The Kindle Chronicles

Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research   Interview starts at 14:38 and ends at 41:53   It’s not about Amazon Echo, it’s about putting microphones in various contexts in your life. Plug one in, like a Glade air freshener, into your bathroom, one next to your bedstand, one in the hallway, one in the laundry, and pretty soon you don’t need Dash buttons. All you have is Alexa everywhere in your home. And you can have Alexa on your phone or in your car if you want, but but most of what Amazon sells you are thinking of in your home, in specific contexts. And so long as you have that microphone sitting everywhere, listening for you to wake it up by saying “Alexa,” that gives you frictionless commerce opportunities that are astonishing, really, compared to what we think of Amazon in 1998 when they were starting to do things like single-click ordering, and you think, “Wow, that was convenient.” We are so far past that now.   News Amazon Flex “What Amazon’s Uber-like delivery service means for the sharing economy” by Brian Fung at The Washington Post - September 30, 2015 “Why I Work for Amazon: A Response” by Maria Renz at re/code - September 25, 2015 You can help the Kindle Chronicles by purchasing your new tablet using these links (thanks!): Fire and case Fire HD 8 and case Fire HD 10 and keyboard case “First Look: Amazon’s $50 Fire tablet” by Chris Meadows at TeleRead - October 2, 2015   Tech Tips Listener Tom Semple’s tip for accessing the diagnostics screen an original Kindle:   Go to Settings page, then type ALT-4-1-1. The first line will say something like 'The FRAS, FIRS, WEBSITE, TODO, CDE server is UP, UP, UP, UP, UP' when everything is working. These will all be 'DOWN' if wireless is turned off or some mix of UPs and DOWNs when there is some other issue (again the meaning is not particularly clear other than 'UP' is good and 'DOWN' is not good). ALT-5-1-1 initiates a 'loopback test', which always seems to fail on my Kindle. No idea what it is for. Finally there is ALT-6-1-1, which seems to show absolutely nothing. If I remember, it was sometimes necessary to switch cellular networks, maybe that is what it is for.    Click here to buy a $25.95 replacement battery for the original Kindle. (via Tom Semple)   Interview with James McQuivey   Content Starts at 41:57 and ends at 44:28: Excerpts from my conversation with Gabby Wallace, author of the forthcoming Kindle book, Go Natural English: Learn to be Fluent in 15 Minutes a Day . Recorded on September 25, 2015 at the Agents of Change conference in Portland, Maine.   Next Week’s Guest Alexandra Alter, publishing industry reporter at The New York Times   Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Persepctive" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!