My new Amazon Kindle 2 arrived on Friday, but all I could do was take it out of the box and ooh and ahh over it - you have to charge it for three hours first.  At least I turned it on and let it register itself, but Day 1 really began Saturday morning.  Sort of like getting a new toy for Christmas, it was fun to look at it, play with the buttons, try to get it to work, read the user manual, etc.  But where I happened to be on Saturday morning is one of the few places in the world with no cell phone signal.  Without a cell phone signal, the Kindle can’t get new books.  First observation - it would be much better if it could use WiFi as well as the free WhisperNet network (read Sprint 3G cell phone network or slower regular cell networks).

So not having a live connection, I tried downloading some MP3 and Word files from my laptop with the Kindle USB cable.  That worked, but in order for the documents to show up, I found out I need to convert them to the Kindle format.  That happens via the WhisperNet connection (which I don’t have right now), or I can email them to a special email address and then copy them over via the USB cable.  The latter is actually free, the former is not free.  Second observation - I need to carry my laptop if I’m going to be out of cell service. Third observation - watch for the little hidden charges if I send documents to myself.

Next, I went into town “for groceries”, but really just to get a WhisperNet connection for my new toy.  The connected Kindle instantly downloaded the book I had selected (Dante’s Inferno, and a sample of a book on Hannibal in Italy).  The prices for the Kindle books are usually cheaper than the physical hardcover version - typically $9.99 for a lot of books, but all the free books are not that appealing - mostly they are from the 19th century.  There are some books that cost as much as $400 - reference books and such.  But, compared to a paperback, I can’t see paying $9.99.  Fourth observation - I won’t be buying a lot of books for my Kindle - they are still way too expensive. I’m inclined to spend $5.95 at the airport when I’m leaving for a trip, but not that interested in spending twice that much for the electronic version.  True that some books cost $0.99, but the fact is that the books you’d want to get are in the $10 range.

So at the end of the day, I had managed to get one book and a sample of another one, download an MP3 file, and impress the other members of my household with the new cool toy.  So far, this is still a toy.  But while fun, is it worth the cost to be able to read about Hannibal and Scipio while listening to Commander Cody’s “Hot Rod Lincoln”?  I couldn’t do that with just a paper version of the book, but I could with a paperback and iPod.  The jury is still out on this new gadget.

BTW - the quality of the type on the screen is as good as they said.

UPDATE - Six months later, I rarely ever use my Kindle.  I tried downloading documents and while it works, the quality of the rendering of images is not good enough.  I couldn’t read a diagram created in Visio and embedded in my Word doc as a WMF file.  I couldn’t read the diagrams or view the pictures in the PDF I downloaded.  However, I did use the web browser for directions to a church where a wedding was being held.  I just used Google map, and its directions - turns out the directions were slightly off and we went left instead of right, and were late for the wedding.  Kindle is not a GPS.  Who knew?

According to the Xobni web site , Xobni is “the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox.” I’ve been using Xobni for the past few days, and it’s much more than that. With apologies to Jose Canseco, it’s Outlook on steroids

Installing Xobni is a breeze. The first time you run Xobni, it will index the e-mails that are currently in Outlook. For me, this process took around 15 minutes. Once your e-mails are indexed, you don’t really notice the indexing of new e-mails that goes on in the background.

Once Xobni has indexed your e-mails, the main Xobni sidebar shows several things about the person that sent you the current e-mail selected in Outlook. The top panel contains the Person Profile. Xobni shows a histogram of e-mails received from that person across different times of the day. While the display is well done, the information itself wasn’t all that helpful to me. Most of the histograms followed a normal, bell-shaped distribution curve. In that same section, Xobni shows the number of incoming and outgoing e-mails to that user, as well as how popular that contact is (in terms of e-mails sent and received) vis-a-vis other contacts in Outlook. The last bit of information that Xobni shows about the contact is her phone number, which is pulled from Outlook contacts or e-mail from that contact. In most cases, the phone number is correct. In some cases, Xobni selects the wrong information. The nice thing is that it shows you the source of the phone number, whether it’s an Outlook contact item or an e-mail. You can change the information if it’s incorrect.

The next panel is the Network. In this section, people that are included in e-mail conversations between you and contact show in the Person Profile are listed. People listed in the top of the Network are those that are included most often in e-mail conversation between you and the contact. A nice touch is the color coding of people in the Network. An orange icon represents people you’ve contacted directly, while a gray icon represents people you’ve never e-mailed directly. In addition, distribution lists have a different icon.

The third panel lists Conversations. E-mails are displayed in a threaded style, very similar to Google’s Gmail. Xobni groups individual e-mails into conversations based on the subject of the e-mail and the people in the To and CC fields. Conversations are listed in descending chronological order, with the most recent conversations listed at the top.

The last panel, and the one I find most useful, is the Files Exchanged. How many times have you wanted to find the document that you sent someone six weeks ago? Xobni pulls out all attachments that you’ve sent to, or received from, the contact and lists them in descending chronological order in the Files Exchanged panel.

That’s a quick overview of the Xobni Sidebar. Xobni also provides analytics for your Outlook e-mails also. The analytics shows things like mail traffic by hour, response times (most helpful), and unique contacts. It’s nice eye-candy that can show some interesting trends and patterns visually.

The most impressive feature of Xobni is its search capability. It’s lightning fast and well-integrated in the Xobni sidebar. Xobni will search on e-mail addresses, names, e-mail content and attachment names. Unfortunately, it doesn’t search on contents of files (yet).

All in all, Xobni is a fabulous productivity tool that every heavy-duty Outlook user should own. Yes, there are a few things that Xobni doesn’t do yet, but the public beta shows tremendous promise and is worth the (small) investment of time and energy required to install and learn the product.

I discovered Yaplet this morning.  It’s a lightweight applet that lets you add chat capabilities to your web site without anything to install or configure.  For now, you don’t even need to register to use the beta version of the software.

Many of the web design and development RFPs that come across my desk ask for chat functionality.  I’m not sure why some organizations are looking for chat capability — that’s a post for another day — but Yaplet looks like it can provide that capability easily.  Try it out now.

This morning, our business development manager forwarded me an e-mail that was posted to the ASAE technology listserv.  The person who posted the e-mail had a question about Microsoft Excel.  In an effort to help him, as well as the larger ASAE community, I spent a few minutes researching an answer to his question.  I used a couple of different resources and finally came across a newsgroup posting (via Google Groups) that answered his question.  What’s interesting to me is not the question itself, but the process he used to get his question answered.

I don’t know the person who posted the e-mail personally; let’s call him John for now.  John, like many of us, probably has certain people within his circle of friends, relatives and co-workers that he turns to for help on certain issues.  For me, I have a friend and former co-worker that I look to for advice on the latest cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players and other high-tech gadgets.  This friend likes keeping up-to-date on the hottest tech toys, and I value his opinion highly.  Let’s assume for a minute that John, our answer seeker, went to his trusted circle and was unable to get the question answered.  Where does he turn to next?  At some point, John decided to post his question to the ASAE community (via the listserv).  I’ll reveal at the end whether or not his question was answered.  In the meantime, let’s talk more about harnessing the power of crowds.

By sending his question to the listserv, John was indeed harnessing the power of crowds.  According to Wikipedia, listservs have been around since 1986.  Originally, they were used to send e-mails to lots of people at a single time.  Now, they’re used by hundreds of groups and organizations, not only to distribute e-mails from the group leaders to group members but also as a means to foster e-mail-based communication between group members.  Now there are hundreds of different ways to harness the power of crowds; I’ll touch upon a few of the more noteworthy types now.

Bulletin board systems (BBS) and Usenet newsgroups were two of the earliest computer-based group discussion systems.  I fondly remember dialing up BBS systems on my Apple II personal computer with my 300-baud modem.  Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I received a 1200-baud modem for Christmas one year.  That meant I could download things four times as fast!  The vast majority of BBS systems were made extinct by the growth of the World Wide Web and the Internet; however, some, such as The Well, have survived and morphed into internet-based discussion forums.

Established in 1980, Usenet newsgroups are still in use today.  Originally it began as a system of posting articles to well-defined topics called newsgroups, which themselves are logically organized into a subject hierarchy.  At its peak, there were hundreds of newsgroups and many thousands of regular users.  While other types of web-based applications have passed Usenet newsgroups in popularity, there are still thousands of people who posts to newsgroup regularly.  In addition, the archive of Usenet newsgroups, originally started by a company called Deja News and now owned by Google under the Google Groups name, is especially helpful when searching for information about a topic that might be a few years old, such as a question about a network card running under Windows 98.

There are web sites, such as Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers (notice that they don’t name their services Google Questions or Yahoo! Questions) , that bring together people who have questions to ask with people that like answering other people’s questions.  With Google Answers, Google has pre-screened a limited number of researchers.  Customers with questions pay a small non-refundable listing fee to post the question and offer a price for an answer.  Question askers don’t pay unless they’re satisfied with the answer.  Yahoo! Answers has a similar structure, except that no money changes hands.  Instead, Yahoo! offers a points system, with additional privileges available for users once they reach a certain point tier.  While it costs points to post a question, you earn points for choosing a best answer for your question, answering questions or having your answer selected as the best answer.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk) is an interesting twist on the concept of harnessing the power of crowds.  Instead of a simple question-and-answer structure that Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers uses, Mturk leverages the power of the human brain and its ability to handle certain tasks, such as identifying objects in a picture, much more efficiently and accurately than any machine or computer can.  Instead of question askers and question answerers, Mturk has requesters and people who complete tasks.  What’s the incentive for people to complete tasks?  You guessed it… money, usually very small amounts though.  When the Mturk service was introduced a few years ago, the only requesters were other groups within Amazon.  Now, they are dozens of requesters that post very interesting and different tasks.  I’ve seen requests as varied as selecting the best picture that represents a specific business to writing trivia questions on current events to transcribing podcasts.  While Mturk hasn’t taken off in the same way that Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers has, I think we’ll see many more similar services in the future.

So, there are numerous places that John could have turned to for an answer to his question about Excel.  In the future, there won’t be a need for traditional printed or electronic documentation.  Instead, software vendors will simply provide a user interface on top of one (or more) of these existing ways of leveraging the knowledge of large numbers and provide low-cost, accurate, on-demand help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

In the end, John (not his real name) received several replies to his question and sent back a note to the list thanking the numerous people who replied and stating that he did get his question answered.  For once, a story with a happy ending