TECHNOLOGY TOOLS of theTRADE

There were a number of device with a leg up even on no presumption of any tether at broadband service from Verizon. devices announced at the Con- Apple’s iPhone. The Pre has a all for the Pre. More details are The keyboard has a pointing sumer Electronics Show 2009 3.1-inch touch screen with a at www.palm.com/us, where stick instead of a touch pad to (CES) last month that were bright 24-bit color 320 ✕ 480 you can also sign up for alerts allow for larger keys, and there impressive enough for us to resolution HVGA display with on the availability of the Pre. are two USB ports and SD Card relax our usual rule of only multitouch and an accelerome- and Memory Stick Duo slots. The covering hardware that has ter. There’s a slide-out QWERTY Sony Passport PC overall size is 9.65" ✕ 4.72" been released and is some- keyboard, 3-megapixel camera Also announced at the CES, the ✕ .78", and it weighs 1.4 where on store shelves. Palm’s with LED flash and extended Vaio P-Series Lifestyle PC is a pounds. The standard battery Pre phone and the new format depth of field, GPS, Wi-fi, stereo netbook-size, seriously styled lasts about four hours. The P- SD memory card will be avail- Bluetooth, 8GB of user storage, minilaptop that’s available now. Series is available in garnet red, able this year. The Sony Pass- and USB mass storage support. Although the clamshell comput- emerald green, onyx, crystal port netbook is already on sale The Pre has Microsoft Outlook® er joins a growing inventory of white, and classic (matte) black. at the Sony site. e-mail with Microsoft® Direct half-size laptops that have been www.sonystyle.com Push Technology and categorized as netbooks, this POP3/IMAP (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Vaio is in a different price cate- SD Extended etc.), and integrated messaging gory and has many features of Capacity Card (IM, SMS, and MMS). But the conventional laptops. At $900, In the area of pure tech, one of most distinguishing feature of it’s at the high end, about two the most impressive announce- the Pre is its operating system, to three times the cost of Dell, ments was the next-generation WebOS™. Interviewed in Asus, and HP offerings, but it’s SDXC (eXtended Capacity) ArsTechnica, Palm’s Product also powerful with a quality memory card specification that Manager Matt Crowley 1600 ✕ 768 8-inch display. The will provide up to two terabytes explained there’s no sync, save, OS is Windows Vista running on (2,000GB, or two trillion bytes) or push—only the WebOS com- an 1.33GHz processor and of storage capacity with acceler- mitting changes to “whatever 2GB of RAM. There’s a 60GB ated SD interface read/write canonical data source it is hard drive, 3G mobile broad- speeds up to 104MB per sec- accessing in the cloud.” With an band antenna, 802.11 Wi-Fi, ond. That speed is the current Palm Pre iPhone, the design assumes the GPS, and Bluetooth, with mobile goal, with the ultimate rate Once the preeminent force in canonical source of a user’s the world of handhelds, Palm data (contacts, calendar, music, had almost slipped over the etc.) is a Mac. Palm’s WebOS horizon with cell phones replac- assumes cloud-based services as ing most of its PDAs. Now with the source. The difference, then, its new touch-screen Pre phone, is “tethered sync to a Mac” as a the company has launched a default mode for the iPhone and

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TECH FORUM

The Last Bastion of Analog By Michael Castelluccio, Editor

THE KINDLE was first put in the hands of the public on Nov. 7, 2007. That first supply of the net- becoming 300MB per second in Hoover’s Mobile worked e-reader was sold out in five and a half hours. later iterations. The SD Associa- and Mobile SP Six months later, bloggers, journalists, and investors tion claims the new cards will Hoover’s has developed two were complaining that Jeff Bezos still wouldn’t tell any- turn mobile phones into media mobile applications that offer one how many of his readers had been sold. There were centers with an ability to store access to company and execu- regular updates on how many titles were available an estimated 100 HD movies, tive data contained in the for the device (115,000 that April), but no hard numbers 480 hours of HD recording, or Hoover’s database. The free on the hardware itself. Rick Munariz of the Motley Fool 136,000 fine-mode still photos. Hoover’s Mobile for iPhone, financial website complained, “The lack of Kindle data is The high-speed performance will BlackBerry, and Windows perhaps the most troubling, because this is where Ama- have applications in high-end Mobile phones will provide zon is riding on the hardware side. Owners and potential photography with an ability to company information, phone buyers are flying blind here.” Shareholders also weren’t store more than 4,000 RAW numbers, building addresses, happy about being kept in the dark. executive information, competi- There have been any number of tipped-up flags for tors, and financial profiles for those looking for them. The Kindle remained periodically any company in their database. sold out over its first six months in the Amazon catalog, The Hoover’s Mobile SP works and the holiday season that just passed emptied the ware- only on BlackBerry and Win- house once again. The home page today (mid-January dows Mobile and is available 2009) has a familiar apology: “Due to heavy customer for $20 monthly. It offers in- demand, Kindle is sold out. Please order Kindle now to depth financials and detailed reserve your place in line.” The company guess is that it’s information that you save on “expected to ship in 6 to 8 weeks.”Yet if you were to just your phone. The SP service also dial up the website, featured at the top of the home page, has GPS-focused information there it is—the often unavailable reader. that is tailored by your choices Amazon didn’t become “America’s largest online retail- for company type, size, and lim- er, with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of images, which is the uncom- ited radius. The Hoover data- runner-up Staples, Inc.”(Wikipedia) by remaining clue- pressed mode professionals use. base includes 28 million less about how to keep popular items in stock or by The Association assumes the companies, 36 million execu- tweaking customers with phantom offerings. first SDXC cards manufactured tives, contact information, It isn’t that the company and its CEO refuse to admit are likely to provide 64GB stor- financials, maps, and driving to the Kindle’s runaway popularity—they just won’t pub- age, doubling the 32GB maxi- directions. Visit the lish numbers. mum in SDHC memory cards. To www.hooversmobile.com site to A few days after Christmas (Dec. 29, 2008), an Amazon keep track of which manufactur- sign up and get FAQs for partic- press release offered lists of its best-selling, most-loved, ers will be first offering the new ular receivers as well as a list of most wished-for, and most-popular gift products for cards, you can check the Associ- helpful tips on using Hoover’s continued on next page ation’s site at www.sdcard.org. Mobile.

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2008. These were simply rankings without any numbers than the Kindle, but the e- at the Sony store are more attached, and the results were sorted by product classifica- expensive. Because Sony has just logged its first losing year tion. Kindle falls in the “Electronics” category, along with in its 14-year history (estimates are from $1.1 billion to dozens of other devices including audio, TV, cameras, cell $2 billion for 2008), the company might be ready for a dra- phones, MP3 players, GPSs, video games, home appliances, matic head-to-head with Amazon on the e-reader front if it and musical instruments. There’s lots of competition, but in looked like time is running out for them with this product. the Electronics category for Then there’s the much 2008 the winners were: Best- anticipated Plastic Logic selling product—Kindle; Prod- Reader due out in 2010 uct most often put on customer (www.plasticlogic.com). This Wish Lists—Kindle; Product 8.5" ✕ 11", very thin (7mm) most often purchased as a reader features the e-ink tech- Gift—Kindle; and Product rated nology of the Kindle and PRS, most positively by customers— but it’s much larger, has a 1. Samsung 40-inch 1080 touch screen for proofreading HDTV, 2. Kindle. and markup, can display nor- With inventory sheets writ- mal documents (Word, Excel, ten in invisible ink, the public PDF, PowerPoint), has wireless and analysts have stepped in to and wired connectivity, and make their own guesses about syncs with common operating how many beans are in the jar. systems. Particularly unnerving CitiGroup analyst Mark for Sony and Amazon are the Mahaney dubbed the Kindle following lines in the compa- “the iPod of the book world.” “I really don’t know whether we will be printing the ny’s FAQ: “Plastic Logic under- In the spring of 2008, Mahaney Times in five years. And you know what? I don’t care stands that customers have guessed that Bezos might sell either. The Internet is a wonderful place to be.” acquired content from a variety an estimated 189,000 units in —New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger of sources, some of which has 2008 and up to 2.2 million by digital rights management 2010. He also thought the price would come down to $300, applied to it. We will support digital rights managed content, netting Amazon $750 million in sales in its first two years. the specific formats will be announced as we approach the Then in August 2008, the same analyst bumped up his esti- product launch date.” Could it be that this reader will read mate to twice his original guess—380,000 units in 2008. In a most computer docs and a variety of e-book formats? client note, he said he expected the Kindle to add $1 billion By keeping the panic levels down among competitors, in sales by 2010, which would comprise 4% of Amazon’s perhaps Amazon is trying to quietly broaden and lock in an total revenue. By way of comparison, the Apple iPod sold overwhelming customer base. 376,000 units in its first year (launched October 2001). Or maybe there’s another possible reason. Jeff Bezos is a serious reader. Books are a significant part of his life— Why the Secrecy? consider that Amazon began as an online bookstore. He has At this point, the question “Why?” has become even more called paper books “the last bastion of analog.” In his debut tantalizing than “How many?” Think about what sort of presentation of the Kindle, he showed a five-event timeline control is needed to keep these numbers hidden. for the history of books. Hieroglyphics pressed in clay, ink on If this is a business decision, then the answer likely has to papyrus, the first codex, Gutenberg’s bible, and the electronic do with competition. The Sony PRS (Portable Reading Sys- reader. Today there’s the real possibility that the e-book will tem) e-books are Amazon’s main competition in the U.S., find a place in cultural history as significant as moveable and perhaps Bezos is trying to avoid setting off panic alarms type. Jeff Bezos knows this, and perhaps he knows that he’s that might recall for the Japanese manufacturer the VHS building a legacy far more important than his pioneering

Beta clash of years past. The is less expensive role in online selling. SF PHOTOGRAPH: AMAZON.COM

60 STRATEGIC FINANCE I February 2009