Programming
Why Kindle is a hit…
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
When Amazon announced their Kindle last year, I bought one. I wasn’t too optimistic, as I had read a lot of bad reviews.
However, to my surprise, I’ve really enjoyed my Kindle experience. The screen is extremely readable — and while the controls are somewhat limiting, it’s very easy to use. And as long as I view the Kindle as a replacement for a book (rather than a replacement for a PC), it has surpassed my expectations. So I’m not surprised to see today’s reports that Kindle is a hit.
More importantly, I’ve found that I have purchased about 3 times more books using the Kindle than I otherwise would have purchased. Surprisingly, the primary drivers of my increased purchases are due to the business model — not the actual hardware. Specifically:
1) My bookshelves at home are filled with books that I never finish. There’s nothing more frustrating than buying a book, getting 20 pages into it, and then deciding that you don’t like it. Amazon’s Kindle allows you to download the first few chapters of a book for free - so you can make a purchase decision after you’ve started to read the book. Very cool. I’ve avoided purchasing more than six books because I didn’t like how they began.
2) The average book on the Kindle costs under $10. While it’s still more you’d pay at Half.com, the instantaneous download and low price do provide a real benefit. I’ve downloaded books on trains, at airports and at hotels — and have found that the experience is seamless and addictive.
The biggest drawback? Reading on planes. Use of electronic devices is prohibited during the first 20 minutes of a plane ride. It’s pretty frustrating to see everyone around you reading a book/newspaper, when your Kindle needs to be holstered.
Originally
from Redeye VC
by
reBlogged
Get Satisfaction Announces API - Look Out Corporations of the World
Sunday, January 6th, 2008New customer service site Get Satisfaction, itself a wonder to behold, announced today that it is now accepting requests for access to a beta API (Application Programming Interface). Satisfaction functionality will soon be available for apps and sites all over the web. Fresh off of a successful conference titled “Customer Service is the New Marketing,” Get Satisfaction is becoming the hippest place for companies to engage transparently with their customers - whether they want to or not!
The Service
Have complaints about the products and services at Twitter? Join the club - at Get Satisfaction! More old-school than that, a user of HP’s photosharing service Snapfish, perhaps? You too can vent your gripes with the cool kids at Get Satisfaction. These are just two of a wide range of companies that have chosen to answer questions and complaints publicly on this website.
More than just a question and answer service, Get Satisfaction includes a bunch of smart, fun and helpful features.
Companies can opt-in to participating and be identified explicitly in conversations. Customers can signal that they share some one else’s problem or question and get an email if it is answered.
The Digg guys tell people to discuss issues on Get Satisfaction. Facebook doesn’t have any employees signed on to answer complaints there. Neither does Webshots, United Airlines, Linksys or Washington Mutual - though there are conversations going on about all of those companies on the site. I guess they prefer customers to complain among themselves.
To learn more about the thinking behind Get Satisfaction, check out this October interview with CEO Thor Muller at SocialMediaToday.
The API
“Get Satisfaction is superclose,” the company wrote tonight, “to releasing a RESTful API (including some very cool OAuth support) through which you can access almost all of our current features and functionality.” They’ve already offer the ability for customers to broadcast their questions and complaints out onto Twitter or Facebook, and for companies to stick a Satisfaction RSS widget on their websites. What on earth could come next? Satisfaction has the ear of some of the most cutting edge Web 2.0 heads online, so there’s probably some very interesting stuff on the way.
OAuth support means you’ll be able to access user data on a wide variety of other systems, including most if not all that support OpenSocial, without asking for username and password.
Does that mean we’ll be seeing the option to shoot your complaint thread about a company out to all your friends on MySpace or GMail? I wonder how many of the company’s absent today will be showing up soon, post-API.
Originally
from ReadWriteWeb
by
reBlogged
on Feb 7, 2008, 1:40AM