Updated 10:18AM PST: Amazon has confirmed the purchase

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is in glorious living color, but its original and still-strong-selling Kindle and cousins, the Kindle Paperwhite family, are still irritatingly stuck in 1950′s-style black and white.

That may soon change.

As The Digital Reader found, Amazon has bought recent Samsung acquisition Liquavista, while attempting to hide the fact by routing the acquisition through a limited liability corporation registered in Delaware, which is in turn linked to a holding company named CSC: “Corporation Service Company.”

Very tricksy, Amazon.

Amazon confirmed the purchase with a short emailed statement, saying:

We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.

Liquavista has built a screen technology that approaches the efficiency of traditional e-reader black-and-white E-ink screens, while offering the color of LCD and other full-color screen technologies. In other words, you can have your cake and eat it too: gorgeous full-color screen plus long-lasting battery life.

That might be just the technology that Amazon needs to kickstart conversion of its full eReader line to a full-color and quick-response screen, as E-ink is also notoriously slow to refresh.

And that is important, because Amazon is doubling down on digital content, hoping to drive both sales and margin growth by selling digital media like movies and TV shows, apps, in-app purchases, and games. The company just launched its new virtual currency, Amazon Coins, today, attempting to increase the rate at which Amazon customers buy things that don’t have to be expensively stored, packaged, and shipped.

And you can’t sell much digital content on a slow black-and-white screen.

While Liquavista’s screen tech won’t be cutting-edge enough to run Samsung’s Galaxy phones and tablets, which need the best screens available, it is advanced enough for Amazon’s Kindles, The Digital Reader says, which are primarily budget, mass-market devices.

And advanced enough to move Amazon’s low-end devices beyond being ghettoes for books, and towards being able to handle all the full-color and full-motion media that Amazon can sell.

Image credits: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Filed under: Business, Gadgets, Media, Mobile

I’ve read thousands of press releases over the years but don’t believe I ever wrote one until now. It was more difficult than I expected! Links and tweets are appreciated, but Amazon reviews will get you undying devotion.

New Book Explores Recent Epidemic Of Online Customer Assaults on Businesses

 ‘Attack of the Customers’ Helps Marketers and Business Owners Manage and Prevent Reputation Threats Carried on Blogs and Social Networks

Customers are taking their complaints about companies and products to the Internet in record numbers, and a new book tells what is driving this trend and how businesses can avoid being victims of customer attacks.

“Attack of the Customers,” by award-winning author Paul Gillin and customer relationship management pioneer Greg Gianforte, arrives as online attacks are becoming a top concern for business and government leaders.

“A lot of attention has been focused on social media’s capacity to aid in awareness, marketing and positive brand perception,” said co-author Paul Gillin, “but little has been written to date about its dark side. Brands have been piling into Facebook expecting to reap a bounty of positive PR, but they forget that these channels can be used to tear down as well as to build.”

Recent research has shown that 70% of large companies have experienced an attack on their reputations during last two years.“Decision-makers believe that social media has made managing crises more difficult and more expensive,” Gillin said. “We wrote this book to address the increasing need for corporations to understand how people express dissatisfaction online and how to distinguish between everyday complaints and potential crisis scenarios.”

Attack of the Customers analyzes the motivations and goals of people who drive negative campaigns and offers guidance for how to respond to and prevent online attacks. Using dozens of case studies from consumer and B2B brands, the book classifies attackers into four categories – Casual Complainers, Extortionists, Committed Crusaders and Indignant Influencers – and provides coping strategies for dealing with each.

The book also documents step-by-step how some recent notable attacks developed and the critical factors that transformed them from minor brush fires into international news stories.

Capacity to Destroy

Attack of the Customers analyzes customer-driven negativity campaigns like the 2010 Pampers Dry Max Facebook crisis and the 2012 beef-industry “pink slime” hysteria to identify lessons brand owners can apply to understanding customer motivations and preparing response strategies. The book also looks at the growing influence of online customer reviews sources like Yelp and Amazon on businesses ranging from electronics to hospitality services and tells how business executives can use peer reviews to their advantage.

Readers will learn:

• Why businesses’ common responses to customer complaints often make matters worse;
• Why complaining customers are some of an organization’s most valuable assets;
• How vocal critics can be turned into raving fans with an active response strategy;
• How to organize a team to identify and respond to attacks in minutes; and
• How to create a culture that puts customers first.

“Delighting the customer is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage today, because product differentiation is fleeting and price differentiation is unprofitable, ” said co-author Greg Gianforte. “Failure to deliver exceptional customer experiences is simply failure.”

Attack of the Customers is available through major online retail outlets and in Amazon Kindle format. Learn more at AttackOfTheCustomers.com.

About The Authors

Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and online marketing consultant who specializes in helping businesses use content to reach customers. A popular speaker and writer, he has addressed more than 150 conferences and groups and published more than 200 articles about social media marketing since 2008. His four previous books about social media and online communities include The New Influencers, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, The Joy of Geocaching and Social Marketing to the Business Customer.

Paul is a columnist for BtoB magazine and a director of the Society for New Communications Research. He blogs at PaulGillin.com and NewspaperDeathWatch.com.

Greg Gianforte has started five successful software companies. He founded RightNow Technologies in 1997 with a mission to rid the world of bad experiences. The company enjoyed 15 years of continuous growth. At the time of its sale to Oracle in 2011, it had more than 2,000 large customers, 1,100 employees and $225 million in annual revenue.
Among his awards are Ernst & Young’s Pacific Northwest Entrepreneur of the Year and the Leader Award from CRM magazine. He was inducted into the CRM Hall of Fame in 2007. His books include Bootstrapping Your Business and Eight to Great: Eight Steps to Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience.

Contact information:

Paul Gillin

508-656-0734

paul@gillin.com

Twitter: @pgillin

Greg Gianforte

greg.gianforte@gmail.com

Related articles

• Paul Gillin’s Attack of the Customers: Don’t Be A Victim

Wikipad, the company developing an identically named tablet that will ship with an attachable gamepad for console-style gaming, has revealed the specifications of the device in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

The Wikipad (tablet, not company) will have a 10.1-inch IPS display with 16:10 1,280 x 800 resolution. The actual tablet will weigh 560 grams and be just 8.6mm thick, making it one of the thinnest and lightest 10″ tablets ever, only slightly thicker than the iPad 2 and nearly 40 grams lighter. When the Wikipad was first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, it was a 7″ tablet that was more similar in design to the Amazon Kindle Fire.

The final design model, which the company revealed to us at a design office in Thousand Oaks, Calif., will feature the NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30 1.4GHz quad-core processor with 1GB of DDR2 RAM. For comparison, the recently released Nexus 7 uses the T30L, which is a 1.2GHz quad-core processor with a 416MHz GPU (compared to 520MHz on the T30) and slower DDR2 RAM (667MHz vs. 1066MHz), and the ASUS Transformer Prime Infinity 700 and upcoming Ouya will use the more powerful T33, which clocks at 1.6GHz and has bandwidth for faster 1600MHz DDR3 RAM.

The Wikipad will also ship with at least 16GB of internal storage, though the amount of local storage hasn’t been finalized as of yet. However, according to Fraser Townley, President of Sales at Wikipad, “we will not go down, we will only go up.” 16GB is the standard amount of storage for tablets today.

The battery is 23.46Wh, capable of six hours of continuous gaming and eight hours of video playback.

Instead of tapered edges, the Wikipad will have flat sides similar to the iPhone 4/4S. The rear panel will also have an elevated plastic lip designed for a better grip in any holding arrangement. This also enables the speakers on the back of the tablet to bounce off of any flat surface and deliver strong acoustics.

Every Wikipad will ship with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and the controller add-on. The controller, which connects to the Wikipad from the bottom with a proprietary connector, is designed similar to the Xbox 360 controller, though according to the company there is little relation to Microsoft’s nearly seven-year-old design. The controller features two sets of triggers, bumpers, and analog sticks, as well as four face buttons, start, and select. The controller is also designed to cover the speakers and flow sound through acoustic tubes out the front grill for better audio performance. The controller also has a port to connect it to a power source on the back.

Wikipad will also feature a built-in 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2 megapixel front-facing camera.

Finally, the Wikipad will not ship the first line of the tablet with a 3D display, which the company originally showed off at CES. Future models may ship with a 3D display. The Wikipad doesn’t have a definite release date yet, but according to Wikipad President James Bower, it will release later this year, and the company will reveal much more regarding the tablet in the very near future.

Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat

BookStats, the “center for publishing market data” just released its 2012 report. The big news? Ebook sales doubled last year, especially in the adult fiction category. Even bigger, overall industry revenue showed a small increase.

I’m just wondering why it takes six months to report that news.

The 2012 report shows that adult fiction is dominated by e-book sales, outperforming paper and other categories, such as audiobooks. However, somewhat surprisingly in the age of Amazon, Kindle, and Nook, actual brick-and-mortar bookstores remained the primary distribution channel for publishers.

BookStats isn’t releasing more detail publicly, but that number must be decreasing.

Source: Amazon

Kindle Fire

Amazon’s ebook sales outgrew paper sales back in 2011, and the online retailer believes it has the market share lead for digital books.

Just a few months ago, Association of American Publishers data showed that ebook sales doubled from January 2011 to January 2012.

An interesting twist: Publisher revenues from direct-to-consumer sales topped $1 billion for the first time ever. That’s a significant accomplishment — and a direct challenge to Amazon and other online retailers.

Amazon, of course, dominates online bookselling, and sold about five million Kindles this past Christmas season on its way to selling perhaps as many as 20 million in all of 2012.

BookStats is a partnership between the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group that launched in 2009. Almost 2,000 publishers contributed data to this year’s report.

With the industry moving so quickly, the organization would do well to release 2012 data early in 2013, if not regularly throughout the year.

VentureBeat contacted BookStats for comments, but has not yet received a response.

Image credit: Rob Stark/ShutterStock

Filed under: VentureBeat

Google’s popular Nexus 7 tablet is selling out and it isn’t easy to find since retailers began selling it on Friday.

PC World reported that the new Android tablet is available at Sam’s Club and GameStop stores, but that was based on just spot checks at random stores. A variety of online retailers such as Staples, Office Depot and Best Buy are evidently sold out. It isn’t clear when the retailers will get more in stock.

GameStop has a promotion where it will give you an extra 30 percent bonus on trade-ins of games, gaming systems and accessories. That means if you trade in a game system worth $80, GameStop will give you $24 toward the Nexus 7 purchase.

The Nexus 7 sells for $199 to $249, putting it on a square footing against the rival Amazon Kindle Fire tablet. It’s a lot cheaper than anything Apple currently offers. The Nexus 7 has a quad-core processor, the latest Android version 4.1 Jelly Bean, and many other exciting features. It is being built by Asus.

Filed under: mobile

Have you ever heard of a PEST analysis? It’s not something you do with annoying people on Facebook or around the house. It’s a basic form of business analysis that looks at four key “big picture” factors that might influence your business, factors in the environment around you and your company. These factors are political, economic, social, and technological. Let’s take a look this week at what these might mean for your business and marketing efforts.

In the original PEST analysis the S stood for social, but in order to differentiate in the world of marketing between social media and society at large, we’ll say societal instead. This is the way that society is changing and people are changing in those societies that impact your marketing.

What are the macro changes that happening in society that could impact your marketing? How is society itself being altered? For example, the baby boomer generation (born 1945-1965) is headed for retirement now through the next 20 years. How will this impact your company? Does your company serve this audience? For example, if you have a website that serves this audience, you could be losing a significant portion of your business if your font size is under 16px. Why? As we age, our ability to clearly and easily read letters on screen declines. This is also why the Amazon Kindle is wildly popular with retirement age folks – it instantly turns any book into a large print book.

Think about macro changes in society in terms of career. How many people today have sufficient incomes and savings to be able to retire in 20, 30, or 50 years? If you’re doing serious long term planning for your company, you may have people in the workforce much longer than you think. We see this happening today in a down economy, with grandparents and their teenage grandchildren competing for the same jobs.

The key question to ask is, how are your customers changing? What’s going on in their lives that is going to impact how you interact with them? For example, Facebook and social media are technological changes, but they have a huge societal impact on how we get news and information. For an entire generation, Facebook is their cable news network and search engine combined. How does that impact your marketing? If someone decides to run a grassroots campaign for or against your company, are you prepared and equipped to handle it?

In your planning, you can and should also account for societal-wide changes. Consider the impact on society that 9/11 had, or that a major biological or nuclear event could have, such as the Fukushima fuel pools going critical or another Katrina. How does this impact your marketing? How does this impact your company?

Tomorrow we close out the PEST analysis series with technology.

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I’m pleased to announce that my newest publication, the Summary of Commentary on Marketing, Social Media, and Current Events for the Second Quarter of 2012 is now available.

The Almost Timely newsletter is the weekly summary of everything interesting that’s caught my eye over the previous week, 20-25 items that were worth your time. However, sometimes we miss things. Sometimes the day gets by us, or sometimes we just take some time off. Sometimes the mail doesn’t get delivered, and we fall out of habit. Or sometimes we just delete stuff accidentally.

Well, now you can get caught up with this new publication. It’s a play off of what the Federal Reserve Board calls their quarterly report, which is their Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions, and it fulfills a similar role: a look back at the quarter that was, all of the highlights, all of the news, all of the premium content, bundled together for your review and safekeeping.

It’s available directly from me in 3 different formats in one compressed file:

+ PDF for the desktop computer
+ MOBI for the Amazon Kindle platform
+ EPUB for the Nook/iBooks platform

Important: If you are a premium subscriber of my newsletter and you have been subscribed since March 31, 2012 and have fastidiously kept all of the back issues, you don’t need this eBook. It’s for people who are not premium members and who are relatively new to my newsletter. Thank you for being a premium member, and feel free to ignore this post.

The report is $9.99. Please download it below:

Christopher Penn’s Summary of Commentary on Marketing, Social Media, and Current Events, 2nd Quarter 2012

If the button above doesn’t work, you’ll find the eBook available here.

Thank you in advance for your support.

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Google’s heavily rumored Nexus 7 tablet will include a 1.3-GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM, and will start at $200, according to a detailed report by Gizmodo Australia.

With Google’s I/O conference starting Wednesday, chatter about the upcoming tablet was sure to get louder. Just as Google is selling the unlocked Galaxy Nexus Android phone, rumor has it that Google will sell its own tablet running the Android OS. Asus will build the tablet but Google will brand and sell it.

The report from Gizmodo seems to confirm much of what we’ve already been hearing, making it a near certainty Google will introduce a tablet with these specs this week. The Nexus 7 tablet will have a 7-inch IPS display with 1280 x 800 resolution, 1.3-GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera. Battery life should run around 9 hours on a charge. The device will run Android 4.1, also known as Jelly Bean, even though Google will likely introduce Android 5.0 at I/O.

On the pricing front, Google will offer a model with 8GB of local storage for $200, and a 16GB model will run $250. While the cost significantly undercuts the price of the $400 iPad 2, that won’t be the primary competition. Because of its cost structure and similar apps, the tablet will become a powerful competitor to the Amazon Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, and other less expensive Android-based tablets.

Photo: Gizmodo Australia

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Filed under: mobile

The Online Publisher’s Association just released the results of a new study on tablet owners’ use and purchase habits. The news is good if you’re a magazine, not so much if you’re a newspaper. But it’s all good if you’re an app developer.

31 percent of US internet users now use a tablet in 2012, up from just 12 percent last year. That’s 74 million tablet users: a significant slice of consumers. And, the magic that marketers are always looking for, they trend higher income. The highest penetration of tablet use is in the $50,000-and-up income categories.

The gap between iOS and Android shrank, largely due to the Amazon Kindle Fire:

The most common uses of tablets are much as you’d expect: watching videos, getting news, and checking the sports scores:

The market for paid apps is getting bigger: Even though only 23 percent of all apps were paid apps, 72 percent of all tablet owners had paid for at least one app. Tablet owners did, however, show an increased preference for apps with advertising versus paid apps, so there remain multiple monetization options.

The researchers estimated that the total market for paid tablet apps in 2012 will be $2.6 billion.

And in good news for Android tablet developers, the gap between iOS owners and Android owners buying apps seems to be shrinking: 79 percent of iPad owners have bought apps, versus 66 percent of Android owners. iOS owners still spent more, however:

Of particular interest to content creators and distributors is the finding that 61 percent of tablet owners have purchased at least one piece of content for their tablet. Most of that is in magazines and digital books, with only 15% of that in newspapers.

Movies, however, are a surging category, with TV shows not far behind:

And in worse news for newspapers, when researchers calculated the total dollars spent on content, news came out far behind magazines, entertainment, and sport:

See more details in the gallery:

Image credit: ShutterStock

Filed under: Entrepreneur, media, mobile, VentureBeat

Amazon is expected to release a new 7-inch Kindle Fire with a higher resolution screen for $199, which would push the current model to an even lower price of $149, according to a new report.