Amazon Kindle DX January 7, 2010
Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , 5 commentsNow 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!
Commodity markets for the 21st century April 24, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : finance, gadgets, development , add a commentRecently there were a few news stories relating to potential shortages of NAND flash RAM due to Apple ordering a large volume of chips from Samsung (rumoured to be heading to a 32Gb iPhone).
From the DigiTimes article:
Downstream memory suppliers are striving to grab more NAND flash chips to meet substantial volumes of short lead-time orders from device makers
Clearly there is extensive risk for flash memory suppliers and OEMs in this market. I was wondering if an active futures market for buyers and sellers of memory would be feasible. A bit of further research uncovered DRAMeXchange which provides market data for various memory products (similar to Platts, one of the major market data providers for the energy market). Could they go a step further and set up a liquid market for buying and selling risk around memory supply? Obviously not all chips are created equal; the contract you use to hedge your risk may be for delivery of a particular type of flash memory that is slightly different to the one that you will be purchasing in the physical market. In financial/commodities markets this is known as basis risk and is understood to be something that needs to be monitored when hedging a risk exposure.
I also came across Zerobeta’s blog recently (via Park Paradigm). An interesting insight into Ztail (TechCrunch):
Whats interesting is if Ztail is selling naked puts on spot ipods, they have a synthetic position that is short the call option and long the futures. While I understand that they don’t really have that position, but it is an interesting position nonetheless and their guaranteed price should be a good (albeit hopefully low) gauge on what a 1 year out ipod futures are trading at.
Another interesting article over at Ars Technica, Why high-performance computing needs financial engineering:
If (Richard Bookstaber) is correct with his recently floated hypothesis that “the days for high frequency trading are numbered,” then this would be pretty bad news for Intel, AMD/ATI, and NVIDIA.
As biotech moves further from research to commercialisation it is the obvious candidate to pick up the slack in HPC demand if high-frequency trading does in fact fall off (a forecast I disagree with). Could a GPGPU-powered compute grid help a team win the Archon Genomics XPrize?
Finally, the source code for the JPMorgan CDS model (which I discussed here) was released and is available at cdsmodel.com.
Scotland Yard July 14, 2008
Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , add a commentI have many childhoold family memories sitting around the dining table playing board games. Some of the games we played more frequently were classics like Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly but also less well-known games like Rum Rebellion and Scotland Yard.
With Friday’s release of the iPhone 3G with integrated GPS the big question is whether this heralds the moment that location-based services (LBS) take off or whether they will be consigned to be a plaything of the digerati.
One of the aspects of LBS that haven’t been explored in great depth so far are location-based games. So I wonder if a GPS and Google Maps enabled version of Scotland Yard, played in London itself, would actually be enjoyed by anyone, other than perhaps the LARPing community? Traveling on London’s public transport network is frequently an exercise in frustration so running around town trying to track down someone playing the role of Mr. X might not be that much fun. It could be an interesting one-off event in conjunction with something like the London Festival of Architecture however.
Apparently a group of students in Germany, the home of the game’s publishers Ravensburger Spiele, have already had a go at implementing a GPS-enabled Scotland Yard.