture. If they don’t, they are quite likely to pull their content, which is unlikely as they can sense the moving of the tectonic plates of media consumption and will not be caught off-guard.

And then there’s Comcast….

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Bill Wasik, senior editor at Harper’s magazine, makes several interesting and interlacing points in his talk (seen here). I feel that his assertion that “short stuff” will never be monetized is essentially correct. Short posts by an author or organization are too much like Twitter, and most of these same authors Tweet their short stuff, so why would I pay for that?

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When I tell a story, there is a distinct “movie” going through my head and the words are an attempt to express that “movie” in such a way that others can appreciate the story the same way I do. That covers the written narrative and some kind of multi-media or video representation of it. What about “static media” like graphics, paintings or illustrations?

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I have had a few careers so far: professional musician, music teacher/band director, software developer, college instructor, technology specialist for developers, consultant, product planner and product manager. Every one of them, along with every other subject I’ve ever studied and things for which I have a passion, are what I bring to what I do. My primary motivator in each of these is helping people (OK, so playing music is helping people enjoy themselves….or so I hope…).

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

…with apologies to Was (Not Was)…

Newspapers are signposts of their constituents in so many ways. Just take look at the difference between the Seattle Times, the Des Moines (Iowa) Register and the Boston Globe (the paper/site I took a look at for this post).  Each has top line focus on local news, but the Register does not have a link to national/global news on its front page. They choose to stay purely local.

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I am a big fan of the comedian Brian Regan.  He is the only artist I’ve ever seen from which I came away physically in pain because I was laughing so hard.  In one of his bits he tells about growing up in a household full of brothers who were, shall we say, “encouraged” by their mother to go outside and find a “good activity”.  Activities discovered were more or less not totally destructive…hilarity ensues.

Anyway, this thought always comes to me when I sit down to write. Although I can sit for long periods of time and spin out stories and opinions to friends and family, when I am confronted with a screen and a blank page, my mind goes into Choke Mode.  It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s just that I’ve read so much great stuff from my colleagues and others that I follow across the web that I feel stymied about what I have to contribute.

This morning I ran across a post by Tac Anderson entitled “How to Blog a Lot” that, for some reason, pushed me over the edge (at least for today…).  His guidance is a little self-referential: in order to blog a lot, you should blog a lot.  A kind of “practice makes perfect (or at least better)” methodology.

Great advice. However, I, like most everyone who works with some kind of PC sitting in front of them all day, spend most of the day responding to e-mail, creating presentations, working on documents, attending meetings, Tweeting, etc.  In other words, taking the time out, as Tac suggests, first thing, going over the daily news and posts and then writing about what I find takes a discipline I haven’t really cultivated yet.  I guess part of my hesitation has to do with the organizational expectations around e-mail.  I have, in the past, tried to remind my colleagues (and myself in my more hassled moments) that e-mail is designed to be asynchronous and that it is unlikely that, if I do not respond to a particular mail for an additional 30+ minutes, the world will end or someone will die….just take a deep breath and allow myself to do something that may contribute to the conversation in the greater community that is the Web.  Then I can jump into the swamp-like morass that is daily e-mail.

So I guess this is a good activity……

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In the battle and discussion around Free (using Chris Anderson’s capitalization), I have felt that a missing component has been whether the Free stuff in and of itself has value to the consumer.  Sometimes maybe and sometimes maybe not.

I work in an organization in which we run across something like this: another business unit inside the company has created some technical training content aimed at consultants and systems integration firms.  Many times it takes the form of “<Name of technology goes here>-Brain-Dump-in-a-Box” which is duly posted for broadest possible distribution on the Web.  Great!  Lots of folks go there, download and/or watch it (if it happens to have webcasts that aren’t downloadable) and get whatever assistance the content by itself can offer.

Then, this internal group will approach my team and ask us to make it available to our training channel.  For various niggling reasons, a cost/price becomes associated with this training content in the process.  So the question is, will a training company be able to sell this same course to corporate customers despite the fact that they can get it “for Free off the Web”?

The answer is Yes.

The reason is value. When this corporate student attends an instantiation of this class, she or he will not be staring at a monitor for five days. They will be taught by an experienced technology trainer. There is the value!  It’s not just the content (or whatever other IP you might think of) by itself.  It is the context and the “value-add” that make it worth paying for.  The value-add also adds cost, but the Value scenario still comes out looking good.

Will some companies still opt to go to the site, download the content and point their employees at it, telling them to “get up to speed” on their own?  Sure.  There will always be takers for Just Free. However, context and extra value can make the difference.

The challenge is to discover the context and extra value the potential consumers of your currently Free Stuff would be willing to pay for.

Green

That’s the idea: Green

I feel that there are a lot of possibilities with a more abstract phrase/word.  Aside from the most currently common definition today (environmentally friendly) and the obvious definition (um……well, green…), several others come to mind easily:

• Sickly
• Inexperienced
• Overcome with envy

A few other associations come to mind:

• green belt
• green card
• little green men
• green thumb
• greenback
• greengrocer
• greens keeping
• green light
• green tea

Given the breadth of experience and the depth of creative talent in this class, I feel that this would be an exciting topic.