The reviews I have read invariably start with what’s wrong with the Kindle Fire. So I will do my best to first focus on the positive attributes before casting any stones. Bob Sacks of Precision Media Group has more of an even-keel view of the Kindle Fire that I share in large part.

‘It is not an iPad, nor does it pretend to be one. Most of the reviewers are making a mistake to compare them . . . The first and obvious attraction to the Fire is the price. At $199.00 it is half the cost of an iPad, so no comparison is necessary there. And most of those who buy a Fire will not have held an iPad and will therefore not be able to make a comparison . . . Is it a perfect device? No. Is it a fair compromise of price and services? Absolutely yes.’

What first attracted me to the Kindle was that it served as an e-reader with true web connectivity. Yes it is a mini-tablet and for me eminently more portable than an iPad. The back lighting on the Kindle Fire is very good and the book and periodical reading experience is also excellent – better than the original Kindle by far. Oh and did I mention it was $199.00? Price is a huge driver here and I think it is also true that many people who will try the Kindle Fire have not used an iPad so they do not have that experience to compare one versus the other.

The Kindle color tablet screen is vivid and for me not too small as some have suggested. There are some issues with content not being optimized for the Kindle size but those will be worked out in subsequent versions. Book and publication downloads are fast and easy. The battery life is more than adequate particularly if you are careful about turning off the Wi-Fi when it is not being used. The touch screen and navigation are intuitive and work well.

When it comes to things I don’t like about the Kindle Fire there are a number of those as well. The thing that first bothered me is that there is no way to get web access other than Wi-Fi. At present Amazon is not offering consumers a way to purchase 3G or 4G connectivity under subscription. The lack of a front and back facing camera is something that will be added later I suspect but again keep in mind that an iPad costs more than double the price of a Kindle Fire.

Over the air updates are slated to come in spring 2012 for the Kindle Fire. So I expect some improvements in the user experience. And when Amazon releases the Kindle Fire 2.0 (sometime) I expect many of the issues to be resolved – perhaps not at the $199 price however. I can see Amazon creating a vertical market for the Kindle Fire with different levels of features and services.

Amazon needed to get version 1.0 of the Kindle Fire on the market or it might have been too far behind to ever catch up. If you are a book lover the Kindle Fire offers a great reading experience and a so-so web browsing experience in a convenient and portable size. You can wait for the next version but it might be a while.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is not an iPad – and that’s ok isn’t it?

In my experience QR codes are clumsy, and don’t work as often as they do work. The smartphone QR code readers are not great and I frequently have to shoot a QR code multiple times in order to get it to ‘register’. For marketers and companies that wish to more deeply engage current and potential customers, QR codes can end up being more harmful than helpful. And asking your prospect or customer to make excessive efforts in order to get information on your company or offer is hardly a path to a consumer-friendly experience. I’m not saying QR codes do not work at all – just that they do not work well.

So if QR codes are to meet their demise something has to be there to replace them – and it has to be better. Near Field Communications (NFC) very well could be the answer. From http://www.Wikipedia.com: ‘NFC, allows for simplified transactions, data exchange, and wireless connections between two devices in close proximity to each other, usually by no more than a few centimeters. It is expected to become a widely used system for making payments by smartphone in the United States. Many smartphones currently on the market already contain embedded NFC chips that can send encrypted data a short distance (“near field”) to a reader located, for instance, next to a retail cash register. Shoppers who have their credit card information stored in their NFC smartphones can pay for purchases by waving their smartphones near or tapping them on the reader, rather than bothering with the actual credit card’.

David Pogue in his excellent column Thursday in the New York Times discusses the relationship between NFC and Google Wallet – http://nyti.ms/nPdh7C. It’s interesting that NFC technology is nearly ten years old and is still being finessed. In fact in the U.S. the current generation of NFC technology is only available on Sprint’s Google Nexus – and admittedly this is NFC 1.0.

For those of you that prefer Katie Boehret’s video review (she also has a written column from Thursday’s Wall Street Journal) that can be found here – http://on.wsj.com/oK7we8
But there have to be many people who like me would welcome the day when we could use a digital wallet and have our phone (which is with us all the time anyway) be able to do so much more when it comes to purchasing goods, receiving timely offers, as well as to request information easily and in a timely fashion.

It’s the wave of the near future. Are you ready?

An article in the NY Times last Friday – http://nyti.ms/jmcazW really got my attention. The figures were eye opening. ”The most recent unemployment rate for those 20 to 24 years old is 14.2 percent; for those 25 to 34, it is 9.4 percent. The rate for people aged 55 to 64 is only 6.2 percent.”

Financially, the disparity is similar. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “…those people aged 45 to 54 and 55 to 64 had the highest median weekly earnings of any age segment in the United States: $844 and $860, respectively. Meanwhile, those 20 to 24 had weekly earnings of only $454. Those who are 25 to 34 earned $682.“

Mature consumers also seem to be spending on categories not traditionally associated with older people. NBC’s study of those people 55 to 64 showed that they spent more than the average consumer on categories like home improvement, large appliances, casual dining and cosmetics.

They have also become heavy spenders on electronics and digital devices. The study also showed that members of the 55-to-64 age group were just as likely as those ages 18 to 34 to have high-definition televisions, digital video recorders and broadband service.

The most interesting statistics I read were on audience age: The median age for audiences for every broadcast network has moved upward since 2006. NBC has moved to 50.1, from 48.5; ABC increased to 52.3, from 47.4. Fox, always the youngest network, aged to 45.4, from 41.5. CBS began at 53 and is now at a median age of 56.

“American Idol,” once considered the hot show for young people, finished its first season 10 years ago with a median age of 32.1. This season, its median age is 47.2. ABC’s biggest hit, “Dancing with the Stars” has a large complement of 50-plus viewers.

Patricia McDonough, senior vice president for insights, analysis and policy for Nielsen, said, “35 to 64 is becoming a relatively common target now.”

So the 55+ set is generally more employed, more financially stable and more prone to watching television and buying things. I guess they’re not getting older, they’re getting better. It’s not too long for me to join this group and somehow I am feeling a bit better about it.

Sort of.

I don’t know about you but my handwriting is terrible. Never all that good in the first place, it has devolved into a text style instantly recognizable by nobody and sometimes not even by me. I am a far better typist since I type ALL the time and dislike having to write by hand. Since I grew up even before the advent of the personal computer (I was a proud owner of an IBM Selectric back in college) typing was a vast improvement over my even then lousy handwriting.

Teenagers today impress everyone with their mind-blowing speed when SMS texting. I also notice that kids are very fast and good at typing on a keyboard as well (their spelling – well that’s another story). But what if there was really good voice recognition software and technology that worked all the time? Perhaps I will receive notes from companies like Dragon and Nuance, as well as products from Windows, Google and Apple espousing how well their products work. I’ve used a few of them from time to time and my impression is they are improving but the learning curve takes too long – that is they take too long to recognize my voice to make the proper word interpretation.

Eventually voice recognition technology will be truly high performing. And the need to actually type one’s thoughts and ideas will be reduced dramatically. There will be a much higher value put on editing since the inability to think orally (unfortunately evidenced by too many people too frequently) will allow things like term papers and white papers to be much more easily started. But the finishing will then truly be the challenge – something that writers already are well aware of. Taking all those thoughts you have that then are translated into text that you can read on the page will be exciting at first as it will seem so easy. Yet crafting something that is both interesting and concise (brevity is beautiful after all), is not as easy as it looks – even when you don’t have to physically type the words.

Part of my process for “creating content” as it is now called, is writing and editing at the same time. Even after I finish the thought process I go back and edit. And then I edit again and again. So while I welcome advancements in voice recognition technology I am so wired into typing my thoughts it will not be easy for me to adopt its usage – at least for some of the time.
Of course then there’s eye tracking which was in the news this week as articles both in Business Week http://buswk.co/hbW9QS and the New York Times http://nyti.ms/giq0eA highlighted this emerging technology

I don’t long for my old IBM Selectric, but I wonder if I could really give up typing all together. Could you?

AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong touted that AOL is,”still a very desirable place to advertise – very high household income, and more women than men”. All I could think was – so they’re old. In many cases very old. I don’t know the statistics but it’s hard to imagine very many people under the age of 35 that use AOL for anything else than an email address.

The article goes on to note that since January 2010, the number of unique visitors to AOL’s home page has declined 27 percent. Revenue during the first half of this year is down 25%. So it’s happening right now that AOL is becoming more irrelevant with each passing day.

And is it really any surprise? With the online world taking on a truly global focus how does AMERICA ONLINE fit in with a world view? Is there any way that anyone outside the United States would ever use AOL? That’s not true of Google, or Yahoo or even Microsoft’s home page. They have users from all over the globe. Somehow AOL in French or Chinese does not really work does it?

The new design will also move video near the top of the page – WOW – revolutionary! Clips will include a series called – “You’ve Got”. Is that like “You’ve Got Mail”? The 1998 hit movie starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? That was 12 years ago folks – and I hate to break it to AOL but things have changed in the online world just a bit over the past 12 years.

Maybe I am missing something big here. After all AOL’s revenue was $ 1.24 billion in the first six months even if it was down 25%. But comments that Mr. Armstrong made like blaming AOL’s shrinking (maybe shriveling would be a better word?) dial-up access (Dial-up??? Are you kidding?) is responsible for the declines. Ya think?

With AOL’s first overhaul of the home page since 2008, Mr. Armstrong went on to say that the philosophy behind the page was to inform visitors while also entertaining them. The focus will shift during the day from being news-oriented in the morning to a focus on lifestyle in the afternoon. I guess he’s not too concerned about the evening and night’s since most of the users are fast asleep by 9PM.

Finally the article notes Mr. Armstrong commenting “We are basically trying to make sure that our users are prepared for the day and they don’t get caught with their pants off.” If that were to happen it would likely only be because they forgot to put them on in the first place.

Ok all you AOL lovers out there – let me have it. Speak up now – it’s your turn.

Well after 9 months of ‘checking-in’, having received 9 different ‘badges’, being the ‘Mayor’ of no less than 6 different places – including the Acela Club at Citi Field where I have been only 5 times, I am here to tell you that I personally don’t have any real use for Foursquare.

I have received comments from my Facebook friends (you can link your Foursquare status to FB); on different places I’ve been that they went to at one time or another – that’s a little bit cool. But I have yet to ‘check-in’ at a place and have someone nearby let me know that they are in the area and maybe we could get together.

Granted non-20’s people like myself (ok mea culpa I am more than double that), don’t normally go hopping around in the suburbs from place to place and when I am in New York City and check-in most of my Foursquare friends are either not in the city or not going to the same places that I am.

Occasionally Foursquare has offered me a coupon for an establishment nearby to the one in which I just checked-in and I even used a coupon one time just to test it (coffee). But as I wrote in a previous post http://bit.ly/9AWboS Foursquare’s GPS location is not very good and I can often check into no less than 15 establishments at the same time within as many as 1,000 meters (why it’s in meters I have no idea). In fact frequently it says that I am closer to a place down the street than the place that I am actually in.

An interesting article by Todd Woody in the NY Times from October 20 http://nyti.ms/dwjcRh did a nice job in linking Earthjustice – a non-profit law firm, to a campaign in which $ 10 would be donated to protect endangered species by ‘checking-in’ at Foursquare at ‘Earthjustice ad’. Clever campaign but I don’t know if that’s enough of a business model to sustain Foursquare. And now Facebook has been running its own location based platform – Facebook Places.

As far as I am concerned the road for Foursquare leads directly to be acquired by Facebook. And they better do that fast. Time is running out. You can check-in on that.

What do you think?

To add to all that, even with all that I read I feel like I am missing things that I wished I would have read. Maybe there is now a solution. I can now create my own personal e-newspaper, using the Instapaper platform. I guess the name is okay, but the idea seems like it has a lot of merit.

In an article in the New York Times last week http://nyti.ms/dyVlV5 it was noted the founder Marco Arment created Instapaper for himself but his friends began asking about gaining access to his service. Mr. Arment had not apparently quit his day job (CTO at Tumblr) until just recently. He has not yet gone to outside financing either preferring to self-fund. At least for the present time.

Instapaper has an iPhone app as well as an I-Pad app. To date there are no plans for an Android or BlackBerry application although Mr. Arment has discussed an HTML 5 web versions that would cover Android devices. To put it simply, Instapaper takes online article content and saves it on your bookmarked toolbar.

There is competition in this ‘space’. Readitlater and InstaFetch (for Android devices) have been around for a while but the early buzz is that Instapaper is a preferable platform. As a BlackBerry user I am not feeling the love here at all.

If Instapaper gains in popularity Google Chrome to Phone has something to lose here. So I am wondering WWGD? We know Google can easily crush such an unfunded and under-resourced entrepreneur like a bug.

But I think there’s something so cool about one guy coming up with a concept, developing it and trying to make it work for everyone else as well as himself.

Will he make it? Would you buy the app?

Yet at its core, the prospect of people cutting spending on things like apparel and inessential big purchases – like automobiles and giant flat screen televisions, should not be seen as a bad thing. Weren’t we told that Americans HAD to increase their savings rate? That rate is now up to 6.4% from the latest report about three times greater than 2 years ago. An article in today’s NY Times highlights the challenges of retailers and the economy in general – http://nyti.ms/9ylhPl

Economists never agree but there does seem to be consensus that consumer spending which represents 70% of the American economy has to move forward in order to enable a real recovery to take place. Since retail sales were so bad a year ago, John Long, a retail strategist at Kurt Salmon Associates noted “that should have made this July’s comp a layup”.

An article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week http://bit.ly/ayAGVe noted that sales of technology and electronics are bright spots but those sales appear to be coming at the expense of items like clothing and appliances.

I cannot for a moment imagine that returning to the ways of the recent past – profligate spending and people spending money they did not have in the first place – will result in economic salvation.

We run a marketing agency and our primary focus is helping our clients gain and retain customers. Consequently consumer (and business for that matter) spending is critical to our mutual success. However I am not disappointed that Americans are being more careful about how much they are spending while at the same time increasing their savings.

The big problem for businesses like ours is getting banks to loosen up their purse strings and actually lend money for expansion and growth for small businesses. But if a return to spending money one does not really have is the answer we are in a lot more trouble than I ever could have imagined.

Agree? Disagree?

And I have been to the Acela club exactly three times this season which leads me to think that people who visit the Acela club do not subscribe or care about Foursquare. In fact the few people I asked who work there had never even heard of location based services like Foursquare. As Acela club ‘mayor’ I have not been offered the key to CitiField or even a free drink – alcoholic or not.

In an article in today’s NY Times http://nyti.ms/aDGgmn, it was noted that Loopt is offering people a mobile game that rewards people for checking in frequently to particular places. And as such one can become ‘boss’ of certain locations – sort of like being the mayor. The key thing is that companies like Gap, Burger King Etc., plan to use Loopt Star to reward loyal customers. Foursquare is also working with its partners to offer real-time rewards for check-ins and frequencies of visits.

One thing the article fails to mention is the vagaries of GPS check in on these platforms. I know for example on Foursquare when I attempt to ‘check-in’ I am given a list of nearby locations even if I am smack in the middle of one on the list. (Somehow I find it really odd that if I am sitting in a Starbucks it tells me that the one I am sitting in is somehow 137 meters away). But I can also check-in to any of these GPS-enabled locations whether I am actually physically there or not.

GPS technology is set to make a major leap forward with the advent of High Accuracy-NDGPS which will enable accuracy to the centimeter level. This will be a critical enhancement since it appears that I can check in at any number of places simultaneously/concurrently (or at least in quick sequence), so that I could gain reward points at places I actually never visited.

Think about it, you are sitting at coffee shop in the middle of the city, but you check in at Burger King (for the third time that week) even though you have been to the Burger King. Now Burger King sends you a coupon for a soda with a sandwich purchase. Retailer margins will be squeezed. People will game the system – that can be guaranteed.

I understand that companies can counter that talk about the fact the patron actually purchased something, but at the same time product is being given away for nothing. And how is that a good idea?

So join up now and get free stuff – while you can.

It’s no secret the publishing industry is in the midst of severe changes and employee downsizing. The future of publishing is fast evolving. So let’s say that one the largest and most successful publishers in the world (Conde-Nast – think Vanity Fair, Vogue, etc.) might be uncertain about their future in terms of how many people and they will employ (staff vs. freelance for example). What might they do?

Reading the article in today’s New York Times http://nyti.ms/cHwJyA gave me the idea that Conde-Nast moving out of Times-Square and down to the WTC is a nearly perfect arrangement. It gives the WTC a flagship tenant that very well could attract other possible prime tenants to head back downtown. Conde-Nast currently occupies 800,000 square feet at 4 Times Square as well as five other buildings in Manhattan. One million square feet out of 2.9 million total square feet will be a huge boost to Mr. Silverstein and his partners.

And what does Conde-Nast get? A back door perhaps? If for some reason Conde-Nast were to be smaller than they forecast, (I strongly suspect the brass at Conde-Nast have no idea what their personnel needs will truly be five years from now) they can simply renegotiate lease terms – less space, lower cost per square foot etc. In the meantime both parties can crow about a match made in heaven or at least the 110th floor of this 1,776 foot tower, (to be known as 1 World Trade Center after the term Freedom Tower was scrapped) which is to be the tallest building in the United States.

It’s a risk both parties have a good reason to strongly consider.

Agree? Disagree?