10:33 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I am happy to announce that we have -five- more invites to share with our dear MobileRead members. From the previous announcement:

What is Rojo? Corie Lok at MIT Technology Review describes Rojo as "the first company to combine RSS aggregation with social networking." Rojo is currently available by invitation only: "As of press time, a limited number of invited users were testing Rojo’s website, which was launched in October [last year]."

And now you can have your own invite from MobileRead. We have -five- invites to share with you.

The rules: You have to be a registered MobileRead member and actively participating in our discussions (by that we mean no new joiners who are eager to just grab the invite and disappear again). As always, we'd appreciate if you had something nice to say about us (suggestions are also welcomed!). Simply reply to this post. First-comes-first-serves!

10:03 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

As a special one-time promotion, eReader is offering $5 off your first e-book purchase using the code: NEWBIE.

[via PDA247]

08:19 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

So now it is Todd Bradley, CEO of palmOne, who is going to leave the company's executive house of horror.

Jun'04: Judy Bruner, former palmOne CFO, left palmOne to join SanDisk Corp.
Jan'05: Angel Mendez, still senior vice president and head of the company's Global Operations, is going to leave palmOne to join Cisco Systems.
Jan'05: Todd Bradley, still palmOne CEO, is going to leave palmOne in May-June '05.

What is going on inside palmOne? While they call it a Leadership Transition, the terms Leadership Leave-Taking seems more appropriate to me.

CEO Todd's leave will cost palmOne and its shareholders dearly, as The Street reveals:

palmOne will give Bradley a severance check for somewhere between $2.4 million and $2.8 million, according to a regulatory document filed on Thursday. Additionally, the company will accelerate the vesting of all of Bradley's restricted stock and an undisclosed portion of his outstanding options when he leaves the company on June 3. [...] Bradley's stock and options holdings could turn out to be another boon for him. As of July, he held some 403,688 options, of which some 215,052 had an average exercise price of $11.20 a share, according to regulatory filings. The company awarded him another 150,000 options in October, according to the filings, but did not disclose the exercise price of those shares. At the time of that grant, the company's stock was trading at about $30 a share. As of last month, Bradley held at least another 31,760 shares of restricted stock.

Just do the math.

05:19 AM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Here is a very cool development from Japan. Apparently refurbished devices of Sony's first-generation e-book reader, the Librie EBR-1000, are on sale. Now available for 29,800 JPY (~ USD 290.984) - not a bad price considering that Japan export dealers still ask for USD 439.00 (down from USD 489.00).

Could this mean Sony is silently phasing out the EBR-1000 before announcing its successor?

The EBR-1000 went on sale in Japan in April 2004, and never made it to oversea countries. It utilizes Philips' remarkable electronic ink (E Ink) technology offering a truly paper-like reading experience. Alas, two of its biggest obstacles are a slow screen refresh and the hideous DRM format - bought e-books would self-destruct after 60 days (later 'scythic' published a hack allowing you to convert your own e-book content).

We hope that Sony has learned from the past and will come up with a more sensible DRM policy for the successor model.

[news on sale via Akihabara News]

02:30 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

BetaPlayer V0.096 unstable, the best mobile video player in my opinion, turned to V0.5 stable! BetaPlayer is a media player for PocketPC. It has built-in codecs like mpeg4 video (XviD, DivX), mp3 (libmad), vorbis (Tremor) and supports third party plugins, too (e.g. AAC).

New in 0.5:

+czech translation by Triple T
+support for mqv extension
+higher priority for buffering advanced option
+adding files in subdirectories
-various bugfixes

Click here for the download.

11:52 AM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Sony's PlayStations Portable (PSP) with its large 4.3" 16:9 screen is not only good for playing complex 3D games or watching movies; the handheld console can also be abused as an e-book reader! Japanese programmer Kentarou wrote a tool called Jpegbook to convert any kind of text into JPG files for the PSP. You can even set a background image and the font type of your converted text.

Jpegbook is currently available for free on Windows and Mac platforms.

11:16 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Akihabara News has some nifty screenshots of what appears to be a vending machine for Japanese PDA software and e-books. According to the report, you indicate via touchscreen which product you want, then choose the right memory card format (SD, CF, or MS), and hit "Buy" to receive the software on your memory card (not sure whether you have to supply the card or whether it is included with the purchase).

Because really, what could be more wonderful than to buy your magazines and books from an electronic vending machine in future?

10:23 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

It is always nice to make new discoveries on the Net. Today I learned about Tam Hanna's Palm OS Blog, an impressive daily resource for - as the name implies - anything relating to Palm OS. One of Tam's more recent news items discusses the pros and cons of online- and offline web browsers/readers.

For all news junkies: an Atom feed is available as well.