Puzzled by the weird story of the “Alex,” the would-be e-reader that looks something like the “Nook,” the e-reader Barnes & Noble introduced last month? Then this won’t clear anything up: Spring Design’s court case against the bookseller, which it says broke an “implicit promise” and stole its idea for a two-screen device.
Not sure what Barnes & Noble has to say about the “Nook” that it didn’t discuss yesterday, when it unveiled its new e-reader. But the bookseller’s press conference this morning, scheduled for 9:30 EDT, gives us an opportunity to try a little crowd-sourcing experiment: Send me any questions you have and I’ll try to ask the company on your behalf.
It’s e-reader preview week, apparently. Last night, Plastic Logic formally named its would-be Kindle killer; tomorrow, Barnes & Noble is supposed to show off its own branded device. This morning’s entrant: Spring Design, which says it has produced a reader that boasts two screens and an operating system that runs on Google’s Android. What it doesn’t have: Big-pocketed partners to boast about.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt used the opening moments of a New York City press conference to reinforce a message he’s been delivering for several weeks: The worst is over, things are looking up, and Google is spending accordingly.
One of the hottest start-ups of 2009 had to fend off investors this summer–even if many people don’t understand exactly what the service does or who is supposed to use it. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley explains.
Napster says it has an awesome new iPhone app that will let you stream music directly to your phone–just like the one Apple approved for Spotify, the superhyped service you can’t even get in the U.S. yet. But Napster says you won’t be able to use its app anytime soon, and it blames the big bad music labels.
The Palm Pre debuts this week. Next week, we should hear about a big update for Apple’s iPhone. And by the end of the summer we’ll have new phones running Android platform. So who’s going to emerge as the winner? Easy, says Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney: It’s Google. But Mahaney isn’t talking about Google’s smartphone platform. He’s talking about Google’s core search business, which he thinks is finally about to see significant lift from mobile users.
Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users have downloaded one billion apps for their devices in nine months. Someone other than Steve Jobs and co. ought to be able to make money from that, right? That’s more or less the logic behind Medialets, a start-up that serves up ads on Apple’s mobile applications, and to a lesser degree, programs designed for Google’s Android mobile platform. The New York-based company, founded last June, is announcing a $4 million Series A round led by Foundry Group. DFJ Gotham and angel investor Bobby Yazdani also participated.
At today’s Kindle 2.0 unveiling, CEO Jeff Bezos took pains to point out that at some time you will be able to read Kindle books on non-Kindle devices. Of course, he didn’t provide any other details. So does an iPhone tie-up make sense at some point? Or does he have something else up his sleeve?
Amazon has been selling digital music from all the big music labels for nearly a year now. It hasn’t changed Apple’s grip on that business in any way, and it hasn’t made any money for Amazon. But don’t write it off as a failure just yet.
Apple, Research In Motion and Google are duking it out for consumers’ smartphone dollars this fall. But here’s an early winner: Time Warner’s AOL, which has landed a $1 million contract to push Google’s G1 phone for the next two days.
Wireless carrier T-Mobile, which is selling the phone in the U.S., is launching a big push on AOL’s Platform A ad network today. It has agreed to buy a billion impressions today and tomorrow.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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