A month after a price war broke out between Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com over e-reader prices with a WiFi only Barnes & Noble Nook selling for $149, Amazon.com will soon announce a smaller, lighter WiFi-only Kindle for $139. A 3G enabled version will sell for the previous model's price of $189.
$10 is not enough to make up for its e-books being restricted to one vendor however.
After twelve years Blizzard has released StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.
No professional reviews at Metacritic yet. I think a week of playing would be needed for single player and a couple of weeks for multi-player before realistic reviews could be given.
With the expected November 2010 launch date approaching, General Motors has announced the price of the Chevrolet Volt will be $41,000 before a $7,500 federal tax credit. Leasing will also be available at $350-a-month lease for three years, with $2,500 due at delivery, with GM receiving the tax credit.
As a plug-in hybrid and not an electric car, the Chevy Volt is not a direct competitor to the all electric Nissan Leaf which is priced at $32,780 before the tax credit but many will make the comparison. Crunchgear.com has a comparison.
For discussion see the the fan site, GM-Volt.com which has a post with hundreds of comments.
Amazon.com reports that Stieg Larsson, author of the internationally bestselling Millennium Trilogy, has become the first author to sell over 1 million Kindle books. To mark the occasion, Amaozn.com is starting the "Kindle Million Club" which recognizes authors whose entire body of work has sold over 1 million copies in the Kindle Store.
Kindle e-Books can be viewed on Kindle readers and on Kindle software for iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac, iPad and Android devices. They are still however DRM locked to the Amazon.com ecosystem and thus less useful than freely transferable e-Books.
In other Larsson news, Daniel Craig who previously played James Bond will star in an English language adaption of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and if that is a success adaptions of the next two books.
Microsoft announced today that Windows Phone 7 has reached the “technical preview” state and as a result it can now ship prototype units to developers. It states that “thousands of prototype phones from Asus, LG and Samsung are making their way into the hands of developers over the next few weeks”. Along with these devices for developers a number of media outlets and bloggers received units to review.
Reaction varied, particularly depending on how important one felt the missing elements such as cut-and-paste, third party application multi-tasking, side loading of applications, raw sockets, Microsoft SQL Server CE , HTML5 or Flash or Silverlight in the mobile browser and others were compared to new UI and cloud integration features that were present.
Microsoft oriented Paul Thurott has a very positive preview. Engaget, Gizmodo, ZDnet, Cnet all have indepth previews in whicih they note that the missing features could really hurt Windows Phone 7’s chances as could a lack of third-party apps at launch.
In light of this, Ed Bott’s statement that Microsoft really needs to publize a road-map for WP7 is a good one. Missing cut-and-paste is acceptable if it will be fixed in a few months, waiting for a fix sometime in the indefinite future will drive customers away.
Microsoft has released a beta version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools replacing the existing Community Technology Preview last updated in April. Major changes including full Microsoft Expression Blend support, an updated Windows Phone 7 API, additional controls (but not the Panorama and Pivot yet), and Control Templates.
Microsoft also announced the distribution of pre-production devices to select developers will start in mid-July.
Locus Online has details of its parent magazine’s 2010 Locus Awards winners, held June 25-27, 2010 in Seattle, WA.
Some winners are;
Best SF Novel:
• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
Best Fantasy Novel:
• The City & The City , China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
Best First Novel:
• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
Best Young Adult Book:
•Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)
The Windup Girl previous won the Nebula Award for Best Novel and is nominated for the Hugo Award along with Boneshaker and The City & The City.
Locus Online reports that Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is the winner of the prestigious 2010 Carnegie Medal which is awarded for an outstanding book for children.
Past SF and fantasy related winners include:
Barnes & Noble ignited an e-Reader price war today with the announcement of a $149 Wi-Fi only version of its Nook e-Reader and a price cut from $259 to $199 for its 3G connected reader. Hours later Amazon.com cut the price of its 3G connected Kindle from $259 to $189.
With these price cuts the lower end, the $149 Kobo eReader which is distributed by Borders in the US and Indigo/Chapters in Canada and lacks any mobile connectivity other than piggybacking on a phone’s Bluetooth connection may be priced out the market unless its lighter weight, and open ePub format give it an advantage.
And looming in the background are tablets, iPad and otherwise.
Gigaom has a story on a presentation by Mark Williams, VP of Network Operations for Zynga, the company behind FarmVille and other social games. Williams describes how the company was able to keep up with FarmVille’s growth of one million users per week by using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instead of using actual physical hardware:
At the time of FarmVille’s launch, Zynga had just run out of data center space, so the company had to use Amazon’s EC2. That circumstance-based decision was extremely lucky, Williams said; given the game’s huge growth, without Amazon FarmVille would have failed. Amazon allowed Williams to “acquire instances at will” using RightScale, which he called “absolutely key.” Zynga uses Apache PHP on the front end, memcached for active user play and MySQL on the back end. It uses memcached to store key value pairs to deal with active user play during sessions and then later writes it to disk.
Zynga later moves some of the players to its own hardware once growth becomes predicable.
Microsoft Windows Azure and Google AppEngine are two competitors to Amazon EC2 and it’s partner service Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).