Amazon Kindle Thoughts

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I bought an Amazon Kindle around the holidays. My goal was to read less daily stuff and more fiction and non-fiction. So far so good. I am still reading plenty of news but I have read at least ten books in the last few months, more books than I have read in the last ten years. For the record I bought the Kindle Touch.

For the most part I have been happy with it. The purchase process is seamless, reviews of books are nice, and its feature set is straight forward. It is a little slow to react to menu presses and the like, but page turns are fast enough and the e-ink display is fine for reading in light. My biggest headache is with touch itself but only because it reacts differently than my iPad. On the Kindle, anything that touches it counts as a touch — a blanket corner, pillow, arm, finger, anything. On an iPad, only body parts touching makes it register touches. This is awkward as I constantly forget, go to wipe some piece of dirt off the screen and find myself a chapter ahead.

Another issue is the screen’s color. It is darker than a piece of paper so even in times when I would normally be able to read a book without a problem, I still need a light for my Kindle. Backlighting might be nice, but that is a fine line. Too bright, like my iPad, and it keeps me up in the evenings and early mornings when I do my recreational reading. Today I use a small light attached to the Kindle where I can focus the source on the screen. Of course this means I had to buy a light, attach it to my Kindle, and carry an accessory with me, making my small Kindle that much bigger.

Enter the rumor mill. Reuters is reporting that Amazon is rushing the next Kindle to market in July and that the big new feature is a lit screen. It’s believed Amazon is rushing it to market because Barnes and Noble released a version of their eReader with a backlit screen. I doubt it. Amazon, like Apple, always seems to do things on their own schedule. [1]

Given that, if it is done tastefully, I think the backlighting will be an excellent feature and would even get me to buy a new one. But the light has to be simple (not glaring), be able to turn off, and the device can’t suddenly work for one week when the old model worked for one month.

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[1] Really, MG? There is no way Amazon “has to react” any more than Apple does to Android. No one is going to switch to Barnes & Noble’s eReader for the backlighting. And a new user will pick a platform based on content and reach more than a small feature of the reader. I care way more if my book is available and the format will be available for the long run then on a backlit screen.

Activities Of Ages Past

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My wife was a swimmer in school and on Saturday all the ladies in the area that swam on those teams gathered at their old swimming pool for a reunion. Most are married and have kids. Most were still in excellent shape. She talks about that team with affection, how they whipped most teams in the district and if it wasn’t for some weird coaching decisions the relay team was headed to states. While I haven’t met most of them before I knew almost all the names.

So we all swam at the pool and the girls talked to each other and all the kids played. At one point I saw the diving board and, realizing that I hadn’t done a swan dive in 25 years, decided to try one. It was sloppy — a 4.5 on the judges scale not including difficulty which probably would have dragged my score lower — but I did it.

Afterward it dawned on me how, as we get older, there are just certain things we don’t do any more. I haven’t dove in 25 years. Now I’m content to walk in the water or slide in off the side. There was a time I wouldn’t get in the water without diving. I don’t jump anymore, either. I watch my daughters, aged 6 and 4, skip. Don’t do that, although I’m not certain I ever did.

I don’t know when that happened but at some point those things just went out off fashion for me. And, for the most part, I don’t miss most of them. (Although having a little more hair on my head would suit me fine.)

Solve A Problem, Not A Feature Set

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Caterina Fake, founder of Pinwheel and Flickr, in an article talking about growing communities slowly also made this comment:

You shouldn’t get attached to a feature set. You should get attached to a problem you’re solving.

It took me a long time to make this differentiation. The last few years, as this distinction has become more obvious to me, has created a wealth of experimentation around this personal theme of working with numbers. Some experimentation was with products, others with partners. Most of the prototypes never saw the light of day, a few bombed and a few have succeeded.

The whole article is full of wonderful nuggets. Being the founder of one of the first great photo-sharing communities, Flickr, and a pioneer of the community-oriented Web 2.0 movement, Caterina would understand this better than most. She talks about how it takes time for a community to build “antibodies to spammers and trolls,” that it “takes time for the culture to grow,” and that the worse thing a start-up community can do is buy advertising to grow the community. It needs to grow organically as people find value in the site.

Is it Belief? Or Delusion?

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I have been running Infinity Softworks for 15 years now, most of the time as a start-up and some times as a company. The process is walking the fine edge of a knife. I have to be strong willed enough to keep going, determined enough to fight ridiculous odds, and positive enough to keep me and my team going through every up and down of the company. Any fall off of any of those three and we slip off the knife edge.

There was a time when I almost gave up. It was the fall of 2007. Our multi-year campaign to make headway in math education came to a screeching halt thanks mostly to Palm firing their education team. From 2006 to 2007 we lost 75% of our income and I took the team from 10 to 3. An opportunity to sell the company fell through, which was a shame as it would have meant an incredible opportunity for Infinity Softworks’ technology and me personally.

I had faith in a new product we were developing, though, and believed that that would help us re-build. But I underestimated so much: the market interest, the help we had gotten from Palm, how hard sales were going to be. In mid-2007 I realized the product we had spent almost two years on wasn’t going to go anywhere either, fired my last employees and was trying to prepare myself to move on. As a friend said to me, it was the first time he saw me ever hit a brick wall and stop. Usually I’d claw my way over, under or around.

Now I’m on to new and interesting things, all within the same theme of working with numbers. powerOne is doing well and we just released DEWALT Mobile Pro. We are working on new deals and new ideas that push the boundaries of working with numbers even further.

So I’ve been thinking about that start-up knife edge again, thinking a little bit about how I almost gave up, almost sold out, some five-six years ago. And I realize that there is one other thing I hadn’t considered regarding that knife edge: there is a fine line between delusion and belief. And I think you have to have a little of both to make this start-up thing work.

Wild Things Live Forever

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A moment of silence for one of the great authors of all time: Maurice Sendak. He died today at age 83.

My wife and I have a wonderful children’s book collection. Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen, editions from the early 1970s given to me by my stepdad, are two of our prized possessions.

Thanks, Maurice, for inspiring multiple generations of children to explore their imaginations to its fullest!