12:22 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A quick post to make note of a few interesting sites that were noted in Jim Karpen's Web Guide:

* Purely Mobile
"...a new Pocket PC-friendly directory that provides a searchable directory of the most popular and new PDA sites in the UK and around the world. All sites are tested and approved before inclusion in the directory in order to ensure a scroll-free browsing experience for users."

* News For Mobile
"another portal ... the categories go beyond news and include areas such as entertainment, knowledge search, and shopping."

* Freeware for Windows Mobile Pocket PC
"...a new site that claims to have the largest listing, with some 5,700 titles. I thought that I saw demos among the listings, but the site’s owner says it’s all freeware and that the demo designation is a vestige of Handango’s former system of putting freeware under trial folders."

* SocialText Personal Wiki
A "miki" is a mobile wiki. From the SocialText web site... "Socialtext Personal, which is free for five users, gives you a private wiki as notepad in your pocket. Simply bookmark your miki in your mobile web browser to quickly take notes that you can access and edit anywhere. A workgroup of five, for example, could have one common wiki and five private personal wikis, all for free."

And if you're not familiar with the site, check out Smartphone and PPC Magazine, which has such a nice news site that it convinced me to subscribe to the print edition also.

06:14 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

According E-Book Russia (as translated by Babelfish), Hitachi has announced availability of a new black e-paper display. It is available to wholesalers in lots of 10 or more, and is apparently not cheap. Specifically, the translation says "from 4000000 Jaehns (near i 35000 for the complete set)" but it's not clear to me what that is in US$.

Is there really a difference between the previous white displays and this one? It's hard to tell from the translation. Maybe someone who speaks Russian can help us out here. But it does seem to be a new monochrome A4 sized display, and oddly enough it is apparently done in cooperation with Bridgestone corporation! The name in the translation is also odd -- "Albirey," but that does match previous news, where there is some additional text to be compared for discerning readers looking for more information. It has a wireless module, the monitor is standalone, and there is internal memory for storing information.

For now, it's just good to know that the Phillips spinoffs have some competition, and every new e-paper technology is a good thing. If only they were available in products!

07:19 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Feedback

Just a reminder that many of our best stories come from you, the readers, who have about a billion eyes on the news around the world. That should beat the handful of eyes we have as editors, especially for sources that are off the beaten path which we may not have the opportunity to see!

So feel free to contact us with the "Submit News!" link in the top right corner. That will get a lot of attention because it creates an email that goes to all the editors. Unfortunately, that's also a nuisance when it turns out to be spam, but that's life!

If you are a member (very simple to sign up, by the way), then another way of contacting one of the editors or any MobileRead member is to either send a private message, or an email by clicking on the person's name link, say right next to a post. You'll find options to send your message by private message or email. A private message will initiate a pop up message to notify the person you are sending the message to. No, it's not annoying like web site pop ups. It's actually convenient, and easy to do if you want to contact an editor with a personal note. If you are spamming, please don't bother.

When you do submit news to us, please remember that we do this for fun in our spare time, and there's not usually a lot of spare time to go around. Certain weeks we might barely be keeping our heads above water, so sometimes you might not hear back from us. Please forgive us if that happens. And we might not always have the desire or energy to post what has been submitted. We're not trying to be a pain in the neck, I'm just telling you like it is in the real world.

Also remember that the more your submission is packaged up like a ready to publish story, that doesn't lack info or look like a press release, the more likely it is to get posted. It has to be on topic of course, but we love those stories that are "ready to go". Maybe one day when we get to be as big as Slashdot, we'll be as strict as they are about submissions, and as careful about spelling and grammar too I suppose, but for now we can afford to keep the personal touch.

So if you can handle the caveats, please send us your news! If you only have time to give us a link and a sentence or two to tell us what it's about and why it's interesting, send it on! If it catches our attention, you might just see it appear on the front page.

And one more thing... if you do contact us, please don't forget to include an email address where we can contact you if we have questions, want to thank you, or maybe we just want to say "hi!"

Thanks to all those that have submitted news, and for all the stories that I'm sure we'll get in the future.

P.S. In case you're wondering what caused me to think of this, we got a submission from someone trying to locate information for the editors to initiate contact. But no email address in the message, so we can't respond.

06:57 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

We all know that Palm Addicts is a great site, and the perfect way to keep up on Palm news. But don't forget that they also have some nice articles on the e-book world. A couple recent stories include:

* A Few Words for the eBook Nay-Sayers
* eBooks: Titles, Revenue Up

Plus, there's a daily dose of a few hand-selected e-book titles from Jennifer Chappell that's always worth a look.

06:50 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Did you ever wonder what the big time news organizations are shooting for in a news web site? Well, those same sites are trying to figure out what readers want on a news site also. The Wall Street Journal presents a nice summary of what it thinks readers have told them to do.

Look at the impressive partial summary of the results (emphasis mine)...
"Readers want more context and background included in news reporting. They want new ways to receive their news, on next-generation handheld devices, for instance, rather than simply on a Web page. They want fewer ads – especially the kind that animate or show up in popup windows."

But why do I say it's what the "think" readers want if it's based on a survey? A couple of reasons. First of all, the answers in a survey don't always reflect the truth. One reason is the survey taker might misunderstand the question or make assumptions the survey didn't expect. Or maybe the survey taker thinks he wants one thing from a web site, but really wants another and just doesn't know it.

Secondly, survey results require a lot of interpretation, even when they are simply being summarized to be presented. Answers are seldom exactly the same, so they need to be classified. The compilation needs to tell a story, and make a conclusion. Just like book and movie reviewers come to different conclusions about stories, so do different people interpreting survey results. Sometimes, the bias of the organization receiving the results also affects the presentation of responses. For example, they may either have predetermined views that affect their interpretation, or in the worst case they may have plans already laid that they are trying to justify with the survey rather than being directed by it. Rarely will a company base an entire plan on survey info. They combine their own intelligence and viewpoints and experience with the survey information.

Nonetheless, survey results are always interesting, especially when you preserve snippets of the responses. Let's take a brief look at the WSJ results. Site warning... while this article is freely available right now, the WSJ is a subscription site, so there's no telling how long the article will be available. Especially after they see how I've cast aspersions on the information!

Some of the interesting conclusions are as follows. Readers want:

• Filtered news, with just the best information
• The site to be in the palm of your hand On a mobile device, with simple navigation.
• Less ads But the bills have to be paid so that means other revenue sources have to be found.
• New sources for top stories Consensus top stories and even user submitted stories.
• More background information available with the stories. Reporters dig it up while researching, so why not make it available?
• Multimedia content

Despite my natural cynicism with regard to the article, this is a great read. And I really enjoyed both the conclusions and examples, and the prominence of mobile devices in the writeup. Very nice!

12:15 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

It's faintly irritating that whenever we hear about a commercial product with E Ink technology being introduced, it's usually not an e-book reader. So here we have SiPix Imaging, another expert in developing electrophoretic displays, who announced today that they developed a flexible e-paper display embedded into DisplayCard, a bankcard for secure authentication. SiPix's technology comes in handy because it's flexible, thin, and consumes only little power (as should be expected from e-paper). The card uses One Time Passwords (OTP) to ensure that you can only use a password once and that a discovered password (through crackers, sniffers, loggers) is basically useless. From the press release:

During an online merchant checkout or home banking login, the cardholder obtains a new, unique number by pressing a button on the card. As prompted, the cardholder then enters the number, proving the presence of the card, and completes the transaction. With the DisplayCard, banks can strengthen online banking sign-on by enabling two-factor authentication.

10:04 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Oh goodie, what a big day. While most of us are still contemplating whether to get the Sony Reader or iRex iLiad, Hitachi silently emerges from their dugout and announces the Albirey eBook reader display (remains to be seen if this device can be used as a dedicated e-book reader). Details are still scarce, but Engadget was able to decipher a Japanese report and discovered that the reader is not based on E Ink technology but on technology from Bridgestone. Like the iLiad, it also features WiFi 802.11b connectivity. No further info available, at least nothing that could be described as meaningful.

Edit: I believe the screen is only two-scale, black and white, with a color version expected to arrive in 2007.

Edit 2: Discoverd this PDF (in Japanese) describing the reader and also the distribution system. Anyone familiar with the language care to translate for us?

Edit 3: Daniel sent in more details (thanks!):

• Measurement: 222.6×289.2×3.7mm
• CPU: H8S/2215 (16bit/16MHz)
• Memory: Flash 8MB
• Power: Lithium polymer (3.7V)
• Display size: 13.1", 2-scale monochrome
• Resolution: XGA (1024×768 dot)
• Contrast: 1:7
• WiFi: IEEE802.11b

So what do you think, will this change your decision which e-book reader to buy next?

Related: Hitachi joins the league of e-paper manufacturers

[via Engadget]

09:32 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

NanoMarkets analysts have published a report stating that the combined sales of OLED displays and paper-like displays will reach $10.2 billion by 2011 and then go on to reach $14.7 billion by 2013. The three key factors to help them grow into a multibillion dollar business over the next decade are:

• low-cost: the cost to manufacture these displays will continue to decrease
• low power consumption: bistable e-paper displays don't require power to retain an image)
• flexibility: see our earlier post today on Plastic Logic

You can find an excerpt of the report here which also includes the following positive statement in particular on paper-like displays:

Paper-like displays may have a revolutionary impact. It is easy to speculate about their replacing books or leading to much more efficient retailing. However, as with anything almost totally new, paper-like displays are as likely to have a marginal as a world-changing effect on our lives. The personal computing revolution was supposed to bring the paperless office, but cheaper printing actually increased our use of paper. Paper-like displays have the potential to change the face of book, magazine and newspaper publishing, and even to reduce the number of paper drafts that are printed in the publishing process, but to predict any of these things as a certainty would be beyond foolish. Having said that, paper-like displays do offer an attractive, portable, re-usable and low-power alternative to both paper and any kind of screen.