Category Archives: Business Strategy

Advertising, Business Strategy, Innovation, Internet, Market News, MyOrbit Blogs, New Media, Retail, Training

Bezos describes Amazon Kindle EBook reader

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So you can think of Kindle EBook Reader as a ‘large-screen pre-paid cellphone’, through which Amazon aims to galvanize portable book reading like Apple did to portable music through ipod and iphone. As you can see, Kindle is released just in time for the holiday season! How many gadgets can we really have on us?

Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg talked to Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezor, who unveiled the Kindle, a $400 wireless device – purpose built for E-Book reading. Bezos says Kindle will make reading electronic books much easier. It uses 3G cellular connection to download the content directly from Amazon’s site, and Amazon will take care of the complexity behind the interacting with the cellular. What do you say?

Some serious analysis: The global EBook market is estimated around $25 million, and if this device stands up to the promise, then that market can essentially double. The price point of $400 looks high – its aimed for entry and holiday shopping.

In two quarters, we can expect them to sell on Amazon marketplace under in a more attractive $250-290 range. And if the product does well, which company is best placed to compete? Device manufacturers: RIM with an advanced Blackberry, and Google Books + Nokia with a new large screen version, could be top alternatives.

In fact MyOrbit has a couple of EBooks getting ready for publication, and we will check if Amazon has some special deals for publishers. We will share updates from our discussion with Amazon. Stay tuned.

Advertising, Business Strategy, Innovation, Internet, Market News, Mobile & Telecom, MyOrbit Blogs, New Media, Online Marketing

Open Handset Alliance announced -Google Android to Arrive soon

Google has announced the details of its mobile OS strategy. It’s called Android and its the brainchild of the so-called “Open Handset Alliance.” The Daily Tech Rag reports on the latest and very interesting development in the Mobile application space.

Google has teamed up with 34 different partners in the technology space (including NVIDIA, Intel, Texas Instruments, Synaptics, Marvell, Qualcomm, Motorola, Samsung, T-Mobile, Sprint, Skype, LG, HTC, KDDI, DoCoMo and China Mobile) to create the Open Handset Alliance (OHA)–a group focused on building an open, fully customizable alternative to closed operating systems like Windows Mobile 6, Symbian S60 and the iPhone OS.

The OHA’s first product will be Android, an open-source mobile OS and associated application suite that’s built on the Linux operating system (and will be open-sourced via the Apache v2 License). The Android SDK will be made available to developers on November 12th and Android-sporting handsets will flood the market next year, from device manufacturers like HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung.

These handsets will be available during the second half of 2008 in the U.S. (from T-Mobile and Sprint) China, Japan, Germany, Italy and Spain. As has been reported earlier, the Android OS will be targeted toward consumers and will be available to OEMs free of charge (the OS will be ad-supported, like all of Google’s other apps).

“A few observations:

  • It’s interesting that Google isn’t putting their own name on this but rather, taking a step back and pushing the OHA brand. While this certainly seems like a collaborative effort to a degree, it’s clear that Google is the driving force here–they’ve had the OS in development for three years now.
  • Will this force other carriers/device manufacturers (most notably AT&T, Verizon, Nokia, RIM and Apple) to open up their handset platforms?
  • Does this mean that just about every desktop developer who has thus far been shuttered out of the wireless industry will make a mad dash for that SDK in order to have an Android app out by next year? You had better believe it.

From the looks of it, Google and the OHA are sitting on what could be a real game-changer here, in terms of openness, user-customization and mobile functionality. Android is expected to usher in an age where mobile devices operate more like PCs, with users downloading, installing and customizing to their heart’s content. ”

Endadget has compiled some useful background information – if you want more details.

Read – Google press release
Read – Android mobile OS overview
Read – Google blog: “Where’s my Gphone?

Business Strategy, Internet, MyOrbit Blogs, New Media

Books & Journals moving from Libraries to Online

Over the last 5-10 years, the Internet has become the primary resource for information for everything from financial planning to healthcare to food recipes- and hence there is value in digitizing the huge amounts of information residing in paper books and journals, so that its available on the Internet. Many companies and organizations, including search engines are working with book publishing houses and libraries to digitize their collections of books and journals/periodicals.

Here’s a video by WebProNews that speaks with Google’s Gabriel Stricker, Brewster Kahle of the Open Content Alliance, and the Boston Library Consortium’s Executive Director Barbara Preece about their efforts in this direction. Now, there have been a few controversial issues among the various platforms, but all agree that the common goal is to increase the availability of paper books and periodicals in the online world.

Advertising, Business Strategy, Internet, Jobs & Careers, Market News, MyOrbit Blogs, New Media, Online Marketing, People, Venture Capital

Bubble: Microsoft buys small stake in Facebook

Oct 24, Seattle:

  • Microsoft beat Google on Wednesday to invest in social Web site Facebook, agreeing to pay $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the Web phenomenon – thereby valuing Facebook at $15 billion (!)
    • Our thoughts: Is Facebook 10 times the value of YouTube (which definitely is growing as the largest media and information sharing community online)? This looks more like wanting to stay in the “online social-site play” than business value. Microsoft will of course like to believe otherwise because they have already bought it.
    • Microsoft is quoting the 50 million users of today (and projected 300 million in 2-3 years) as the source of value. With $240m, you can create similar user communities on CNN and BBC – potentially getting over 100 million on its own – and with majority stake. Wonder if these alternatives were explored at all.
  • Microsoft also got exclusive rights to sell ads on Facebook outside of the US as part of the investment (60% of Facebook users are outside US)
    • This is the real benefit. Its similar to how Google bought ad rights for MySpace for $900 million in August last year. Now MySpace was supposed to have 100 million users, but analysis revealed 43 million. Along similar lines, its possible that Facebook has about 25 million real users (or about 15 million non-US users).
    • MSN Ad Network (similar to Google’s ad network) will benefit with a captive demand – and will keep MSN Ad Network alive (maybe this was the real thought behind the deal – and also the reason why Google didn’t push it hard – as they already have what Micorsoft wanted most). Without considering any additional deals by Microsoft into Facbook, it will need $120 million of ad sales to break-even on this investment. We’ll keep an eye on this.
Business Strategy, Energy, Industrial, Innovation, MyOrbit Blogs, Venture Capital

Challenges in moving towards Renewable Energy

Most of us will happily switch over to Renewable Energy if its available at around the same price. Some Renewable Energy producers are seeking the “cap and trade system” to boost the eco-friendly energy. But a bill to cap carbon dioxide is not easy – conventional energy companies have made deep investments. For example, Mike Morris, the CEO of AEP (American Electric Power), feels the use of coal is still needed to meet the base energy requirements. Still, given the thrust for green and environmental friendly energy, and with certain VCs willing to invest in them in a phase by phase approach, we can be sure to see some good innovations within a 5-10 years. Manoush Zomorodi of Reuters reports. If you are interested in Solar Energy, head over to this site that is dedicated just to it: Solar Energy Review