Amazon Kindle DX January 7, 2010
Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , add a commentNow that the Amazon Kindle DX (the 9″ version of the Kindle originally targeted at students, newspaper readers) is now available in an international edition, I have had cause to think again about purchasing an e-reader.
I blogged a little about e-readers in the past but I have yet to jump into the market myself.
With the Kindle DX shortly being shipped to Australia however, I may put my money where my mouth is.
Whilst I like the smaller e-readers that now appear to be abundantly available the sort of e-reading I want to do lends itself to a larger screen. I have a number of books downloaded via O’Reilly Safari monthly download tokens; these are generally technical/programming books and are available in PDF format (although I have recently noticed Safari now lets you download certain whole books in PDF, epub or Kindle’s Mobipocket format; but O’Reilly published titles only at the moment). Kaplan Professional, with whom I am studying a Masters of Applied Finance, has also started making their study notes available in PDF (which saves me from scanning and OCR’ing them myself via my ScanSnap).
PDF documents don’t reflow so attempting to view any of this content on a smaller screen (including the regular Kindle which recently gained PDF format support) would be an exercise in futility. Hence my desire for a larger screen e-reader.
The number of large format e-readers available is still very small. This list on Wikipedia shows only the Amazon Kindle DX and a couple of models from iRex. I’ve followed the evolution of the iRex products and they have had some quality-control issues from my time lurking on the iRex forum.
The elephant in the room is the mythical Apple tablet. Rumour is hot that by the end of this month Apple will have revealed its 10″ tablet, the ‘iSlate’, which will revolutionize the consumption of media. Or something like that. Despite being an Apple fan I will remain skeptical that this device will be suitable as an e-reader unless it incorporates some sort of dual e-ink/LCD display technology… my eyes don’t want to read lengthy text on a bright backlit LCD screen.
Various other consortiums of publishers have been proposing to build their own e-readers which may or may not be open, large format or otherwise functional. So the Amazon Kindle DX just might be where I jump into the e-reader world.
However, I have my reservations, some of which are echoed in Sean Carmody’s excellent post about the Kindle in Australia on his Stubborn Mule blog:
- I believe that Amazon has not yet established in Australia a servicing capability for Kindles that breakdown. Any required repairs either in or out of warranty will require it to be shipped back to the US.
Australia’s antiquated publishing laws surrounding parallel imports mean that the content available in to the Australian region is significantly smaller than that available overseas. However I still have a bank card with a UK billing address and it appears that this is sufficient to purchase books available in the UK region… although this maybe more faffing about than I can put up with. - What is AT&T Global Wireless coverage like in Australia? Which local mobile network operator do they piggyback on? (hang on, it looks like there is a coverage map)
- The e-book format war: Although the Kindle DX has excellent PDF rendering, it does not support the epub standard, preferring its own Mobipocket format. It would seem unlikely that Amazon would ever add epub support to the Kindle range.
- Are local news outlets going to be publishing via the Kindle store, or in Kindle format? (eg. Crikey, the AFR, etc). According Stubborn Mule, they may have been turned off by the high percentage of sales revenue that Amazon demands from publisher’s pushing content to the Kindle platform. At the very least I can use a desktop application to scrape these sites for content, convert and sync; perhaps Calibre?
- Kindle purchases are made in USD. Although the AUD is quite strong at the moment, most Australian credit card companies tend to charge fees plus an FX spread you could drive a truck through on foreign currency transactions. It would be great if Amazon opens online Kindle stores ‘around the world’ that bill in local currency especially since they are restricting the available titles to what they have rights to sell in digital format in any region.
Given CES is about to kick-off and Apple’s rumoured event to launch the tablet is at the end of the month I think I will cool my heels for the moment, and hopefully I will have a bit more clarity at the beginning of February about my e-reader purchase decision!
The New Asset Class December 14, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : finance, virtualization, development , add a commentI touched on this idea briefly before in Commodity Markets for the 21st Century and it looks like the idea is evolving further…
In Hedging Your Options for the Cloud Joe Weinman discusses how as cloud computing turns computing power into utility, its pricing and risk management strategies around volatility of prices will begin to reflect those of other commodity markets (electricity in particular).
As if in response to the previous article, Werner Vogels of Amazon announces ‘Spot Pricing’ for EC2; customers requiring EC2 compute time at some point in the future without hard deadlines can nominate a maximum price they are prepared to pay. When the spot price (defined in financial markets, particularly commodities and FX, as the price for immediate delivery of an asset or commodity) drops below this level the customer’s EC2 instances will spin up and start computing. When the spot price climbs above the customer’s specified level the EC2 instances will automatically shutdown. The latter will require the workloads to be resilient to abrupt termination but this should be fine for robust batch jobs.
So I wonder if futures/forwards/options markets may grow around this new commodity one day. Probably not at the moment as there is no mechanism for selling short. Also unlike deregulated and competitive electricity markets there is only one ‘generator’, Amazon. However the EC2 APIs are published and in fact the Eucalyptus project is building an open-source implementation of the EC2 APIs. Eucalyptus has already been integrated into Ubuntu and RightScale’s toolsest for virtualization. So it might seem that the barriers to entry for a potential Amazon competitor are quite low, however Amazon have already achieved significant economies of scale (which will increase further with their planned entry into the Asian market).
It would seem natural for Microsoft or Google to challenge Amazon directly by providing their own implementation of Amazon’s EC2 APIs, however their own cloud computing offerings require developers to code to more proprietary frameworks (although there are open-source efforts to implement the Google App Engine on EC2; AppScale being seemingly the most advanced) rather than EC2’s approach of just providing access to a virtual machine. Maybe they have already run the math and decided that competing directly with a low-cost provider like Amazon is like wrestling with a pig… you both get dirty and the pig likes it 
It would be great for competition and innovation if cloud computing was more transparently portable between providers, and the resulting fungibility would benefit consumers of cloud resources in being able to manage their operational expenditures.
Xignite November 12, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : finance, development , 3 commentsXignite, ‘on demand financial market data’ recently got some coverage from TechCrunch regarding their upcoming integration with StockTwits and iPhone portfolio management apps from Turing Studios.
Xignite have some great looking APIs and I understand that their business model is all about providing the data ‘on demand’, but it would be great if they could combine their use of open APIs with a basic market data streaming offering as well. They could take the ‘comet‘ approach, use a 3rd-party technology like Caplin Liberator or Lightstreamer, or perhaps the best forward thinking option, adopt HTML 5 Websockets. Since they would be delivering their stream via the Internet rather than leased line or private packet switched network there would be more latency compared to a professional solution such as Bloomberg or Reuters, so is there a market for streaming financial data at a lower SLA?
I would like to do some experimentation with these APIs, maybe amCharts’ WPF Stock Chart control will be an excellent way to visualise the data. Hopefully amCharts are working on a Silverlight version as well.