Live Blog of Amazon.com Introducing the New Kindle

Live Blog of Amazon.com Introducing the New Kindle:

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, introduced the the Kindle DX at Pace Univeristy in New York on Wednesday.

11:07 a.m. Wrapping Up: Mr. Bezos is summarizing the features of the Kindle DX. Large 9.7-inch display with auto-rotation, high-speed wireless access to 275,000 books, 3.3 gigabytes of storage, or room for up to 3,500 books. Native support for PDF documents, with no panning, zooming or scrolling necessary. “Kindle is now a family,” with two models, Mr. Bezos said.

11:04 a.m. More Details: And now the screen is back up, just as it appeared Mr. Bezos was about to fire someone. He is showing how The New York Times looks on the device. Also, “Biology of Fishes, Third Edition.”

Meanwhile, as a commenter notes, Amazon has put up a product page for the new device, indicating that it will cost $489 and ship this summer.

11:01 a.m. Whoops: In an awkward glitch during a demo, the image of the Kindle DX is projected onto a big screen backward. “I’m going to choose to find this hilarious,” Mr. Bezos said. And now the screen has gone completely dark.

10:58 a.m. Ink-Free: “We’ve known for more than a decade that one day an e-reader product would offer the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper,” Mr. Sulzberger said. He called the partnership with Amazon an experiment and a laboratory to test new digital distribution strategies. Mr. Sulzberger did not give details on the size of the discount the papers will offer.

10:55 a.m. On to Newspapers: Three newspapers will offer a reduced price on the Kindle DX in exchange for a long-term subscription: The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. [Corrected that sentence.] These offers will be available starting this summer in areas where home delivery of those papers is not available. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times, has taken the stage.

10:50 a.m. Freshman 15: “We’re going to get students with smaller backpacks, less load,” Mr. Bezos said. Amazon is also announcing six universities and colleges whose students will try out the Kindle DX this fall: Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, the University of Virginia, Reed College and Pace.

Barbara Snyder, president of Case Western University, is now speaking, saying the school will test the device this fall and measure how students use it to learn and communicate with each other and with professors.

10:48 a.m. Heading to School: The Kindle DX is especially suited for textbooks, Mr. Bezos said. Amazon has reached agreements with three leading textbook publishers that represent 60 percent of the market: Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley. (That pretty prominently leaves out McGraw-Hill Education.)

10:47 a.m. A Wider View: “You never have to zoom, you never have to scroll, you just read the documents,” Mr. Bezos said. The device automatically shifts to a horizontal display when you turn it sideways, suggesting that there is an iPhone-like accelerometer in the device.

10:44 a.m. The Kindle DX: Mr. Bezos is talking up the advantages of the Kindle and its specialized reading screen. But people still print their documents. “Computer printers have proliferated, and so have their evil companions, the ink toner cartridge. We sell a lot of these.” The reason we still print so much is that computer displays “are a worse display device than paper. Paper is just better.” Kindle’s paper-like display solves that problem, he says.
But still, most documents are 8 1/2 by 11, and of course the Kindle 2 screen is about half that size, Mr. Bezos said. “Even with electronic paper you need a big display.”
And with that Mr. Bezos pulls out the Kindle DX. Its display is 2.5 times the size of the display on the previous model.

10:40 a.m. Some Stats: Mr. Bezos on the Kindle vision: “Every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.”
“Were making progress on that vision, Mr. Bezos said. Today there are 275,000 books available for the device. On Amazon.com, 35 percent of sales of books that have a Kindle edition are sold in that format.

10:38 a.m. Getting Going: We’re here at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University in lower Manhattan, as Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, is being introduced by his chief spokesman, Craig Berman. My colleague Motoko Rich notes that the crowd of journalists seems somewhat smaller, and a bit More muted, than the one at the Kindle 2 event in February. Mr. Bezos has taken the stage.

10 a.m. Setting the Stage: Last February, Amazon introduced the Kindle 2 at a private library and museum in New York, a setting chosen to highlight the literary ambitions of its electronic book reader.

On Wednesday, as then, Amazon seems to be conveying a message in its choice of press conference location. At 10:30 a.m. New York time, Amazon will introduce its large-screen Kindle at Pace University in lower Manhattan, suggesting not only the company’s intentions to tailor the Kindle for textbooks, but newspapers as well. The Pace campus is located on the site of the 19th-century headquarters of The New York Times.

We’ll be at the event to record the proceedings live, hopefully with a minimum of typos and a modicum of on-the-go analysis. As always, we welcome comments, questions and remarks below.

The Internet’s Role in Gaming the Markets

The Internet’s Role in Gaming the Markets:

HERE’S an investment opportunity you might be able to pass up.

The company has no operations, and no prospects of any. Its previous operations all failed, and the reports the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that its only source of cash is issuing stock.

But a few weeks ago, this stock shot upward on huge volume, providing what may have been huge profits for the people who were being allowed to buy stock from the company at a deep discount to market price. Perhaps not so coincidentally, some Internet message boards buzzed with activity at the same time, promoting the stock as one that was sure to keep rising.
The name of the company is MotivNation, but that is of little importance. There are many companies like it.

A look at MotivNation’s trading activity this year provides a window on a netherworld of the American stock market. It also illustrates the paradox of the intersection of the penny stock market — a traditional area of stock promotion and “pump and dump” schemes — and the Internet.

On the one hand, the Internet has made it far easier for any investor who wants to do so to quickly find S.E.C. filings by any company. Twenty years ago, getting a copy of a corporate filing was either slow (ask the company to send you one) or expensive (buy a filing from a company that could get it from the S.E.C.). Now anyone with Internet access can download corporate reports within seconds after they are filed.

But the Internet has also made stock manipulation much easier. In the old days, a person — perhaps a broker for a penny stock firm — would have to contact an investor and talk him or her into buying the stock. That was expensive. Now, mass e-mail messages can be sent out — it appears that happened with MotivNation — and anonymous posters on bulletin boards can promote the stock at very low cost. One enthusiast signed his posts, “Cantgetmyname.”
Anyone who bothers to read the annual report filed by MotivNation can learn just how little fundamental value the company has, and how the company prints shares by the millions while it has no other business.

To be sure, the filing of that annual report was delayed past the due date, and by the time it arrived the stock promotion appeared to have settled down. In the weeks before the filing, the price of 100 shares of the stock leaped to a high of 37 cents, from 2 cents, and hundreds of millions of shares were traded. Now it is back to about 12 cents, still an amazing price given the company’s lack of a business.

Where did those shares come from? Many millions were newly printed by the company, sold to hedge funds at deep discounts to market value and almost immediately sold on to speculators. Others appear to have been sold by speculators who did not own any shares, and did not borrow any, but were placing bets that the stock price would decline. They were engaging in what is called naked short-selling, which is illegal if it is intended to manipulate the stock.
How many shares were created by each method? From the annual report, we know that MotivNation issued 28 million shares in the first quarter, but there is no way to know how many were issued after the end of the quarter, while volume was still high. As of the end of the quarter, the company had 134 million shares outstanding, up from 30 million last June, just before the company’s only operating subsidiary went into bankruptcy and ceased operations.
Under S.E.C. rules, stock markets each day release the name of any company where there have been failures to deliver at least one-half of 1 percent of the outstanding shares — a figure that for this company would be fewer than 700,000 shares. MotivNation went on the OTC Bulletin Board list a few days before the stock peaked in late March, and has stayed there since. From publicly available information, there is no way to know how many failures to deliver there have been.

A call to the phone number for MotivNation, in Irvine, Calif., was picked up by an answering machine that did not indicate whose number it was. The call was not returned.
Yoel Goldfeder, a lawyer for Corey Ribotsky, whose hedge funds were the buyers and distributors of the stock issued by the company, said his client had not promoted the stock he was buying and selling to the public. “We definitely would not have been involved in marketing anything, especially, as in this case, if there was nothing much to market,” he said.
Mr. Ribotsky’s funds have made similar investments in numerous other companies, and claim to be among the most profitable hedge funds in recent years. In this case, they have the right to buy MotivNation stock at any time they want — paying half of the lowest price the stock has traded for in any three of the most recent 20 days. There is a limit as to how many shares the funds can own, but that limit is irrelevant since they can purchase more shares as soon as they sell the ones already bought.

Who’s the villain here? Is it Mr. Ribotsky’s funds? They appear to have followed the rules. Is it the company? It has made the required disclosures, albeit sometimes on a tardy basis. Is it people who promoted the stock? Perhaps, but it is not easy to know exactly who they are. Is it the naked shorts? They have violated S.E.C. rules, but at the same time they have probably saved investors money by keeping the stock from rising to heights even more absurd than the ones it reached.

If the villain is not easy to spot, the victims are. They are the people who will end up owning worthless stock. Don’t be surprised if some of them conclude that they were victimized not by the people who promoted a company with nothing to recommend it, but by the naked short-sellers who figured out what was happening and, in effect, siphoned off some profits that would have gone to the promoters.

10 Ways to Build Traffic to Your Site

10 Ways to Build Traffic to Your Site:

SELF-PROMOTE:

To help secure readers, add a favorites or bookmarks option so visitors can add your Web site to their reading list. Along the same lines, add an “e-mail this” and “share” tab at the bottom of each post. You might also try creating a weekly newsletter that highlights your best content. Blast it out to readers who sign up.

Comment on online forums and blog posts and link to your Web site each time. Make sure your comment adds to the conversation. Do not spam. Also add your blog or Web site to your e-mail signature, Twitter, Facebook and other online accounts. Claim your blog on Technorati and look into submitting content on StumbleUpon and Delicious. Also, create a “lens” or page on Squidoo.

DON’T WAIT ON GOOGLE:

Be proactive. Send your site to Google and other search engines. If you rely on them to crawl your content, you may be waiting a long time.

WRITE USEFUL, ORIGINAL CONTENT:

This sounds obvious, but it bears mentioning. Attract readers by writing well and regularly. Then keep them interested by continuing to do so. When you’re building a base, try to post new, original content at regular intervals. Use blogging software that lets you set an automatic publishing time so you don’t have to physically get up early in the morning, for example, to manually post your content at that time. Also pay attention to your headlines. Use simple keywords to describe the subject of your posts.

BRING ON GUEST BLOGGERS:

Another way to increase traffic is to use an established name to bring the desired traffic to you. Find someone who writes well on your topic and ask them if they’d be willing to contribute to your Web site or blog.


MAXIMIZE TECHNOLOGY:

Don’t just rely on text to attract readers. Use video, podcasts, slide shows and other multimedia to create dynamic content.

LINK AND TAG:

Link to other sites within your post and ask other blogs to link back to you and add your Web site to their blog rolls. Another option is to submit your site to blog directories.
Use headers, title tags and meta tags to optimize your site for search engines. Use keywords to describe what your Web site is about. Also make sure that your site’s content matches your meta data and other tag phrases. HitTail is one service that helps you home in on key words. Don’t forget about your images. Make sure they, too, are search-engine optimized.

ENGAGE THE READER:

Respond directly to e-mail and comments. Even a short mass e-mail message will begin to open a two-way dialogue. Showcase your personality by sharing personal anecdotes where relevant so that you can establish a rapport with your audience. Another option is to conduct a reader survey or poll so you can improve on your site based upon your readers’ preferences. Tracking and analyzing your statistics also helps. You might also try joining a syndication service such as BlogBurst.

PROVIDE AN RSS FEED:

Feedburner and FeedDemon are two sites that can set you up with this.
THINK GLOBALLYRemember, the Internet spans the globe. Even if your Web site is local in nature, it can still attract readers in another country, so don’t limit your base. If you’re able to add language options to your site, all the better.

DON’T FORGET THE OFFLINE WORLD:

Sure, the Web is great for spreading the word about your site, but so is in-person communication. Use word of mouth and, if you can afford it, a well-placed print advertisement.

BE PATIENT:

Building traffic takes time. Set short-term goals for yourself, but understand that this is a long term process.
What have I missed? What other ways can you get more people to check out your site? Comment away.....