e-Books Outsell Hard Copies on Christmas Day

I came across an article through Digg claiming that e-books outsold hard copy books on Amazon on Christmas day.

I bought a Sony Reader recently so I've been keeping an eye on developments with e-books. Also, as I mentioned in a previous post, I've been reading The Long Tail, and there's a lot of material in the book on the advantages of digital distribution for retailers. It'll be interesting to see whether this was just an anomaly or the beginning of a move towards consumers buying e-books more than hard copies.

Calais

I've been doing some research for a report I have to do on the semantic web and I came across this ZDNet blog post on how Oracle will be offering support for Thomson Reuter's Calais service. Calais is a service that generates semantic metadata. It looks interesting and the site is worth a visit.

This video gives a brief overview of the service.

No Bricks-and-Mortar Stores for Amazon

I posted earlier in the week on Amazon's plan to open bricks-and-mortar stores. Silicon Republic carried a story on Tuesday reporting that Amazon have made an offical denial in response to the Sunday Times article.

It's too bad that this doesn't seem to be going ahead - it would have been interesting to see how opening bricks-and-mortar stores would have impacted on their business model.

Murdoch vs. Google - Sunday Business Show/Wall Street Journal

Today FM's Sunday Business Show had a short piece yesterday on Rupert Murdoch's conflict with Google.

The whole show is nearly an hour long so you may want to skip forward to the relevant bit at around 54 minutes in. (The first few minutes might be worth a listen too, because Amazon gets a mention in the show's investment advice section.)

They refer to a Wall Street Journal article that Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote during the week outlining his take on the future of media (interestingly, the WSJ is owned by Murdoch).

Amazon Move to Bricks-and-Mortar

The Sunday Times has an interesting article on Amazon's secret search for property. The article says that Amazon plan to begin opening bricks-and-mortar stores, operating these as collection points for customers who don't want their goods delivered to their homes. It will be interesting to see how they design and locate the physical stores. They could end up locating them in retail parks and maybe having a superficially similar layout to Argos stores.

I wonder if they'll open one in Cork at any stage (Mahon Point or Blackpool please!).

PlinkArt

Silicon Republic has an interesting article about Plink, an Irish firm that just won a prize as part of the Google Android Developer Challenge.

Their product, PlinkArt, is is a "visual search engine", a sort of a visual equivalent of Shazam or Midomi. It allows you to photograph a piece of art and get information on that piece returned to your smartphone.

It looks pretty cool, and it's nice to hear of an Irish firm doing well.