Archive for March, 2009

Kindle: The Device vs. Kindle: The Platform

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Kindle for $359, or Kindle for free?

Quite frankly, I never expected this will ever come true, especially so soon after the release of Kindle 2. At this point, Kindle 2 is just barely hot off the press, shipping to those early adopters, and already it's being replaced by a software platform strategy. You have to wonder about Amazon's claim of Kindle success. For as long as Amazon has tauted Kindle being a hot selling, successful consumer electronic product, the company has been more than reluctant to release any sort of sales figure. During the Kindle shortage throughout the holiday season, Amazon would not divulge any production schedule or data.

Every consumer product company, regardless of industry, understands the important in marketings its own success. McDonald's with their millions of burgers served, Pepsi with their "4 out of 5 people prefers the taste of Pepsi over Coke", Apple with their millions of iPhones shipped. Publishing these numbers breeds consumer confidence, and leads to increasing momentum for the popularity of your product. So why isn't Amazon more forthcoming? Is Kindle really as much of a success as Amazon want the outside world to believe?

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This is not the new template I was referring to…

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Meanwhile I'm working on a completely new template for my blog, I made the decision to temporarily rever the blog's template to something very simplistic. This will give me the flexibility to be able to add richer content without having to worry about the constraints of the previous blog template, and start looking forward to the eventual implementation of the new one.

I did run into one snag: Since WordPress's own default theme is really formatted for a fixed width 800x600 screen, it doesn't jive with my new design & content areas. I looked around and found this theme, which is a 1024 adaptation of the original WordPress template. You can download this template here:

WordPress Default Theme 1024 Wide

Thinking about a new blog template…

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

I've been contemplatinng creating a new blog template... perhaps something that's completely written from the ground up by yours truly. Can't say when I'll have it done, but at least by making the fact public, it might give me enough push & motivation to get it done.