Amazon Light
A much better way to surf Amazon. I mainly buy books – way too many books in fact – and get annoyed by all the clutter and ‘noise’. Read about this in the redesigned MIT Technology Review – has a series of great articles on Amazon and Google in the current issue.
Also take a look at the article by John Battelle – cofounder of Wired on A New Idea for Publishing and Jason Epstein on the Future of Books.
Absorbing stuff and well worth the price.
Now this is cool…
Google gives you suggestions as you type away… It’s a beta but works great…
News To Go…
It wasn’t going to take long but a number of companies are now providing RSS readers and connectivity for mobile devices. Check out 79BMEDIA if you have a Blackberry. Check out this project to get your RSS via SMS and here for WAP. Standalone has a reader for you Treo users.
It’s all a little geeky and not for the luddite (yet), but its getting there). Nooked seems to be carving out a leadership position in the communications space.
The Pen Is Mighter Than the PDA
Worth a look… I gave up my PDA ages ago – just too much hassle – and for some reason I kept scratching the screen.
I now favor index cards from Levenger. Think of this as a hand powered PDA. But then I also carry two mobiles (A new SonyEricsson K700i and a new Blackberry) and an Apple so I’m not any smarter for loosing the PDA… But my battery never goes flat.
My Phone Number…
I always chuckle when someone asks me for my office number. The only number that matters is my mobile. One number, always on, anywhere (pretty much) on the planet. By next month I suspect we will be using VOIP at home as well. Poytner.org just highlighted some interesting research that pretty much confirms the view that the US is a wireless backwater in terms of wireless to wireline dependency:~
A Connected Continent
Some interesting new facts on telephone usage in Europe from the “Telecoms Services Indicators 2004” report: The percentage of European households with at least one mobile telephone reached 81 percent in 2004. This puts mobile telephony on a par with households having at least one fixed telephone line.In fact, more and more households have mobile phones and no fixed line at all. The average of households without any fixed line is already 15 percent, and this proportion reaches 33 percent in Finland and Portugal. (Only 3 percent of households have no phone at all).
