- Drones Over Somalia are Hazard to Air Traffic (Washington Post) — In a recently completed report, U.N. officials describe several narrowly averted disasters in which drones crashed into a refugee camp, flew dangerously close to a fuel dump and almost collided with a large passenger plane over Mogadishu, the capital. (via Jason Leopold)
- Sequel Pro — free and open source Mac app for managing MySQL databases. It’s an update of CocoaMySQL.
- Neural Network Improves Accuracy of Least Invasive Breast Cancer Test — nice use of technology to make lives better, for which the creator won the Google Science Fair. Oh yeah, she’s 17. (via Miss Representation)
- Free Harder to Find on Amazon — so much for ASINs being permanent and unchangeable. Amazon “updated” the ASINs for a bunch of Project Gutenberg books, which means they’ve lost all the reviews, purchase history, incoming links, and other juice that would have put them at the top of searches for those titles. Incompetence, malice, greed, or a purely innocent mistake? (via Glyn Moody)
"amazon" entries
Four short links: 26 July 2012
Drone Overload, Mac MySQL Tool, Better Cancer Diagnosis Through AI, and Inconstant Identifiers
Top Stories: July 2-6, 2012
Reevaluating criticism of visualizations, why websites still matter, Amazon as friend and foe.
This week on O'Reilly: Andy Kirk made the case for open-minded criticism of visualizations, Brett Slatkin explained why you still need to own a website, and Greenleaf Book Group CEO Clint Greenleaf discussed the complicated relationship between publishers and Amazon.
Amazon as friend and foe
Clint Greenleaf on the challenges of working with and competing against Amazon.
In this TOC podcast, Greenleaf Book Group founder and CEO Clint Greenleaf shares a unique perspective on working with and competing against Amazon. He also addresses the DOJ lawsuit and offers thoughts on the future of ereaders.
Direct sales should be a publisher priority
Bob Pritchett on how and why he built his company around a direct sales channel.
In this TOC podcast, Logos Bible Software president & CEO Bob Pritchett talks about the importance of customer engagement, building direct sales channels, and how to beat Amazon.
Four short links: 12 June 2012
Amazon Royalties Suck, Learn Electronics, Microtasks, and Finance Considered Harmful
- Amazon’s Insanely Crap Royalties (Andrew Hyde) — Amazon offers high royalty rate to you, but that’s before a grim hidden “delivery fee”. Check out Andrew’s graph of the different pay rates to the author from each medium.
- SparkFun Education — learn electronics from the good folks at SparkFun.
- TaskRabbit — connects you with friendly, reliable people right in your neighborhood who can help you get the items on your To-Do list done. Lots of people and projects sniffing around this space of outsourced small tasks, distributed to people via a web site.
- Henry Ford on Bootstrapping (Amy Hoy) — Amy has unearthed a fascinating rant by Henry Ford against speculative investment and finance. I determined absolutely that never would I join a company in which finance came before the work or in which bankers or financiers had a part. And further that, if there were no way to get started in the kind of business that I thought could be managed in the interest of the public, then I simply would not get started at all. For my own short experience, together with what I saw going on around me, was quite enough proof that business as a mere money-making game was not worth giving much thought to and was distinctly no place for a man who wanted to accomplish anything. Also it did not seem to me to be the way to make money. I have yet to have it demonstrated that it is the way. For the only foundation of real business is service.
Four short links: 6 June 2012
Lagging Latency, Don't Take the Extra Cookie, Amazon's Print Plans, and Maker Schools
- Why Latency Lags Bandwidth (PDF) — across disk, memory, and networking we see bandwidth growing faster than latency comes down. This paper covers why and what we can do about it. (via Ryan Dahl)
- Michael Lewis’s Princeton Commencement Speech — a subtle variation on “work on stuff that matters” that I simply love. Commencement speeches fly around this time of the year, but this one is actually worth reading.
- The Amazon Effect (The Nation) — Readers of e-books are especially drawn to escapist and overtly commercial genres (romance, mysteries and thrillers, science fiction), and in these categories e-book sales have bulked up to as large as 60 percent. […] Amazon swiftly struck an alliance with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to handle placing its books in physical stores. In a transparent subterfuge aimed at protecting its tax-avoidance strategies, Amazon intends to publish many of its books under a subsidiary imprint of Houghton’s called New Harvest, thus keeping alive the increasingly threadbare fiction that it has no physical presence in states where it does business online. I did not know these things. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Learn by Doing (Slate) — Dale Dougherty’s excellent call to arms to turn away from zombie-producing standardised test classes to learning by making real things. The empty campus on test day horrified me.
Amazon, ebooks and advertising
Amazon's adoption of ad-supported ebooks is shifting from possible to likely.
Amazon already sells ads on the Kindle. Joe Wikert explains why ad-supported ebooks are a logical next step for the company.
Publishing News: Kindle Fire and "your ad here"
Amazon pitches Kindle Fire home screen ads, Apple says DOJ complaint is "fundamentally flawed," and Craig Mod muses on covers.
Amazon is reportedly peddling new ad space on its Kindle Fire home screen, Apple responds to the DOJ, and Craig Mod says its time to hack digital book covers.
Publishing News: Another publisher ends its app fling
MIT's Technology Review ditch apps for HTML5, B&N needs to balance sales, and Sara Nelson heads to Amazon.
The publisher of MIT's Technology Review talks apps and HTML5, RWW's Antone Gonsalves reviews B&N's chances of survival, and Amazon hires Sara Nelson.
Publishing News: Nook gets Microsoft, and soon NFC
Microsoft invests in B&N, Target evicts Amazon, and ebooks teeter on the brink of extinction (perhaps).
B&N’s Nook gets Microsoft’s bankroll and will soon incorporate NFC, Amazon loses its shelf space at Target, and a publishing platform architect makes a strong argument for the end of ebooks.