From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road

Surprises of The Amazon Kindle

On mother's day we got a Kindle for my wife and she hasn't been able to live without it since.  Thank you Amazon.  In many more ways than one, it is a wonderful device, so good that it makes me debate whether every family member should have one.  But for now we are sharing it.  I am reading the kids "The Treasure Island" every night, and for myself, I am reading the Russian Classic "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoyevsky.  I chose that book because, it was well recommended by a few friends, and one in particular who called it the best book he's ever read. So much for that.

Here is how this story about new technologies for old habits gets funny.

Unlike a book, The Kindle is a tablet so you don't really know how far you are into a book, unless it tells you.  With a physical book, you can, with one look kinda know where you are.  The Kindle solves that problem by putting a progress bar in the bottom that tells you what percentage you are into the book.

So when I started "The Brothers Karamazov", it started by showing me that I was 1% into the book.  But after 3 weeks of reading, I noticed that I was still at 1%.  I slowly got nervous.  I was hoping that every time I pressed "next page" I'd finally get to 2%, but no, I seemed to be stuck at 1%.

Then I started thinking: "How long is this book for God's sake?".  At this rate, it will take me 3 years to finish it.  I knew these Russian's wrote long books, but holy cow.

Then finally I asked my wife, about this bizarre phenomenon, and she took one quick glance at the Kinde and threw it back at me saying something like: "look at the title of the book you ordered, you..."

I did and there was the answer. I had not downloaded The Brothers Karamazov, but instead:

"The Complete Works Of Fyodor Dostoyevsky"

D'oh!  No wonder I'll be stuck at 1% for a lot longer.

So here is the lesson for Kindle and new technologies for old habits.  With an Electronic tablet, you may not know exactly what book you are reading!!  On a physical book, you get that confirmed every second you look at the book.  With a download, mistakes can happen.  Something as basic as knowing what you are reading is a potential failure point with a digital tablet.  Who would have thunk it?

A Radical Application

Last Saturday I was a panelist at the TABCON 2009 conference talking about mobile apps.  It was a good panel where the last question was "can you give us an example of a radical mobile application".  It was one of those open ended question that challenge the user to have to be insightful and creative at the same time.

While I was waiting my turn, I got stuck on the word "radical".  Not "new" application, not "great" application, not "fun" or "popular" but radical.  As a birdwatcher, I love the iBird application but that's not radical.  Radical means radical.

In the 2 minutes I had to think, I thought of this one.  It's not one app but the combination of a bunch of things.

I said the radical application is the combination of Government 2.0 and Google Latitude.

Government 2.0, as I've written earlier is what Obama is doing: building a direct relationship with the voter through technology.  Getting emails from the president, viewing him on youtube are all part of it.  Ariana Huffington (one smart woman) said rightly that he looks more like an "independent candidate with the support of the democratic party".  He has 20M emails of his supporters.  Imagine if he had 5-, or 75 million emails.  That's a new an interesting kind of power.

Now combine that with Google Latitude, that lets friends share where they are.  Imagine a political leader had direct access to 50M people and at any given time KNEW WHERE THEY WERE.  That to me is radical.  You can do very interesting things with this.  You can ask them to show up at places or do things together.  You tell not 1M, not 10 thousand but 1000 people to show up somewhere with one email, you got yourself any protest you want.  You can block things, stop things without using guns.

Any why shouldn't you use guns?  I hear in Texas, a popular iPhone app is the "NRA app".  The Apple ads on TV goes like this: "Imagine you wanted to tell your friends what kind of assault weapon you just put in your trunk.  There is  an app for that."

But seriously.  50M people, you know where they are, just figure out a way to know what kind of weapons they have and pal, you got yourself an army.

Now that's a radical app.

Thanks Efe for another great conference on Saturday.