A great article on why Japan still leads the US in terms of Gadgets.

There are a variety of reasons posited, but the main one is that gadgets are not dominated by males in Japan.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the fact that Myspace’s growth came from its male/female balance, caused by teenage girls attraction to alpha males in bands.

Perhaps this gender symmetry helps achieve viral growth since hubs and key influencers are more likely to connect male -> female -> male etc.

Thanks to Keith for the article.
ASIAN POP The Gadget Gap / Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?

Julien ‘Spike’ Galbraith born 21:12 on Jan 11.
I am so, so happy.

My gut tells me that Kindle will go the way of poopy brown Zunes and Segways.

1. Expensive hardware.
2. Cheap looking hardware.
3. Expensive content.
4. Un-innovative software.
5. A name that sounds like firewood.

I like Amazon - a lot. I think its really hard for a startup to come along and beat a company that has so much infrastructure and logistics nailed, and I like the innovation in S3 and EC2.

But the Kindle has dog written all over it. Amazon needed to do something really disruptive here and this is not a disruptive product.

Ebook readers have not taken off, and the difference between laptops and readers is narrowing. I suspect a market slice is needed to gain traction and that education could provide that in a way that would be world changing.

What I’d like to see is a Kindle like product for schools and universities, worldwide - a reader meets the $100 laptop. Education is an area where lowered royalties could be made for developing countries allowing for a device that could give every child on earth access to the same textbooks.

My wife is now nearly 4 months PREGNANT! So we’re launching a kids and baby site for Wists, called Yokiddo.

Hopefully by saturating ourselves with fun kids stuff to look at, such as a $3M model of Moscow or Craftsman’s ‘my first chainsaw’, we will exorcise the need to actually buy any.

Is Rim the new Microsoft?

The graph says it all. Far from denting the Blackberry maker’s stock, RIM has actually outpaced Apple’s massive surge since the iPhone announcement at the beginning of the year.

Windows 3.1 was shabby compared to the original Mac OS, but businesses liked Microsoft because its very absence of polish made it seem less like an indulgence.

Bottom line: Rim is the Microsoft of the business cellphone market, and there is a lot of money to be made there. The iPhone is years ahead of the Blackberry, but its presence creates context making Rimm’s the business device and Apple’s the consumer one.

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