The Skiff is not only the state-of-the-art e-book reader it is also a fully interactive media tool.  First of all, this new breed of e-reader offers complete touch screen capabilities.  Not only can you interact with your newspaper by scrolling through articles with your stylus, but you can also write in the margins (or all over the article if that suits you.) 

The fact that you are reading this right now is evidence that the nature of the way people get their news is changing, but it is still a bit difficult to take a blog or e-zine on the train with you in the morning.  One of the many cool gadgets being showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show is an innovative e-news reader that will change the way you read  your news. The bright, shining example of new media journalism toys is the *Skiff Reader*.  The Skiff is the conceptual lovechild of the e-book reader, the artist’s tablet, and the dataphone, and it’s been optimized for your enjoyment of, and interaction with, the modern media.

We talked about changes that will appear on the Amvona Blog this year. You would be pleased to know that this year we aim to focus our approach more on sustainable living practices and add more exclusive news to our Blog. New team members will also be joining us this year. Another important and significant change is that from this week onwards, Greg Lemelson, CEO at Amvona.com & Flekt.com will make regular contributions to the Amvona Blog.

The battle over carriage fees was previously deferred by the addition of supplemental cable properties, such as FX, Fox Sports, and Fox News. This strategy has become less feasible in recent years, as many providers have reached their limits on the sheer number of channels. This puts the industry back at the position of networks demanding extra cash infusions from providers, and many fear this episode will be repeated ad nauseam. Though financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, it was generally considered a victory for Fox, and Time Warner subscribers will likely see their rates go up as a result.

This will probably also draw additional scrutiny from politicians and regulators, who weighed in on the Fox vs. Time Warner spat. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass), said he would request the FCC "to intervene and mandate continued carriage and arbitration." FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski then weighed in, saying "Companies shouldn’t force cable-watching football fans to scramble for other means of TV delivery on New Year’s weekend."

image courtesy of screenrant.com

Last year's winner of the Underhanded C Contest was John Meacham, who used a 55-line entry to create a malfunctioning redaction program. He managed to write a program that subtly obscured the redacted data without eliminating it. The blocked-out areas of any images could thus be recovered.The goal of this year's contest is to create a luggage sorting program for the fictitious UCK Airlines. The code must organize the luggage by date and time, ID number, flight number, departing airport code, destination airport code, and also be able to receive comments or additional instructions by the airline employees.

Dr. Scott Craver wants you to create a surreptitiously misbehaving computer program. Craver, a Professor of Engineering at the University of Binghamton in New York, says the goal of his Underhanded C Contest is to "write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. In this contest you must write C code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil." In short, programmers must create a form of malware that passes visual inspection by other programmers. The contest opened on Dec 29, and entries will be accepted until March 1. The winner will receive a gift certificate to ThinkGeek.com

According to the makers of comic reading software, the inherent difficulty in viewing comic book scans on a mobile device is the ability to adjust image and text sizes, zoom, track, and switch to different views. This is especially problematic for comic books, where panels do not necessarily flow in a conventional manner, and artwork often breaks out from the panel format entirely. Many mobile devices downscale image resolutions and distort images to fit their screen aspect ratios. This can make art unrecognizable or words illegible. Reading comics on a desktop, laptop, or via the old paper format would eliminate this issue, but sometimes it's important for nerds to venture out of the lair, and wasting paper is bad.That's where mobile comic readers come in, and if Mobile Insider blogger Steve Smith is to be believed, you can find comic scans dating back to the '30s and '40s.

An old favorite is rising from the morgues of newsprint to find new life in cyberspace. All hail the return of the comic. In the early 20th century, comic strips were sometimes the biggest selling point for a newspaper. Literacy rates were low, and comics often had limited dialog, attracting a broad audience. Local rivals would engage in bidding wars for a popular comic. After newspapers moved online, they became largely decoupled from comics. Now programmers are creating applications to bring comics to the Internet. A number of different options are available, providing access to different catalogs. The UClick syndicate offers its readers popular comic strips such as Doonesbury and Calvin & Hobbes. It also provides access to a number of political cartoons. A number of similar comic reading devices are available through Android, but without dedicated libraries. If you'd prefer something more specific, there are dedicated apps for both Dilbert and Garfield.

Some business analysts feel the statements made by Amazon signal a new digital revolution, where e-book sales will maintain strong growth trends and potentially hurt the sales of physical books. Tom Taulli of Blogging Stocks writes "this is not necessarily a sign that traditional books will vanish and everyone will be lugging a Kindle. However, visionary people [...] realize that the future will increasingly be digital. So, why not get started now? What's more, this trend will be another hit to mainstream publishers. Selling books will become more about using digital marketing, not getting shelf space at the local book store. Of course, this is certainly good news for Amazon.com."

Alex Pham of The Los Angeles Times cautions that while the Kindle is selling faster than McDonald's can make Hot Cakes, consumers should wait until next year to buy any competing products. "Next year will bring a wider array of choices, fancy features and, very likely, lower prices, analysts predict. A number of companies are holding off their product launches until next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. One company, Plastic Logic, said it would show at CES a shatter-resistant touch-screen reader that's the size of a sheet of notebook paper." This is just the icing on the cake for Amazon, whose press release trumpets "The last Local Express Delivery order that was delivered in time for Christmas, was placed by a Prime member and went to Seattle. It was a Kindle that was ordered at 1:43 p.m. on Christmas Eve and delivered at 4:57 p.m. that evening."

Asian news site Khabrein also predicts a strong future for the Kindle abroad, saying "for readers E-books are easy to read and handle and thus its popularity is going pay with each passing day. With more competitors hitting the market it is expected that it will penetrate further to developing countries."

Here's a page-turner: Amazon.com's Kindle is the company's most gifted product for the American market this Christmas, and the most gifted product in the company's history.
They did not provide any quantitative sales data, but founder and CEO Jeff Bezos credits the Kindle's massive library, which contains over 390,000 titles, many of them best sellers and new releases. Bezos went on to say "We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history. On behalf of Amazon.com employees around the world, we wish everyone happy holidays and happy reading!"

AdMob won't provide exact revenue figures, but claim they're approaching $100 million this year. That's a drop in the bucket for Google, but they're counting on the acquisition to post a rapid growth rate. This has attracted attention from the FCC, whose antitrust officials have asked Google for additional information on the deal. Google is already the largest Internet advertiser, and this deal would give them ownership of the company many feel is at the forefront of cell phone advertising. Now federal authorities wonder if the company has become too big for the good of the business. "The fear is Google and AdMob together will flatten the mobile advertising landscape," says The Business Insider, though Google insists the deal is purely calculated for extra revenue, and group product manager Paul Feng says "the rapidly growing mobile advertising space is highly competitive with more than a dozen mobile ad networks."

Four years ago, Omar Hamoui was just a grad student trying to add a project to his resume. Now he's $750 million richer, and his advertising network AdMob has been labeled by many as "Google's secret weapon."
Hamoui was a student at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School when he launched the network; a husband and father in his late 20s, burdened with financial hardship and an uncertain future. Now 32, he is a cell phone advertising pioneer, and his distribution system is a watershed. His deceptively simple concept established a method for advertisers to reach customers across multiple cell phone platforms and networks. The trick was creating a way for AdMob to circumvent the strict content controls that wireless carriers placed upon their networks, managing all data and images that customers saw. Hamoui's trick was the creation of "walled gardens," which allowed independent programmers to create for-profit applications, targeted for consumption by cell phone subscribers. Growth was slow at first, but that changed when Apple launched the iPhone.

In a paper published by a panel of three judges, the Court of Appeals said "The district court found that Microsoft captured 80 percent of the custom XML market with its infringing Word products, forcing i4i to change its business strategy." The court documents go on to state that "after its effective date, the injunction prohibits Microsoft from selling, offering to sell, importing, or using copies of Word with the infringing custom XML editor." This injunction was originally handed down in the August 12 verdict, but was stayed upon appeal by Microsoft. It is now slated to take effect Jan 11. Ironically, the i4i website openly promotes Microsoft Word's support of custom XML.

A federal appellate court may have the last word today, regarding Microsoft Word 2007. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a ruling dating back to August 12, 2009. The ruling concerned a lawsuit by small Toronto-based software developer i4i, who claimed industry giant Microsoft violated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) on a method for reading XML. The ruling prohibits Microsoft from selling any more copies of Word 2007 with custom XML functionality, and also requires the company to pay $290 million to i4i.