Stop digging ditches. Invest in clouds.

The world of books, including basic technologies and business models involved, is undergoing a major change. According to CNet:

Amazon is reportedly planning a Netflix-like subscription service for e-books, in a move that would be another perk for Amazon Prime subscribers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is in talks with book publishers about subscription access to a library of e-books.

It's quite possible that for certain schools and cities it would be less expensive to contract with Amazon than build and maintain public book collections. Quiet study rooms that libraries provide today can be also replaced with interactive online lessons, etc.

I wish that instead of using stimulus money on roads and powerlines, which are elements of the 20th century infrastructure, we spend our taxes on broadband access and building new educational tools. Rather than forcing Amazon to collect state taxes, the governments should work out deals with the company to provide communities with access to knowledge.

Mr. President, do you hear me?

tags: education, information, distribution, business, model, cloud, 10X, bet, infrastructure

Amazon: making long-term innovation bets.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, talks about his company's approach to invention and innovation:

we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago….  There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work.

Most of our customers shop with us from desktop or laptop computers, but people have a different posture with tablets,” he said. They “lean back on their sofa. People leaning back on their sofa, buying things from Amazon, is another tailwind for our business, so I’m very excited about that.

via venturbeat.com

Tablet is going to be a huge boost to e-commerce and many other ways of content creation/consumption. The sooner the Internet sheds shackles of the browser,  the better.

tags: 4q diagram, bus75, course, bet, innovation, strategy 

The race for mobile processors is heating up:

Nvidia is betting a big part of its future on boosting graphics performance in fit-in-your-pocket mobile internet devices (MIDs). iPhone-style devices with Nvdia's APX 2500 system-on-a-chip--due late this year and next year--incorporate most of the functionality of a PC.

On a somewhat related topic, Google keeps perfecting cloud-to-cloud communications. This time it's multi-size embedded presentations. And you can add youtube videos too. Pretty cool. I would probably start using the technology in class this summer, if youtube/docs allowed me to insert snippets of videos, rather than the whole video stream.

In any case, this approach is a sure sign of a potential ms office killer. It offers a combination of a new technology and a new application. Quite a good bet.