Color display, Barnes and Noble partner and a great price

Pandigital, a company best known for creating wireless digital photo frames, took a novel step forward with the introduction of a $200 full-color e-book reader with multimedia capabilities and a Barnes & Noble affiliation. In addition to the unit’s e-reader functionality, you can store photos, music, and movies, and use the device as a photo frame when you’re not reading.

The Down Low

The first version of the Pandigital Novel is a 7-inch eReader with an integrated and very fulfilling Barnes & Noble eBook Store experience. The comparatively large screen is a full-color LCD touch-screen display. It has Wi-Fi connectivity and a full set of reading enhancements, like a dictionary and notetakers. You can run a browser or play music while you read, since it’s multitasking capable, but the Internet search is not integrated into the book experience itself.

One of the cooler things on my list is a night reading mode where the text inverts from black-on-white to white-on-black. (If your spouse complains about your nocturnal reading habits this is a great answer.) It’ll also take advantage of the cutting edge Barnes & Noble LendMe technology, making it one of the first e-readers to work like a 14-day lending library.

I called Ross Rubin, an NPD analyst who monitors e-books, for his opinion. He believes that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have an advantage (presumably over iTunes), since both have vast databases of avid readers. “Barnes & Noble is reaching out to be the default bookstore on such devices as this one, the Plastic Logic device, and the forthcoming RCA e-reader from Audiovox,” says Rubin.

One of the tradeoffs of using an LCD screen is a shorter battery life, significantly shorter than the Kindle’s e-paper screen. One of the other tradeoffs is using Wi-Fi (home and hotspots) versus the Kindle’s data connection that works anywhere.

On the plus side—let’s face it—the iPad, a device with many similar features, costs $500. The Pandigital Novel is $200. The new Pandigital Novel eReader is an Android-based system, though it does not yet support downloadable apps.

The end result? Affordable, handsome, and a welcome contender to the e-reader plus world. It’s on my list as the closest thing to an iPad at one-third the price. And I’m betting that future versions will take more advantage of the Android operating system.

MySims Sky Heroes: launching by this Sept
 Most of you are familiar with The Sims, the closest thing to a do-it-yourself soap opera videogame.  You may be less familiar with the junior version, My Sims.  It’s a simpler, younger adventure that concentrates on cute Mii like characters.  There have been racing version of My Sims and well as others.
. The newest My Sims addition is called SkyHeroes and it will be available by September.  A better name would be My First Flight Simulator.  Instead of just navigating aimlessly from point to point, your mission is to battle Morcubus and his drone army . They’ve got nefarious plans to take over the skyways!  You earn your wings as your speed and reflexes are put to the test.  Whimsy is pervasive as you can fly everything from a prop plane to a UFO.  Available for Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox and Playstation.
Sky Captain by D3 Publishers, also jumps into the flight training craze with  a  much more structured adventure for young children where they can  pilot anything from a plane to a UFO 40 different tasks from stunt flying to shooting targets.  No killing, no crashing, and simple enough to pilot that even I managed. Sky Captain reports they’ll be available by this sumer.

Amazon announced two major partnerships: one for students and one for newspaper readers. In a partnership with three of the top five textbook publishers, trials are being held at five well-known college campuses including Princeton, Case-Western, Reed College, University of Virginia, and Arizona State. Expensive textbooks—obsolete almost before the ink dries—will be available for the Kindle. Even the most heavily formatted calculus and anatomy books look quite lovely on the Kindle display. Students will have lighter loads and clearly save money over the course of four years at over $1,000 a year in textbooks.

Not a moment too soon, three ailing newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe—will be offering their readers special discounts on a Kindle DX when they sign up for newspaper delivery. While details haven’t been announced, it’s clear we’re talking about saving trees as well as money.

The new Kindle DX is also a more open system. It’ll read PDF files, play music, and even convert the written word into speech. It’s got enough storage to house 3,500 books and uses the same 3G wireless network to download a book in less than 60 seconds with no subscription fees or service charges.

In terms of new technology, the Kindle is only a modest upgrade—a jumbo-sized version of its former self. In terms of creating a new e-book market that serves students and newspaper readers, Amazon strikes gold. When you can purchase content and have the Kindle discounted we all win.

For more:
A website for all things Kindle: http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/06/kindle-dx-review/

For history buffs, Stephen Levy saw it all coming in this 2007 Newsweek article http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983

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Asking Nicely

One of the best ways to manage your reputation is to show up and have your case heard. Asking people to stop saying what they’re saying, apologizing for things you’ve said, clarifying misconstrued statements…these are things we’ve been doing in the real world since the spoken word began.

When people hurl the first things that come out of their mouths into a note, a simple reminder that the recipient is a living, breathing, feeling human being often helps. Giving a body to the disembodied voices of the web brings civility back into the equation. “I’m sorry,” “my mistake,” and “I didn’t mean to cause you grief” are terms that are in short supply on the Internet.

As a blogger (who incidentally finds that being wrong generates the most traffic), I’ve apologized for making mistakes, confronted those who don’t care for my ideas, and tried very hard not to be offensive. Sometimes it’s hopeless. But nine of out 10 times you establish a personal relationship with the enemy and move on.

Reporting a Problem

Your next recourse would be to report a problem to your service provider. Most have a “report problems” button. If it’s easily verified that there’s something wrong going on, the service provider will attempt to suspend, if not cancel, the troublemaker’s account. If complaints from a number of sources trickle in, it’s more likely the complaint will be addressed.

The Legal Route

Of course, there are legal options to seek compensation when someone says something you feel is untrue and harmful. Hard enough to prove in the real world, these libel cases are almost impossible to win in cyberspace. In part that’s because you can quickly defend yourself and correct the record on the Internet, and in part because the courts are likely to play ostrich when it comes to libel rulings on the web. A simple explanation of libel, easy enough for non-lawyers to digest, comes from Larry Lessig’s blog. (He’s a professor and Internet law specialist at Stanford.)

The Reputation Scrubbers

Now to the juiciest part of reputation management. A cross between a personal private eye and a personal vigilante, these are new services that combine the good old craft of PR and spin with search and linking technologies.

Reputation Hawk, ReputationDefender, and International Reputation Management are three of the leading sites that attempt to fix their clients’ sullied profiles. How do they do that? They flood the web with good content, drowning the bad. And they cross-link favorable content in order to get the good stuff to appear higher in a web search.

Just like in the real world, where reputations can be fixed for a price using a PR firm, there’s bound to be a skewing of reality. Case in point: I spoke with Michael Fertik, CEO of ReputationDefender, after he helped spin Sue Scheff’s web situation into gold. Scheff, who runs an educational consulting firm that places troubled teens in residential programs, recently won $11.3 million from the Florida courts. Scheff sued a woman named Carey Brock, a disgruntled customer who expressed her displeasure by posting complaints about Scheff’s services. The posts called Scheff a crook and fraud.

If you aren’t following this case you should be. It’s a clear example of how those with the money can manipulate their reputations. Some commentators believe Scheff is a heroine who stood up against Internet falsehoods to emerge victorious. A few voices rally behind Brock as a consumer without the media savvy to sway the court, but as a woman who simply wanted to warn others about what she considered terrible business practices.

The only certainty is that Scheff is litigious. She recently took action against another website whose owner took the name Sueschefftruth.com as a way of criticism. You can follow along at Topix with its recap, or straight from the horse’s mouth at Sue Scheff’s site.

The Scheff story is troubling. I wrote a note to ReputationDefender’s Michael Fertik a few months back:

“It’s one thing to write a nice ‘cease and desist’ letter to the person or site that’s giving you agita; it’s another thing to populate the web with verbiage and links in an attempt to tip the search scales. You are not alone in providing these services and, in fact, you may be the most honest of them, but you are still using the Internet to manipulate the truth.”

The site and its cable TV channel, Disney XD, is targeted at boys ages 6-14 and replaces the Toon Disney channel. The new channel combines a smorgasbord of content from Disney’s more testosterone-laden properties: Disney Channels Worldwide, ABC Cable Networks Group, Disney Online, and ESPN.

The XD network features sports and video games, live action games, and social networking. Theoretically, it aims to satisfy the “new boy” – one who’s a bit more sensitive and in touch than boys of yore. The company has already announced a live action game called Aaron Stone, an original series about a boy with a secret life as a crimefighter.

A few years ago I wrote a lament for boys, who’ve been marginalized into farting, burping goofballs by many media creators. Contrast them to girls from Legally Blonde to High School Musical, where they may be into shopping and frills but they’re also quite brainy.

It remains to be seen whether Disney is creating a place for the same old jerky guys or the new, sensitive 6-14 year-old. It also remains to be seen whether the opposite sex will cross the chasm and join them for a little competitive action as well.

One of the findings suggests that teens on the Internet come in two basic varieties. There are those who are friend-driven (they like to hang out and chat—the equivalent of the old-fashioned phone call) and those who are interest-driven (geeking out in pursuit of knowledge). The study also found that most teens understand the public nature of time spent online and that the majority prefer to stick to communicating with the friends they know in the real world. The ubiquity of the Internet is not lost on them either. It’s natural for them to be always connected via numerous consumer electronic devices and to expect multimedia information (video, photos, audio, and more) as a regular part of their communications.

The kicker to the report is what it means to parents and educators. In order to remain relevant in the 21st century, educational institutions need to keep pace and embrace digital media. “What,” the authors ask, “would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? What would it mean to reach beyond traditional education and civic institutions and enlist the help of others in young people’s learning?”

Over the coming months, parents and educators are going to rethink their stereotypes about social networking and its dangers. I suspect there’s going to be some attitude readjustment. Regardless of how you cast your vote in the last presidential election, there’s no denying that we watched the power of social networking at its finest. We can all take something away from that experience.

You can read the executive summary, a white paper, and the full report broken down by chapters (friendship, intimacy, families, gaming, creative production, and work). There’s also a video interview with principal author Mizuko Ito. To keep up with the conversation, see Spotlight on the MacArthur Foundation website.

Warren Buckleitner, founder of the learning lab Mediatech Foundation, teamed up with Consumer Reports WebWatch to author a compelling observation of the youngest of the Internet crowd, kids ages two through eight. The study tracked families with kids ages two to eight while their kids visited 21 specific kids’ websites, including popular favorites like Bratz, Club Penguin, BarbieGirls.com, and others.

What they found is not a surprise for those of us who’ve been on sites where young kids surf and play. But, if your kids are playing and you haven’t visited, let this be a cautionary tale.

One of the clearest findings of the study is that the Internet is a very commercial medium. (We suspected as much, but the study shows the problem from a kid’s point of view.) Kids are not equipped to deal with the decisions that the media presents.

Enticements to do the advertisers’ or sponsors’ bidding were many and varied. Some, says the study, invite kids to click on a temptation that whisks them directly to a registration page before they can go any further. Some let the kids create pets or avatars online but hold those creations hostage until the kids have ponied up a subscription fee. Most of the sites took a consumer-driven approach by offering various point systems where kids accumulate points or dollars that they can then use to spend on the site. And a number of sites required an offline purchase like a Bratz or WebKinz toy.

Particularly telling are the anecdotes and videos included in the report. These could be subtitled “When good kids click bad.” Stories of kids’ tantrums when parents say no, we’re not going to pay a subscription fee. Stories of kids all too willing to share personal information in order to enter a drawing or contest.

In a two-class world, sites are also segregating paying from non-paying members. There are tales of parents forgetting to renew their kids’ subscriptions and worrying that they’ll never regain their virtual property. Clearly, kids are dismayed when they’re having a good time on a site and are suddenly hit with a message saying, “you need to subscribe to play the next level.” Free games, like Addicting Games, have many different games to choose from; some are pure marketing and others may be downright inappropriate.

Realistically, websites need marketers the way a fish needs water. Without sponsorship or subscriptions there’ll simply be no play. And on the kids’ web you will either pay with your dollars or your willingness to interact with marketers.

The study goes on to offer recommendations for parents, developers, and policymakers on how to take the existing situation and live with it. The bottom line for parents is to understand that there is “no free lunch” on the Internet and that even the best sites for kids have their trouble spots.

Visit ConsumerWebWatch http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/pdfs/kidsonline.pdf for the full monty.

New York Magazine’s cover story looked at the lives of young 20-somethings who are comfortable broadcasting the most intimate details of their lives online. Calling it the biggest generation gap since rock ‘n roll, the magazine suggests that older folks don’t understand this major shift in conscience from having a private life to having none.

Me, I think kids haven’t changed from the days when I was one, but the tools have. Take a risk taker without a strong notion of consequences, couple him with the Internet and some multimedia tools, and you’ve got a recipe for Kiddie Porn. Kiddie Porn made by the kiddies themselves. The problem deserves as much of our attention as do the more grown up predators who rob kids of their youth. It seems as if they’re perfectly capable of robbing youth from themselves.