LSQHA Blog Reviews » project

Hands-On With Microsoft Docs.com

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:40:31 +0000

Earlier this week, Microsoft launched its Facebook connected online office suite Docs.com . Docs offers online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users can also choose to share these documents with their Facebook friends. Overall, Docs falls somewhat short of being a replacement for a desktop office suite. Even though it offers a better interface than Google Docs and Zoho , its functionality often feels deliberately crippled in order to push users to use (and buy) Microsoft Office. Sponsor Word Web App Among the three tools in Docs, the Word web app comes the closest to fulfilling its promises. While it isn't ready for managing highly complex documents, it's more than sufficient for editing standard text documents collaboratively. The Word web app includes all the basic editing features one would expect from a stripped-down version of Word, but you can't add footnotes, for example, or insert tables from your Excel files. Thankfully, though, Word will not strip any of these features out of the file. Once you download the file or open it up in Word, your footnotes and will reappear. This ability of Word to keep a document's formatting shows that Microsoft deliberately chose not to support these features in the web app. Excel Web App Among all of the apps, the Excel app is the most basic of the three apps included in the suite. It can only read documents in Microsoft's Office 2007 format, for example, while all the other tools also support older formats. That, by itself, could be a show-stopper for some users, but the most egregious omission here is that there is no graphical interface for entering a formula. Instead, you have to type every formula by hand, which is a slow and error-prone process. The good news, though, is that the Excel web app can read all the formulas in imported files. It's clear, though, that the app is only really meant for editing existing documents and not for creating new ones. PowerPoint Web App The PowerPoint web app did a nice job at opening every PowerPoint file we threw at it. When it comes to editing, however, the app is also very stripped down. You can use it to create a basic outline of your presentation or change the order of your slieds, for example, but you can't add floating images, backgrounds and resize text and image fields. You can, however, add and edit SmartArt clips. Bugs While the whole office suite ran very well in all the browsers we tested (except for Safari on the iPad, which displayed the documents just fine but crashed when we tried to edit), Microsoft still has to fix before Docs can become a run-away hit. While Docs has no issues importing most Microsoft Office documents, editing uploaded documents can be tricky. If you set Microsoft Office on the desktop to track the changes you make to a document, for example, the web apps will refuse to let you edit the document. We also ran unto issues with image uploads, which, at times, didn't finish. Docs also often complained that the images we tried to upload were not compatible with Docs, even though they were just standard JPEGs. Verdict Microsoft clearly wants users to see Docs as an addition to the traditional Microsoft Office desktop suite and not as a replacement for Office. After using Docs for a while it quickly becomes obvious that a lot of the limitations Microsoft imposed are not due to the fact that Docs runs in the browser, but simply due to the fact that Microsoft didn't want to include them. While Microsoft is partnering with Facebook on this project, Docs feels like it is stuck between two worlds: the new reality of how people collaborate and share content online - and Microsoft's intent to preserve its old revenue streams for as long as possible. To some degree, Docs feels similar to Apple's office suite for the iPad . While Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPad are sufficient for most basic tasks and hold a lot of promise, users with more than the most basic needs will come away frustrated. Discuss

Link:
Hands-On With Microsoft Docs.com

OpenLike: All-Star Team to Challenge Facebook’s Expansion

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:17:13 +0000

Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking a number of dramatic steps that would all add up to serving 1 billion "like" clicks from visitors to sites around the web, within 24 hours. Many people are concerned about Facebook's growing dominance around the web . One group of high-profile New Yorkers has launched OpenLike , a "very alpha alternative to Facebook Like." Working on the project so far is much-watched blogging investor and startup guy Chris Dixon , Huffington Post co-founder and MIT Media Lab guy Jonah Peretti , Jonathan Glick of Dixon, Conway , Ehrenberg and other VC-blessed TLists , Tom Pinckney who with Dixon both sold SiteAdvisor and founded Hunch.com and MIT grad and Hunch engineer Peter Coles . Dixon said this afternoon that the project is "looking for an authoritative open source person to govern it." Sponsor So the establishment is in Palo Alto and the rock-star insurgents are from the East Coast? Let no one say the Internet is boring. The lightweight technology at OpenLike is right now just a way for site owners to provide buttons for sharing content on a wide variety of social networks. One line of javascript adds a series of sharing buttons to a site, which the site owner can edit. Given that there are any number of ways to do more or less this same thing, and that these are very smart people working on this, we're sure there's a lot more in the works. The project describes itself on its site as "an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications." We'll share more details if and when this project develops. Related: See also developer Jesse Stay's blog post How Do You Compete With This Beast: Here's How , about long-time open standards community member Phil Windley's new product Kynext . The battle over control or absence of control over the internet is far, far from over. There are lots of people getting ready to step up and challenge Facebook's powerful, seductive, expanding control. Discuss

Read the original:
OpenLike: All-Star Team to Challenge Facebook's Expansion

Beyond Street View: Google Photographers Begin Going Inside Businesses

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:33:58 +0000

Google is now accepting applications from businesses to be among the first places the company sends photographers to take panoramic photographs of the insides of buildings. Street view? You aint seen nothing yet. We reported in February on rumors that this project was in the works. The company says the photographs will be taken by professionals trained in low-lighting, will be as unobtrusive as possible, will initially be traditional in format and will be stitched together to form panoramas in the future. Sponsor In September we wrote about a company called Micello , billed as Google Maps for the Indoors, which is creating floor maps for places like shopping malls around the country. That would make a nice compliment to the new indoor photography feature. Startups like Micello are probably no more worried about Google stepping on their toes than they were before, but the new indoor photography launch does have at least one independent professional photographer worried. "Did Google just put low- to mid-range commercial photographers out of business?," social photography blogger Aaron Hockley tweeted this morning. If that was a consequence of Google's new feature, the world would be much poorer for it. Discuss

Read this article:
Beyond Street View: Google Photographers Begin Going Inside Businesses

No Free Lunch for Ning Users; Still Plenty of Bargains Elsewhere

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:34:43 +0000

The social networking platform

See the original post:
No Free Lunch for Ning Users; Still Plenty of Bargains Elsewhere

Mobile Tech Helps Uncover Mesoamerican Lost City

cgseo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:30:00 +0000

Technology has been a part of archaeology from the time it shifted from treasure hunting to academic profession, from using geography to plot a grid on a dig site, mechanics to pump out a flooded tomb, statistics to map demographic changes or now, using personal technology and global positioning software to identify the previously unknown. The latter is what Professor Chris Fisher , associate professor in CSU's Department of Anthropology, and his team from Colorado State University have done. They discovered a large, ancient urban center using rugged handheld computers and GPS. Sponsor This thousand-year-old urban center stands, overgrown with scrub and soil, in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Fisher's team used four Trimble Recon rugged handheld computers in conjunction with GeoXH and GeoXT GPS receivers, to do real-time, on-site mapping of over 1,300 architectural features, including hundreds of "house mounds," in just one acre of the site. They took 25 to 30 data points on each feature but were still able to complete the initial full-coverage mapping in a month. "The technology accelerated our ability to get meaningful data," he said. "We were able to create an architectural typology of the site right away!" The city was part of the Purépecha Empire , also known as the Tarascan Empire. The Purépecha controlled a great chunk of western Mexico with a fortified frontier. On the other side of that frontier? The much better known Aztec Empire. The technology, and the strategy Fisher developed for its use, allowed the near-immediate capture of a frieze-like picture of the urbanization of a Purépecha center that enabled empire. The city, which prior to Fisher's work, was nothing but a couple of ruins and a pin in a map, turned out to be five square kilometers. Without the hand-held, on-site tech, it would have possibly taken seasons of painstaking mapping to develop the picture. "The Lake Pátzcuaro Basin was the geopolitical core of the empire with a dense population, centralized settlement systems, engineered environment and a socially stratified society," said Fisher. Although the city was initially discovered during the 2009 season, Fisher is currently presenting his findings officially at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis. His team will continue mapping the city this summer. Fisher specializes in climate change archaeology, plotting changes in climate and the cultural adaptation that went with it, including identifying which strategies worked and which failed. A project studying this, Legacies of Resilience , is partially funded by the National Science Foundation. "One of the great challenges for the 21st century will be creating solutions to link social and environmental change," said Fisher. "Archaeology is uniquely poised to make a significant contribution to this debate by helping to explain trajectories of socio-ecosystem evolution over long time periods." When Fisher heads back the site on April 18, he intends to make greater use of Google SketchUp , a 3D modeling program. He already used it to make in-field sketches but this season he and his team will use it extensively to create a portfolio of walkable sketches and a three-dimensional picture of the urban center and its agriculture. The same technology we use in our daily lives is helping to make that contribution possible. I'm sorry. But exactly how cool is that? Fessin' up time. I hooked Chris up with his computer system during the time I worked for its manufacturer. I did so because the project, climate change archaeology, was so cool I almost fainted when he told me about it. Discuss

Here is the original post:
Mobile Tech Helps Uncover Mesoamerican Lost City

Google’s Latest Acquisition: Plink, Mobile Visual Search Startup

cgseo — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:03:54 +0000

Google's newest acquisition is Plink , makers of a visual search application for mobile devices called PlinkArt. The app "recognizes almost any work of art," claims the app's homepage , "just by taking a photo of it." In addition to the visual identification aspect, Plink users can also discuss the art within the app, send images to friends or order prints of the artwork. On its own, Plink sounds like an entertaining and educational tool, but one whose real-life implementations would probably be limited to a tour of an art museum or a late-night cram session for an Art History exam. But Google didn't just buy Plink for the art it can identify - that's just an added bonus. It's likely that Google bought the company more for the algorithm that powers the smart application and brains of those who invented it. Sponsor According to a post on the Plink company blog , developers Mark Cummins and James Philbin, Oxford PhD students whose company was only four months old when acquired, will now join Google to commence work on the search giant's "Google Goggles" project. This ambitious, futuristic mobile search application is already available for Google's own mobile OS, Android, in a limited format. At the moment, you can use Google Goggles to take pictures of real-world objects like landmarks, logos, books, contact info, places, wine and - oh yes - artwork, too. The mobile application then recognizes the images and objects in your pictures and that, in turn, kicks off a Google search for whatever item it finds. While on the one hand, it does seem amazing that a mobile application can "see" the world like this, the reality is that this sort of mobile search experience is still in its infancy. Unlike with Google's text-based search engine, there's no guarantee that the app will be able to recognize the image in your photo. Was the photo too blurry? Too dark? Or was it a building (book/place/etc.) that the app doesn't know yet? But just as how the original tablet computers were heavy, clunky, inelegant devices that blazoned a trail that led us to the sleek and shiny iPad, a tablet some now claim will "revolutionize" computing, Google Goggles could one day lead to a world where everything we see - including people! - can be identified through the eyes of camera and an algorithm. That's a somewhat frightening concept, but one that's also incredibly exciting at the same time, we have to admit. Plink will now become a part of that effort, enhancing Goggles' artwork search engine while the engineers bring their talent and ideas to forward the project as a whole. "There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision," reads the blog post signed "Mark & James." "It's going to be a lot of fun," it concludes. For us, too. (Originally reported via the Guardian ) Discuss

Originally posted here:
Google's Latest Acquisition: Plink, Mobile Visual Search Startup

"Do Crew" Augmented Reality Cartoons Help Get Kids Off the Couch

cgseo — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:00:00 +0000

New York-based online video management company whistleBox has developed a new browser-based augmented reality (AR) experience geared directly at children by integrating it with the one thing every kid loves: cartoons. The project, dubbed Do Crew , is a series of animated stories for kids that include interactive AR games and challenges that the kids can play with using a webcam attached to a desktop or laptop computer. Sponsor In examples shown in videos on the Do Crew site, kids can control cartoon vehicles by jumping or leaning side-to-side, and can play other games by waving their hands in front of the camera. Think Project Natal but in a web browser, and integrated within kids' cartoons. This is an excellent use of augmented reality technology because it is a practical application with genuine value, an attribute we discussed last week as being the strongest way AR can break into the mainstream. Best of all, with games like these, kids will no longer be passively glued to their sofas as this new AR project encourages the kids of stand and use their body and arms to control the games. The Do Crew developers state that their mission with the game is help combat the growing epidemic of child obesity. "Children will not stop watching television, and parents will not stop feeling guilt about that fact. So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a rare opportunity to acknowledge this epidemic and treat it at the most basic level," the site says. "The Do Crew team is dedicated to making all passive media active, and we believe that with a little technology and imagination we can reimage the personal computer or console video game system as effective electronic exercise equipment." Going after the children's entertainment market could also be a boon for the augmented reality industry which has yet to find the public spotlight. Time Magazine named AR as one of the top tech trends to watch in 2010 , and by engaging children, AR may be able to make significant strides towards mass public adoption and acception. Actually, AR experiences aimed at kids are not a new concept; a LEGO Store installation that helped kids see 3D reprensentations of model kits right on their boxes, and a web-based Topps baseball card experience that made the players on the cards come alive in 3D are two of the most well known AR roll-outs to date. New projects like Do Crew are not only great for kids, but also for AR as a whole as it strives to gain credibility and traction with as wide an audience as possible. Discuss

Social Gaming: Legit Gameplay or a Play for Your Cash?

cgseo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:00:00 +0000

There is a question being bandied about by people in the game industry. It effects something you do, or, if you don't, your friend, roommate, wife or fencing opponent does. Social gaming. Is social gaming - games played on social networks, like Facebook and MySpace - actually gaming? Millions of users have already given their tacit approval that there is indeed entertainment value in those games. But what puts hardcore gamers' skivvies in a knot is the idea that there has been total sacrifice of gameplay in exchange for filthy lucre - that these "games" have been so neutered that they only outwardly resemble gaming. And so the more important question is this: Are hardcore gamers simply demanding that all cars on the road be sports cars, or are they a bellwether of a shift in social gaming from click-click-click, to quality? Sponsor "Social games are making tons of money," said Karen Clark, a Project Manager at Electronic Arts. "They are like slot machines made legal and web-accessible. There's a lot of investment. Most game people think these 'games' suck because they are more like exercises in clicking and monetization of customers than they are fun." It is a burgeoning area. In December, Digital Sky Technologies bought into Zynga for $180 million. EA snapped up PlayFish for $400 million and Playdom, whose "Social City" game racked up 10 million players in about a month of existence, scored a $43 million series B . Most social games as well as some casual games make use a business model of selling in-game "currency" for the purchase of anything from fertilizer to a straight-razor and combining that with player-privileges sales and advertising. "The business model for social games worked really well," said Mark Hendrickson of Big Fish, a Seattle-based gaming company, "because there were only a few companies who could harvest all the affiliate money and swamp anyone else's efforts by putting that money right back into the Facebook ad network. I really think they should have called it 'Facebook gaming.' Social gaming is only on the radar because it is a really, really cheap way to possibly make a whole lot of money, if implemented properly. "As Facebook goes, so goes social gaming." Tami Baribeau, the producer of Metaplace's Island Life game on Facebook, sees it very differently. "Games go where people go," she said. "Social networks are clearly a hot platform right now because it's where people are spending time on the web." She attributes the fiction that gameplay is compromised to hardcore gamer prejudice more than to any pandering to a lowest common denominator. "The fact that social games are whittled down to their basic core mechanics and feedback loop mean that they're instantly understandable, casual, and the fun is easy to find. This is why they open up the market to so many people, and such a different demographic than traditional console/PC gaming. Traditional gamers don't like to admit (or simply don't realize) that games do not have to be massive, 3D, scripted, deep, and immersive experiences in order to be fun and engaging and monetizable. " Alex Swanson, Project Lead at Playdom, also disagrees with the notion that good gameplay is stepped back in social gaming. "Initially computers themselves were extremely complex and difficult to learn, so the platform self-selected for people that were tolerant of (or even attracted by) complexity," he said. "Since then computers have be come much more accessible, creating a gap in the market between the average computer user and the average 'gamer.' "Part of the reason that games like these were never very successful prior to the existence of social networks is once again an issue of accessibility. These games are built around the idea that the user has a connected identity. Trying to ask users to build out their social graph as part of entering a game would create an insurmountable barrier to entry. Fortunately, Facebook has already convinced the players to do this by providing its own unique benefits." If you play social games, you probably do not care about this argument. You play because it's fun. Maybe that's enough. Maybe it's not for one group of gamers to tell another that they oughtn't love what they love. "All I know," said one social gamer, " is I've met the nicest people playing Mafia Wars." For another view of social gaming, see ReadWriteWeb's post on Armchair Revolutionary . Discuss

See the article here:
Social Gaming: Legit Gameplay or a Play for Your Cash?

Fancy Hands: Virtual Assistants, Aardvark Style

cgseo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 03:18:26 +0000

"It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore." That's how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands , his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee. Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person. Sponsor Roden says the people he's hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha . He wrote a program to sift through piles of applications and plans on using the company's own service providers to select new hires in the future as well. Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He's a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O'Reilly book about building real-time websites , due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo . Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He's bootstrapping it himself "and my wife says it's ok," he says. Casting The Tasks Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a "sweater bag" to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully. Roden says that for now he's doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He's got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it "the eHarmony of Getting Things Done." Social search Aardvark started out as a lot of manual human effort behind public facing technology, then became a search-sorting algorithmic people-connector that Google bought for millions. Fancy Hands is half human and half-machine, too. It connects your emailed task requests with the right staff members to fill them. In that way it's a little reminiscent of Aardvark , the social search startup that began as a human bucket brigade behind a facade of technology and ended up a complex web of computer science that Google acquired this Winter for millions of dollars . At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work. The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he's hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work. This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with "Bob's Heating System Repair" and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with "hello, Bob's heating repair, this is Bob." And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity. He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because "we're a brand new company, just starting." I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business. These Hands Are Fancy People familiar with this kind of "human powered micro-outsourcing" will no doubt be familiar with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It's a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of. These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That's just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience. There's something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There's something intriguing about that. For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. "If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands," he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds. Photo by Justin Ouellette . Discuss

Excerpt from:
Fancy Hands: Virtual Assistants, Aardvark Style

E-Books on the iPad: iBooks vs. Kindle for iPad

cgseo — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:58:25 +0000

Ever since Steve Jobs first announced iBooks for the iPad, pundits have been wondering about the future of the Kindle and similar e-book readers in the face of this new competition. Now that we actually have access to an iPad , we had a chance to take a closer look at both the iBooks and Amazon's Kindle for iPad apps. We are still waiting for the B&N iPad app, but both iBooks and iPad for Kindle already highlight the iPad's potential as an e-book reader. Sponsor iBooks It doesn't come as a surprise that Apple managed to develop the prettier e-reader app. Switching from the iBooks store - which looks a lot like the App Store - to your bookshelf is done through a nifty animation. Newly downloaded books and samples smoothly slide into the bookshelf and thanks to a faux 3d look and a page-flip animation, the app itself mimics the look and feel of a book. When you click on a book in your shelf, it flips open and zoom to the page you left off. Flipping the iPad to landscape mode switches iBooks from displaying on page per screen to a more book-like two-page view. Given how wide the iPad's screen its, this makes it a lot easier to read as the individual lines are much shorter. With regards to customization, iBooks allows its users to change the size of the font, but also the font itself (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman and Verdana). You can also set the screen brightness right from within any book, which is great for reading at night. As far as we can see, however, you can't switch to white text on a black background. Another neat feature is the search function that feels a lot like Spotlight on OSX. This search feature is extremely fast - though sadly it only works for the book that you are currently reading. You can't search through all of your library, though you can initiate a Google and Wikipedia search from within any book (these open up Safari, however). The iBooks app can also read DRM-free ePub texts. You simply download the e-book to your computer, drag it into iTunes and after your next sync, it will appear in iBooks. iBooks Store The iBooks store mostly features books between $9.99 and $14.99 (with a few outliers). There are currently about 30,000 free books in the store (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and about 60,000 books from most major publishers - though there are still some holdouts . Every book in the store allows you to download a free sample (sometimes more than 50 pages long). Kindle for iPad Amazon, of course, offers a far larger store than Apple. With close to 450,000 paid and free books. It's worth noting that the Kindle store also launched with slightly more books (about 88,000). Compared to iBooks, Kindle for iPad feels a bit more pedestrian, as it doesn't feature fancy animations. Pages just slide left and right and instead of two-page view when you flip the iPad to landscape mode, you just get a single page with a very wide layout. The Kindle app also doesn't allow users to customize the font of a book, though it does offer the standard screen brightness and font size settings. Unlike the iBooks app, which only has a bookmark feature, the Kindle app allows users to annotate books and highlight passages in these texts. For students, this is a must-have feature and it's surprising that Apple didn't include this in its app. As with its other mobile apps, Amazon forces its readers to download apps from the Kindle online store. The only way to access this is through the browser. Here, Apple's ability to integrate the store into the e-reader application is a big plus. Verdict: iBooks is the Better App; Kindle is the Better Platform In terms of functionality, the choice between the two apps depends on your needs. If you need to highlight and if you want to take notes, then the Kindle app is the only way to go. If you just want to read, the iBooks apps is just fine. Prices in both the iBooks and Kindle store are likely to be very similar - especially now that Amazon is slowly giving up on its idea of selling all e-books at $9.99. The real advantage of the Kindle app is that you can read and sync books with more devices. You can start reading a book on the iPad at home or on the plane, for example, and then continue reading on your iPhone while you are waiting in line at the post office. Chances are that Apple will launch an iBooks app for the iPhone sooner or later, but until then, investing in Kindle books seems like a smarter decision as you don't lock yourself completely into Apple's smaller ecosystem. More About the iPad Launch Click here for our full archive of posts about the iPad launch . Discuss

Excerpt from:
E-Books on the iPad: iBooks vs. Kindle for iPad