Product strategists in the PC industry are gearing up for 2012 to be the year of the “ultrabook” — very thin, very light laptops, usually with solid-state drives (SSD), that compete with Apple’s MacBook Air — such as the Asus Zenbook and Lenovo U300s. We agree that ultrabooks’ lighter, thinner form will appeal to many consumers. Already, 21 percent of U.S. online consumers say they’re interested in owning one, according to a Forrester Research survey fielded in September. But we see the ultrabook as an evolution of the laptop rather than an entirely new form factor. So what is the next big thing in consumer computing?

The “next big thing” is likely to be many things — we anticipate accelerating form factor diversification beyond the desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets and smartphones we have today, as we advance deeper into the Post-PC Era. Based on what we see in research and development labs, new products beginning to come to market and gaps in consumer computing experiences, we’ve identified these five form factors as the best candidates for what comes next:

• Wearables: Wearable devices, or “wearables” for short, are devices worn on or near the body that sense and relay information. Many wearables, like the heads-up display (HUD) contact lenses in development at the University of Washington, are years from marketability. But other wearables are already available as consumer products, for uses such as communication and health and fitness. An increasing number of wearables in the health-and-fitness space interact with Apple iOS devices, such as the Lark Technologies vibrating wristband that doubles as an alarm clock and a sleep sensor; and BodyMedia FIT Armbands, which have four sensors to track activity, sleep and calorie intake. WIMM Labs, a Foxconn-funded start-up in Los Altos, Calif., has designed multifunctional wearables, based on Google’s Android software, that it will license to other companies.
• Embedded devices: We define embedded devices as physical objects that incorporate computing processors and sensors, excluding those worn on the body, which we classify as wearables. Like wearables, embedded devices are diverse in form, ranging from devices such as Livescribe smartpens that fit into your pocket, to LG Thinq refrigerators that sit in your kitchen. Embedded devices may or may not have a display — Livescribe pens don’t; the LG Thinq appliances do. Today, embedded devices are widely used in industrial automation and automotives, and they have emerging consumer uses in home automation, entertainment and productivity.
• Surfaces: Surfaces are large interactive displays, which may incorporate multitouch, voice and gesture control, facial recognition, near field communication (NFC), quick response (QR) codes or other input/output mechanisms. Today, surfaces are found mostly in public places such as hotels (Microsoft Surface tables in Sheraton bars) and conferences and events (Obscura Digital’s custom multitouch video installations), as well as in education (interactive whiteboards) and news media (red state/blue state maps), but we see potential for additional uses, especially in retail and marketing. For example, retailers such as Victoria’s Secret have commissioned the design firm frog design to create interactive displays for their retail stores. In Seoul, South Korea, retailers use surfaces to extend their reach beyond their stores: Tesco Homeplus, the No. 2 grocery retailer in South Korea, built “virtual malls” in subway stations to reach more customers without building more stores. Commuters take pictures of QR codes under the groceries they want to buy, and the groceries are delivered to their homes.
• Flexible displays: Flexible displays are computing screens that can be rolled, folded or flexed. Flexible devices can take the form of personal devices, such as an e-reader, or larger surface displays, such as furniture or wallpaper. Flexible displays are likely the farthest from becoming commercialized products because of the lack of a defined use case or customer: Polymer Vision, a spinoff of Philips Electronics, promoted its flexible eBook Reader for years, but declared bankruptcy before bringing the device to market. HP has been developing printable Mylar displays that it imagines could be used for candy wrappers, armband computers for the military or living room wallpaper, but the displays are still several years from commercialization.
• Miniprojectors: Miniprojectors are small devices that project a larger image onto another surface or, in the case of holographic projection, into 3-D space. Miniprojectors can be combined with cameras that recognize gesture to become interactive, similar to the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360. Today, miniprojectors such as the Brookstone Pocket Projector are gaining in popularity as iPhone accessories. But they’re still niche products, as consumers must purchase them separately. Apple has already filed a patent to embed interactive projectors into its iPhones, iPads and Macs. Embedded miniprojectors would appeal primarily to information workers, but there could be broader consumer uses as well, such as impromptu photo slide shows or YouTube viewing in a group.

It’s easy to read about computing wallpaper, or contact lenses with embedded heads-up displays, and think that these form factors have no bearing on what product strategists are doing today. But product strategists who see what’s coming can anticipate disruption — or even innovate and become disruptors themselves. As you think about what’s coming in 2012 and beyond, know that none of these devices will operate in isolation. The most successful products will work with other products — for example, wearables that talk to smartphones and TVs; surfaces that are activated by the presence of your smartphone. We’re living in a multidevice, multiconnection world, and the best experiences will be those that work across devices and platforms. In that sense, the next phase of the Post-PC Era doesn’t look so different from today.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, serving consumer product strategy professionals. Follow her on Twitter at @srepps

The bookseller’s stock had jumped 14.3 percent on Wednesday to $12.03. A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which contained one sentence of text to comply with disclosure rules, except to confirm the meeting took place in New York City. She declined to say when during the day the meeting took place, or when specifically executives mentioned the forthcoming launch.

The filing said simply that the company, in the meeting, “indicated it expects to make an announcement on May 24, 2011, regarding the launch of a new eReader device.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The bookseller’s stock had jumped 14.3 percent on Wednesday to $12.03. A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which contained one sentence of text to comply with disclosure rules, except to confirm the meeting took place in New York City. She declined to say when during the day the meeting took place, or when specifically executives mentioned the forthcoming launch.

The filing said simply that the company, in the meeting, “indicated it expects to make an announcement on May 24, 2011, regarding the launch of a new eReader device.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Time to catch up, Kindle competitors that aren’t Apple (AAPL). Borders (BGP) is starting out by cutting the price of its flagship Kobo reader to $129, down from $149. And the super-low-end Aluratek Libre reader is now going for $99.99, down from $120.

Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) cheapest Nook, for the moment, is stuck at $149, but it’s hard to imagine that price sticking through Christmas.

Meanwhile, anyone have any sales data on any of these things? Amazon boasts that its new Kindles are its “fastest-selling ever.” And it declines, as always, to explain what that means in numerical terms. But I believe that’s as good as–or better than–Barnes & Noble, Borders, et al, which are even quieter about their sales.

The i.MX508 applications processor, as Freescale has christened it, integrates an ARM Cortex-A8 processor core and E Ink’s hardware-based display controller into a system-on-a-chip that the company claims delivers twice the performance of its previous eReader chips (it runs at 800 megahertz). It also happens to be more energy-efficient and significantly cheaper.

According to Freescale marketing director Glen Burchers, the chip will cost less than $10 in volume quantities and will drop the unit price of e-readers that use it by at least $30.

“There’s a big unsaturated market out there, and price is a big factor,” Burchers told Bloomberg. “We do see the price of e-readers coming down this year, and Freescale is trying to facilitate that. That’s a lot of what this chip is doing.”

For Freescale customers like Amazon (AMZN), the i.MX508 couldn’t come at a better time. With Apple (AAPL) about to redefine consumer expectations for e-readers with its multipurpose iPad, Amazon will increasingly need to differentiate its single-purpose Kindle on price.

Dropping the retail price of the basic version of the device to around $150 from its current $259 would certainly do that. If that’s possible. Obviously, the cost of E-Ink displays and the Kindle’s other components need to come down as well.

Only a few days ago, the AllThingsDigital team left home freshly pressed, pockets full of cash (or at least as full as journalists’ pockets get these days) and ready to take on the geek horde at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Walt, Kara, Katie, John and Peter had big plans, but in the end, even a copy of Eric Boyd’s “How to Count Cards Like an MIT Freshman” could not save them. They did do a heck of a lot of reporting on CES though. At least they could bring back some news, if not new Ferraris from the dealership at the Wynn.

BoomTown is no stranger to Vegas, so Kara got settled in quick and spent day one hopping up and down The Strip to see presentations and fiddle with gadgets of all sorts. She caught up with Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer after he rocked his keynote just a little too hard and the power went out. I guess maybe he shouldn’t have turned that tablet prototype all the way up to 11. Kara caught the scoop on Electus’s Ben Silverman and his new deal with Yahoo. It seems the Internet portal has brought him on to “produce content” for its new you-centric efforts. Yahoo (YHOO) is hanging its hopes on Silverman, who had success in his early career producing for TV. Kara even got the other side of the deal, catching up with Jimmy Pitaro, who heads Yahoo’s Vertical Audiences Experience, and SVP of North American Revenue Joanne Bradford. Kara hasn’t actually made it back to the City by the Bay yet, so we’ll keep you posted on when she resurfaces. Vegas can be a cruel mistress.

John was a CES coverage juggernaut this week, filing post after post or indispensable, up-to-the-minute CES nerdery. Early in the festivities, Intel (INTC) opened the door on its newest family of Core processors. With model names like i3 and i5 and with a feature called “Turbo,” you know they have to be good. The real story is that the release of these chips puts Intel a solid year ahead of expected releases from AMD (AMD). Though there were no reported sightings of an iSlate, John did deliver a little nugget from the CES rumor mill about their manufacture. Analysts are expecting the device to have an aluminum chassis when it may or may not be shown to the world at an unconfirmed Apple event Jan. 27. John was our correspondent in the audience at AllThingsDigital‘s Mini D event at CES. While there were posts aplenty, it was comments from Palm (PALM) CEO Jon Rubinstein that have been making the rounds on the Internet. Everyone was a little surprised when Rubinstein claimed never to have used an iPhone. Weekend Update has used a Pixi and we might just believe him.

Peter was in full effect at CES this week, trolling around CES with his sizable entourage. Okay, maybe the MediaMemo groupies aren’t that numerous, but Peter was a reporting rockstar nonetheless. In advance of his onstage interview with Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings, Peter wrote about the deal inked between the rental giant and Warner Bros that would delay availability of new DVD releases by Netflix in exchange for more streamable content from the studio. In a quick breather from CES news, Peter reported that Google’s (GOOG) Eric Schmidt and some other Technorati were en route to dinner with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the State Department. No word on which reality TV stars would be crashing that party. MediaMemo rounded out the week with a post about Hearst’s effort to save its sinking ship. It turns out that when the ship is in trouble, you turn to a Skiff for help. The newspaper giant has reportedly plowed $35 million into the nautically-named e-reader, and Peter brought us a sneak peek.

Our very own Mr. and Ms. CES (Walt and Katie) may come home with blisters and a bad case of “qwerty thumb” after handling so many new gadgets this week. The Personal Technology column was all about Google’s Nexus One, the latest super-smartphone from everyone’s favorite search giant. Walt’s review was a mixed bag for the Nexus One, which got high marks for advancing the Android platform, for forcing the other super smartphone giants to up the ante on their cameras and for some of it’s cool Google-connected features. He wasn’t as upbeat on the menu-driven interface of the phone and had qualms about the four hard-wired buttons. The battery life for some features also wasn’t as competitive as it might have been.

Katie spent some pre-CES time investigating the so-called mega-zoom digital camera offerings from Nikon, Panasonic (PC) and Casio. These in-between cameras aren’t quite so cumbersome as DSLRs but offer serious zooming capabilities with lots of other pro level features. Katie fell in love with the higher picture quality and flexibility, even if the cameras are a little bulkier than the smartphone she’d been using for her photo needs previously. All in all, though, she gave the class of cameras high marks and said they were a great next step for people looking to take their pictures a little farther.

Weekend Update has to get going. Its our job to prepare the ibuprofen, cold medicine, ice, bandages, crutches and bail money that may be needed by the staff as they make their way back from CES. Stay tuned through the weekend for a few more tech revelations, and please try not to play your stereo too loud if you’re driving near our Eureka Valley HQ in San Francisco this week. Hangovers after a gadget binge are the worst.

That’s substantially more than the 300,000 available for download on Amazon’s Kindle service, though half-a-million of them are public-domain books provided by Google (GOOG). They’ll be compatible with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry smartphones, and, when it finally arrives at market, the Plastic Logic eReader, a Kindle DX-size e-book reader for which the Barnes & Noble eBookstore will be the exclusive storefront.

“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time,” said BN.com president William J. Lynch.

With a few noteworthy exceptions, of course. E-books sold by Barnes & Noble (BKS) won’t be compatible with Sony’s (SNE) Sony Reader Digital Book or Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, which they are clearly intended to undermine.

To what degree they’ll manage that is anyone’s guess. One thing is sure: We’ll almost certainly be seeing an e-book price war in the near future. And when Apple finally gets around to uncrating that tablet/e-reader device it’s been working on, all bets are off.

Below, video of the Plastic Logic Reader demo from our D7 conference in late May.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090721/barnes-noble-to-amazon-mine-is-bigger-than-yours/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20090721/barnes-noble-to-amazon-mine-is-bigger-than-yours-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20090721/barnes-noble-to-amazon-mine-is-bigger-than-yours-2/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:00:36 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=21771 Six years after shuttering its first e-book effort, Barnes & Noble has embarked on a new one. Monday afternoon, the bookseller announced what it describes as “the world’s largest eBookstore,” an online storefront that boasts 700,000 titles.

That’s substantially more than the 300,000 available for download on Amazon’s Kindle service, though half-a-million of them are public-domain books provided by Google (GOOG). They’ll be compatible with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry smartphones, and, when it finally arrives at market, the Plastic Logic eReader, a Kindle DX-size e-book reader for which the Barnes & Noble eBookstore will be the exclusive storefront.

“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time,” said BN.com president William J. Lynch.

With a few noteworthy exceptions, of course. E-books sold by Barnes & Noble (BKS) won’t be compatible with Sony’s (SNE) Sony Reader Digital Book or Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, which they are clearly intended to undermine.

To what degree they’ll manage that is anyone’s guess. One thing is sure: We’ll almost certainly be seeing an e-book price war in the near future. And when Apple finally gets around to uncrating that tablet/e-reader device it’s been working on, all bets are off.

Below, video of the Plastic Logic Reader demo from our D7 conference in late May.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090721/barnes-noble-to-amazon-mine-is-bigger-than-yours-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/ http://allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:04:07 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/ Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has been a solid success. The device can access a catalog of over 200,000 digital books, including most current best sellers, according to Amazon (AMZN). Its sharp screen, built-in downloading and long battery life have overcome a relatively high price and some poor hardware-design features.

However, most people aren’t likely to carry a Kindle everywhere — it’s too large to fit in a pocket and hogs space in a handbag. Yet they do tote their cellphones everywhere. So, for years, a dedicated minority of folks have been reading books on smart phones and other pocket devices with relatively large screens.

In recent months, e-book offerings have especially exploded on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPod Touch, which, like the Kindle, have excellent screens and an easy and well-organized system for directly downloading content. Apple’s App Store, which carries everything from games to business software, has hundreds of e-book offerings (in addition to the audio books available through the iTunes store).

Some of these e-book apps, or programs, constitute just a single book, while others are digital-reading portals that can access anywhere from a handful of e-book titles, like the collected works of Shakespeare or the Sherlock Holmes tales, to many thousands of titles.

Two of the most popular e-book apps for the iPhone and the Touch are Stanza and eReader. They are pretty basic and straightforward, with little in the way of fancy formatting. But they get the job done, allowing you to download tens of thousands of titles from a variety of sources.

But, as with past cellphone or PDA e-book systems, most of those on the iPhone and Touch focus primarily on older, classic, or out-of-copyright titles, rather than on the sort of current, in-demand titles available on the Kindle. Some fresher titles are available, but the selection of popular books is relatively thin.

Now, two companies are launching new e-book apps that aim to bring current and popular titles from major publishers to the iPhone and Touch. And they add interesting features, including fancy formatting and community tools. I’ve been testing both.

One, called Shortcovers, is from the large Canadian bookseller Indigo Books & Music. Due to show up in the App Store in the next few weeks, Shortcovers is a portal to sampling, buying and reading books, and will have a companion Web site. It will allow readers to get free samples of blogs, magazines and books — say, the first chapter — and then buy either the entire work or other individual chapters or sections, which the company calls “shortcovers.”

The second, called Iceberg, is from an iPhone application developer called ScrollMotion. Already available, Iceberg offers each book packaged as an individual stand-alone app, with rich navigation features.

I found that reading books from these two services was OK, but not nearly as satisfying as reading them on a dedicated, large-screen device like the Kindle, which also offers free excerpts. But it was more convenient. I was able to knock off a chapter or a few pages while commuting or waiting in line. The apps use the iPhone’s touch features to allow you to navigate.

Shortcovers is the more ambitious and creative of the two. At launch, it expects to have 200,000 shortcovers — chapters or other free excerpts — available. About 50,000 of these also will be available for purchase as full digital titles; the rest can be ordered as physical books. Of the digital titles, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 will be older or public-domain books, and the rest commercial books. Typical book prices will be between $10 and $20. If you want to buy paid shortcovers — say a chapter of a business or travel book — the typical price will be 99 cents.

The key aim of Shortcovers is to get people to discover new works. So it emphasizes community features such as rating, tagging and sharing. It even allows people to make “mixes” of their favorite works and to upload their own writing. The Shortcovers catalog is a riotous mix of classics like “The Three Musketeers,” current titles like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” and blog posts and magazine articles.

Iceberg’s claim to fame is its handsome appearance. It has just 14 titles available now, including the “Eragon” fantasy trilogy, and each must be downloaded as a separate app, which risks cluttering your iPhone with icons. The company is promising thousands of titles eventually, and has signed deals with major publishers. Prices hover around $10 or $11, but range to $27.

Books by Iceberg try to preserve the formatting and pagination of the printed title, and stress easy skimming to any page, searching and annotating. Pages are tinted and flip with a visual effect that apes a physical page-turn.

But there are missing features in both. Iceberg doesn’t allow bookmarking and Shortcovers lacks annotation. Neither app allows highlighting, or looking up words.

The iPhone isn’t primarily an e-book reader, and these new apps still can’t match Kindle’s full catalog. But they add yet another dimension to a very versatile gadget.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071122/analog-books-a-kabillion-sold-ebooks-not-so-much/ http://allthingsd.com/20071122/analog-books-a-kabillion-sold-ebooks-not-so-much/#comments Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:58:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071122/analog-books-a-kabillion-sold-ebooks-not-so-much/ Below is a video interview with Amazon’s majordomo Jeff Bezos conducted by The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg about the new $400 Kindle wireless electronic-book reader that the online retailer unveiled last week.

So far the reviews have been less than whelming–too clunky, too pricey, too wonky, to name a few of the complaints–but it’s interesting that tech types keep at their seemingly futile effort to replace the very useful device known as the book.

At D4, for example, Sony head Howard Stringer (pictured below) declared its $350 eReader was going to be a big hit. It was not. (Well, to be fair, he did not give an exact timetable on the success of the gadget, but we’re still waiting.)

So far, the meek little book still seems to be the winner over all e-book challengers.

Why is that, given the relentless digitization of every bit of content on the planet and the inevitable march in that direction?

I’d say it’s pretty simple. Books work fine–they are portable, cheap, easy to read, their batteries never die and they’re kind of pretty.

The pluses of an electronic version of a book are not so much of a plus. It’s portable, but not more so than a book. It’s expensive. It’s complex to figure out and sometimes not so easy to read. Its batteries always die. Also, let’s be honest: Not so pretty.

And, though you can hold more books on them–the big selling point–who usually is reading more than one or two books at a time? The same is true for searchability–unless it is a textbook, I can’t think of a time when I really wanted to search a book.

Still, the efforts to storm the castle of reading continues, as you will see here:

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