Amazon Kindle DX Now Available In Canada

Amazon announced this morning that the Kindle DX is now available for pre-order in Canada.

The Kindle DX which sports a large 9.7” screen compared to the regular Kindle with only a 6” screen, is available for pre-orders, and will ship on January 19.

The classic, smaller Amazon Kindle was only available in Canada as of November 17th, so time will tell if early buyers will regret their purchases and for not holding out two months longer to get their hands on the larger device that sells for $489 USD.

Amazon says the Kindle Store now boasts more than 400,000 books, and that more than 50,000 books have been added to the Kindle Store in only the last three months.

From the Amazon news release:

"In addition to the convenient features such as 60 second downloads, easy-to-use page-turn buttons, and instant dictionary lookup that have made the 6-inch Kindle the bestselling product across all of Amazon, the new Kindle DX with Global Wireless has a large 9.7-inch electronic paper display, auto-rotate capability and storage for up to 3,500 books. Kindle DX with Global Wireless is available for pre-order starting today for $489 at www.amazon.com/kindledx and ships Jan. 19."

According to the Amazon website, blogs and the experimental web browser are still currently not available in Canada, but users can access Wikipedia.

This announcement means that the Kindle DX will be available and that you’ll receive it about a week before Apple is expected to make a new major project announcement on January 27th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The rumoured Apple tablet is expected to ship in March.

Plurk Accuses Microsoft China of Stealing Design and Code

Plurk, the Mississauga based Twitter clone founded in 2008, published a blog post today that builds the case that Microsoft China in a recently released application stole much of the Plurk design and underlying code.

The Microsoft service, Mclub, released to Chinese users in November mimics on top of other Plurk design features, Plurk's unique left-to-right timeline scrolling system, as well as it’s verb system where users prepend their updates with verbs such as “Malcolm thinks...” or “Malcolm hates...”.

The blog post written by Plurk lead developer and co-founder, Amir Salihefendic, goes to to show code samples taken from the two applications that show them to be almost similar. The following image taken from the Plurk blog shows the Microsoft China design top, and Plurk's design on the bottom.

Plurk vs. Microsoft China

Plurk, who say their service is 10x more popular in Taiwan than Twitter, and that is “emerging as Asia’s answer to Twitter in many of the biggest countries in East Asian”, go on to question the motivation to why Microsoft might have done this:

“We’re still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarizing a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms. Of course, it just hits that much closer to home when all your years of hard work and effort to create something unique are stolen so brazenly.”

Time will tell if Microsoft China will respond to the allegations, or what further action Plurk might take.

Update Dec 16: See Microsoft's response here, Microsoft Statement Regarding MSN China Joint Venture’s Juku Feature.

Microsoft Acquires Opalis Software

Microsoft has acquired Opalis, a Missisauga-based provider of IT process automation systems. The plan is to take advantage of Opalis to improve the efficiency of IT staff and operations by combining the automation expertise of Opalis with the integrated and virtualized datacenter management capabilities of Microsoft System Center. Microsoft sees this as important in supporting the growth of System Center.

After the announcement of the acquisition Opalis president and CEO, Todd DeLaughter, wrote in a blog post:

“Microsoft has always impressed me with their next generation view of how systems management tools should cleanly integrate to provide an easier user experience without the baggage of complexity that all of the existing legacy systems management tools carry... I believe, with the Opalis technology, Microsoft will have the most complete virtualization stack available from any single vendor.”

Meanwhile on the System Center blog Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President of Management & Services Division at Microsoft, remarked in the announcement how Opalis software being easy to use and deploy was important, as well as how many Opalis customers were existing System Center customers. Improving product efficiency and ease of use for existing Microsoft customers through the Opalis acquisition was clearly a factor in this purchase.

Voting Open for NXNE Interactive Panels in Toronto

The North by Northeast (NXNE) Music & Film Festival and Conference is adding an interactive component to its event for 2010 in Toronto. The move comes thanks to a new collaborative partnership between NXNE and FITC (Flash In The Can), the popular Flash and motion design conference. The new interactive conference of the NXNE festival that will be added is called NXNE Interactive, or NXNEi.

While the NXNE festival has been around for over a decade, the Toronto event has lacked an interactive component and members of the Toronto interactive community have had travel to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest (SXSW) for a similar experience. SXSW is one of the largest music festivals in the United States, as well as one of the world’s premiere film festivals. 

One unique aspect about both NXNEi and the SXSW’s interactive conference is that besides including keynotes by industry leaders, they also include panel discussions that are chosen by event attendees.

NXNEi has created a new forum for the open submission of panel ideas and feedback. The NXNEi Panel Picker is run on the popular customer feedback website UserVoice. Users can submit their own panels, and can vote up other panels that they’d like to see at the event. 

Highlights of NXNEi include:

  • 2 full days of presentations, plus one optional day of pre-event workshops
  • Presentations and panels covering creative aspects of technology, social media and new trends
  • Prime downtown location at NXNE Festival headquarters in the Hyatt Regency Toronto

At the time of this writing the three panels with the highest number of votes include:

A closing date for panel submissions and voting have not yet been announced. NXNEi will take place on June 15-16, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Toronto.

Who Will Sponsor Toronto’s Foursquare Addiction?

Foursquare, the popular mobile application that lets users check-in with the service on where they are in the real world, just announced today a partnership with Pepsi for foursquare New York. When New Yorkers use foursquare this week, the points they generate on the service through actions such as checking-in and adding new locations will turn into cash that Pepsi will donate to CampInteractive, an organization that helps empower inner-city youth through technology skills and mentoring.

This makes me wonder what organization will be willing to take the risk in being the first Canadian Foursquare sponsor. When Toronto was added to Foursquare two months ago, out of the 15 cities added during the week of October 15th, Toronto generated the most Foursquare activity that week.

Rogers, Telus and Bell who each provide devices that support foursquare (expect that Bell doesn’t have any Android devices yet) are each candidates to be sponsors. Rogers has already used real world scavenger hunt tactics in its marketing campaigns this past summer to help launch their Android phones. Major real estate owners in Toronto, like Cadillac Fairview, the owners of the Toronto Eaton Centre, could also sponsor a campaign to encourage users to spend more time in their malls and the shops within. It could also be used as a way to cross-sell their Eaton Centre iPhone App. Another worthy sponsor? Starbucks of course, match one addiction with another. 

Foursquare already has a resource that encourages local businesses to get involved with foursquare by offering benefits to foursquare mayors of their businesses, people who frequently check-in at particular locations, perks or free products. So far though, only one local Toronto business is listed as providing any perks to foursquare users. Sponsoring Toronto’s foursquare activity for a week may be a more effective way for large businesses to leverage what appears to be Toronto’s foursquare addiction.

DataTO Supports Toronto in Prioritizing Open Data

Building a City That Thinks Like The Web, the title of a presentation given by Mark Surman to the city of Toronto last year, seems to have lived on to become the motto for Toronto’s open data catalogue. Last Thursday at DemoCamp 24, developer Adam Thody gave a talk on his related project, DataTO.org, a site that through user activity aids the city in identifying data sets residents want access to.

Surman’s original talk explained how the forces of openness and collaboration worked to develop the open source Firefox web browser we all know today. It described a community of users not happy with the offerings at the time, and who pooled together time, and money in order to create a better experience for users, that they themselves could help shape. The story of DataTO is a good example of this.

Conceived only less than two weeks before the original launch of toronto.ca/open at a meeting between community leader Mark Kuznicki, Developer Adam Thody, and Thody’s employer Architech Solutions, the opportunity was identified to give users a voice in expressing the data they wanted access to from the city, and for the city to better understand user needs and expectations.

DataTO.org, which lets users create, comment, and vote on requests for city data, helps the city of Toronto prioritize the data sets they publish on Toronto.ca/Open.

While the site is still labeled as being an alpha release, Thody mentions that the site has already reached 200 members, and is close to having 100 requests for datasets. He also mentions that other cities have taken note of DataTO and have expressed interest in having similar sites to pair with their own open data initiatives. Appropriately, open sourcing the code for the website seems to be in the plan for the site as Thody mentioned in a comment on his blog, “I feel there is much to be gained by sharing this platform with other cities, and having the global developer community contribute to it. Again, this is now more of a question of how best to go about it”.

One of the major short term goals for the project is getting it translated into other languages.

Story Telling In The Stars and In The Cloud

There’s more to the WorldWide Telescope than just being one of the most beautiful and seamless stargazing experiences available and on Monday of the NextMEDIA conference in Toronto, Curtis Wong, a Principle Researcher at Microsoft Research spoke of the story telling elements that had been an influence on the design of the software.

Wong, whose longtime focus has been on creating digital learning experiences and storytelling, explained to the audience at NextMEDIA the challenge of telling stories in context, the importance of story telling, and the architecture of the narrative of the experience, “The architecture echos how we learn” Wong stated.

The WorldWide Telescope provides users with a seamless experience with navigating the night sky, enabling users to zoom deep into distant galaxies and star clusters that is unparalleled. But as Curtis Wong demonstrated, the WWT is a teaching tool as much as anything else. One of the ways that the WorldWide Telescope excels as a teaching tool to teach about astronomy is that it delivers an experience that almost feels like video, it is a very rich environment, with moving and shifting images and even supports narration to guide users along, yet at the same time the WWT gives users a control over the experience that a video does not.

One of the key ways that that WorldWide Telescope is able to tell stories in context is that no matter what celestial body the user is currently examining, through a single menu they can look up more information on that item from around the web. After Wong linked out from the WWT directly to the Wikipedia page of the galaxy he was studying Wong added, “With this king of information available, kids can actually do science”.

Another Microsoft Research project Wong demonstrated to the audience at NextMEDIA was Project Tuva, an online tool that displayed transcriptions of university lectures given by Richard Feynman in 1964, and that also annotates the lectures with relevant media and information from around the web.

The Demos of NextMEDIA Toronto

November 30th was the first day of the two day NextMEDIA event in Toronto, and in the afternoon of the event, five companies demoed their products. Representatives from Ogmento, Thoora, Darwin Dimensions, Boxee, and Primal Fusion demoed products that were either already public, or in some form of accessible beta.

First up to demo was Avner Ronen from Boxee, who gave the audience a demonstration of the different ways Boxee users could interact with content no matter where it came from on the net. Avner played some clips live from sites including Fail Blog, he then showed how users could share that content with their friends online in a seamless experience. Ronen mentioned that while Boxee users watched 60-70 videos a week, they didn't care where the video came from, they cared about the content.

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