Valentin's Blog

Amazon's Kindle is the first really transparently Internet enabled appliance. Its the first mainstream appliance that has mobile Internet access, without the user needing a contract or worrying about it in any way. For years we have been talking about the rise of ubiquitous computing and a myriad of connected devices, and now - finally - this starts to become reality.

I do not have any insider knowledge about the cost of necessary hardware or that of the deal between Amazon on the Sprint for supplying the network connection - but its probably safe to say that its not too expensive to include similar chips in the next generation of cars; enabling them to relay data about their status and to receive software upgrades. What we seem to be witnessing is that its becoming cheap to build and run devices that are potentially always connected but only rarely need to transmit data. Combine this with steadily decreasing cost for the bandwidth, necessary hardware and cell based location technology (e.g. MyLocation) and you get similar chips embedded in your heating automatically calling technicians, 10$ fire detectors capable of alarming the fire department, trash cans informing the central office they are full ... all ideas that have been tossed around for a decade or so - but Amazons Kindle reminds us that these are slowly becoming realistic. And maybe this development will even pick up speed considerably, if Google manages to buy its own spectrum for a 'open' mobile network.

If you want to read more about the Kindle, its possible impact and its relation to social media there is an interesting series of articles at O'Reilly's Radar: Kindle Fundamentals, Kindle Economics and Kith and Kindle.  You might also want to have a look at the 'Most Unusual Books' - from where I took the picture accompanying this post.