I’m three weeks into having my Kindle and I love it.  3Quarks Daily’s post Ode to Textuality: Sam Anderson on the Kindle prompted me to write about it.

I’m currently reading Fatal Revenant (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) on my Kindle, along with a handful of doc / pdf files I’ve been forwarding to it.  I’ve got a nice library of stuff queue up and am delighted with the overall experience.  I’ve got a few minor complaints about the form factor and the UI, but the magic of Amazon’s Whispernet makes it 10x more usable than the Sony eReader.

I think the Kindle is analogous to the first iPod.  Prior to the first iPod, there were plenty of MP3 players, but none of them integrated seamlessly with online music (or if they did, the UI sucked and no one could figure out how to get it to work correctly.)  The iPod + iTunes got it right and Apple has been reaping dividends ever since.

Amazon is the natural provider of the Kindle.  100,000 ebooks later and there is actually a good library of titles to choose from (and growing daily.)  So far I’ve been able to find everything that I want, and for $9.99 or less (vs. the $25 that hardback books are going for these days.)

If you’ve got a reader in the family, you’ll delight them this year with a Kindle.  Amazon is taking a big chance with this, and I love it.

When 369 of something suddenly appears, I get excited about the opportunities to do something with it.  When I noticed the 370th new ad network, I realized there were probably a few opportunities to do some interesting things across them.  AdReady – a company I made an investment in a year ago – is seriously kicking ass (if you do any display advertising on Google, Yahoo/RightMedia, or AOL go take a look at them) and their early success reinforced this idea to me.

While I’ll talk more about a new investment we’ve made in this area in a few weeks (yeah – that’s what real journalists call "the tease" or something like that), when I was at Clickable a few weeks ago (not an investment of mine, but a really interesting one by Union Square Ventures and Pequot with the tagline "online advertising made simple") we were discussing the challenges of integrating with some of the existing ad networks through their weak to non-existent APIs.

As a horizontal thinker, the API is my friend.  APIs are hard and often take a long time to get right.  Anyone that has integrated with someone else’s web service knows there are a whole series of things that "should" be part of the next version of the API.  Frustration abounds and the rationalization of "we’ll do this thing that will massively drive user adoption and our services utility when company X finally puts it in their API."

To that, I say "manually automate your API."  Figure out what you want the workflow to be, hire a person, and have them do whatever the API should do, but do it by simply running the other system.  Way back in the land of DOS there used to be neat little script programs (anyone remember the Peter Norton, Paul Mace, or Dan Bricklin tools that did this) that automated your keystrokes.  Your manual API person can do the same thing today with the contemporary versions of these keystroke automation programs. 

By manually automating your API – or creating a manual version of the API you wished the other guy’s web service had – you can immediately drive more value to your users while prototyping – with precision – what the integration points between the two systems need to be.  Yeah – you could get a developer to write a bunch of screen scraping code, but you don’t have any extra developers laying around, plus it’ll break in six days anyway when the other service does a new release.  Just hire a young smart person and give him the mission of figuring out how the puzzle pieces fit together.

Tristan Louis nails it in his post Personal Relationship Manager.  I think the only thing he missed are blog comments.  Too bad PRM stands for the now mostly defunct "Partner Relationship Management" category.

If you’ve been following along at home, you know that I just got a new MacBook Pro and am going to give it a shot for a while due to my current frustration with my laptop and all things Vista.  My partner Chris suggested to me that it’s not about productivity or frustration; rather it’s my endless desire to play with electronic toys (he is likely correct, but I need a business rationalization for my behavior.)

My biggest historical barrier to using a Mac has been our deep reliance on Exchange.  I’m a very heavy Outlook / Exchange users and exercise it fully (yes – I use tasks.)  All of my previous experiences – either with Entourage 2004 or my feeble attempts to get all the “pieces” working (e.g. mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks) on Mac apps with an Exchange data store have been failures.

I know that I have a default option of using Outlook in a Vista window on the Mac running Parallels or VMWare Fusion (I’ll try them both.)  But that doesn’t really feel very satisfying to me.  I just got a copy of Entourage 2008 Beta so I’ll give that a try and a good workout, although early reports are that Task Sync is still not implemented.

Are there any other real alternatives out there in the world, short of dumping Exchange (which is not going to happen)?  Help me Obi-Mac-A-Roni.  And – thanks to everyone (all 34 of you) that commented on the previous Mac post.  Ross assures me that he is installing every last piece of software that y’all recommended.

Any day now.  The first detailed reviews are out – Ben Kuchera has a great one up on Ars Technica subtitled I don’t want to be a guitar hero, I want to be in a band.  I hope mine shows up before Thursday so I can spend Thanksgiving playing in my new Keystone band.  A new Mac, Rock Band, and a Kindle – all kinds of fun toys to play with.

I’ve started telling people that when we look back 20 years from now, the way we use computers today will look quaint, sort of like punch cards and room sized computers do today.

The "book" is also on my list of quaint things.  I don’t think the book is fundamentally going anywhere – yet.  While the promise of the electronic book has been a promise for a long time, Amazon’s Kindle might finally deliver on it.  Steven Levy has a great article on it in Newsweek titled The Future of Reading (which I – ahem – read online.) 

I’ve had a Sony eReader for a year and I "like" it, but don’t love it.  The selection of books is weak (I still buy 10 physical books for everyone 1 ebook), it sucks at handling non-Sony eReader format (e.g. PDF’s), it’s not connected to the Internet (so I have to buy books on the computer and connect my eReader to sync them), and it has a bunch of little quirks that add up over time.

I don’t know if Kindle will nail everything, but the description of it sounds awesome.  Once I get one and use it for a little while I’ll tell you more.  Regardless, I expect I’ll still be lugging my books around with me for a while.

In the past month, I’ve had two situations where I came within three seconds of grabbing my Lenovo x60 (running Vista) and smashing it on the ground, stomping up and down on it, and then lighting it on fire.  The only thing that kept me from doing this was that I didn’t have a video camera handy and didn’t want to waste a Youtube content creation moment (e.g. "VC accidentally burns down office building after being driven crazy by laptop – full story at 6 o’clock.")

Last week, after my Lenovo x60 rebooted three times (and ate 30 minutes of my life) in the middle of my day, I decided that it was time to try something different.  So – I’ve ordered a MacBook Pro which arrived on Friday.

2.4GHz 7200rpm Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive,  SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW), 10/100/1000 Ethernet, WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, 15" Widescreen

I’m looking for software help.  What should I get?  I’m loading it up will all the obvious stuff (Office, VMWare, Parallels, EVDO) but looking for friendly hints and tips, especially for a guy who has spent the last 10 years living in Windows.

Please comment freely.

CIO Magazine, that paragon of business wisdom, has a a list of five Five Favorite Facebook Widgets for Business Users.  My TechStars friends J-Squared weigh in on the list with Sticky Notes.   Entertaining.

My railing against software patents shouldn’t be new to you, dear reader.  Recently, this tilting at windmills has generated some attention.  Among other things, a new group of interesting people is forming a coalition named End Software Patents.

This group is being spearheaded by several very smart people, including Ben Klemens – a guest scholar at The Brookings Institution.  Ben is also the author of Math You Can’t Use, a fascinating exploration of patents, copyrights, and software that I’ll review in depth at some point.

In the short term, this coalition is looking for examples of innovative and profitable software companies that have been successful without any patent activity of any sort.  While this success doesn’t necessarily correlate with a desire to abolish software patents, we want to better understand real life examples of successful companies that don’t care about software patents.

If you fit this description and are willing to have a discussion, please contact me.