Over the past few weeks I’ve had a plethora of different reactions regarding Amazon’s new reading device, Kindle. Initially I felt that the Kindle was doomed. I figured there is no way that people would be willing to adhere to the strict DRM policy that’s been set in place by Amazon and the content publishers. However, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think the Kindle might have a shot at being a great device. No, not because the device itself is a joy to use, but rather because it offers something we have never seen on the tech landscape before. Free high speed web access without a subscription cost.

Here’s the deal. The Kindle is incredibly important to the future of content distribution and discovery because it offers free 3g wireless internet (mobile EVDO) with the device. Free free — as in the online content isn’t restricted to just content from Amazon but rather it’s full fledge internet. Do you see what I’m saying? The Kindle is the first device in the history of tech devices that gives us the ability to browse the web practically anywhere in the country without having to pay.

Now picture this. An iPod Touch with free high speed internet anywhere in the nation. Check your mail, browse your blogs, download photos and music, all without having to pay a monthly cost. This is unthinkable, and something that we never saw coming from the big telco’s, yet all of a sudden the Kindle has broken the mold.

Yes the Kindle’s ugly, yes the user interface looks slow and frustrating, yes the screen is not paper-white, and yes the battery doesn’t last as long with internet on. But what I am saying is not that the Kindle is a great device, but that it is a great gateway device. The type of device that we need to be successful so we can use other better designed devices in the future.

A while ago I posted a blog about image retargeting, a new form of image resizing that uses algorithms to determine what part of the image is most important and what can be stripped away during resizing.

And while the video helped illustrate the concept of image retargeting, it didn’t allow for first hand usage of the technique. Therefore I would like to direct your attention to riszr.com. An online flash application that allows you to upload images and resize them using retargeting (along with the normal methods). Then you can save your retargeted image out.

Rsizr.com is really well done, and greatly helps to demonstrate just how beneficial and powerful image retargeting is. It even offers advanced features such as area selection for retargeting protection. A technique that allows you to select parts of the image and protect them from being retargeted. Head on over to www.rsizr.com and give it a whirl.

A few weeks back I received an invite to check out JumpChart.com, a tool designed for the quick gathering, editing and deployment of web content. Ironically, we’ve discussed building a tool very much like JumpChart; to assist us with our client content gathering woes. JumpChart beat us to the punch and they did a great job executing the overall application.

Imulus is just like every other agency / development house out there who is frustrated with trying to gather client content for web projects. Typically we start with a timeline which is dead-on and very achievable, yet the project gets delayed because client has under-estimate the amount of work which goes into content writing, gathering and editing. The second part of that problem is the client’s inability to visualize the content they are tossing over the fence in Word, Excel, and PDF format.

JumpChart goes a long way toward solving these problems. The interface is intuitive and extremely useful for quickly building web structures. It took me 10 minutes to layout the structures of a 30 page site. And it took me another 15 minutes to copy & paste in all the client’s content. The resulting effort produced a clickable website skeleton which was publicly accessible by the client. It quickly became apparent to the client that there was much work which needed to be completed before the site could go live. By stripping out information architecture and content from the actual design, it forces the client to evaluate their content structures, page lengths and overall voice before that content is formated and embedded in the website.

Once the client has signed-off on the JumpChart content you can export all the goods in CSS / HTML which can later be imported into your favorite content management system.

To really do this service justice I suggest visiting their website and looking at the video tours. http://www.jumpchart.com/video-tour/

There have been many websites rushing to be “social” due to the success of Facebook, MySpace and Digg. With so many social sites making noise these days it was easy to miss one of the best social websites, patientslikeme.com.

Patientslikeme.com is a community of users with various diseases and illnesses that share their successes and failures as they battle through their experiences. The most refreshing aspect of this website is that it was the brainchild of three MIT engineers, not by some huge pharma corporation. The operating costs of the effort are covered by partnerships with healthcare provides that use annoymized data from the permission-based community.

Users are able to chart their progress, compare stories and rate the effectiveness of various medications. It helps network together shared experiences and provides a community of people who can relate to each other. Although I currently have no use for this site I am glad to know that in the event that I or someone I love gets ill, there is a community of people who I can turn to.

I’m a sucker for heatmaps. I guess I watched the Predator too many times as a child. Map of the Markets gives visitors a heatmap view of the hottest / coolest market sectors, along with the largest movers of the sector pie.

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