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I had the opportunity to travel to Sony a few weeks ago and preview the new Sony Reader hands on and meet with the product manager. Overall, I enjoyed the Sony Reader. I love reading books so this is something that naturally appeals to me. It's clear that Sony has done a lot of work on this and has been working on it for a long, long time. At my previous company, we worked with Franklin Electronics on their eBookman product, so I understand how hard it is to build a complete system like what Sony is trying to make.

I was really impressed with the screen on the device. It uses a 2nd generation ePaper from a company called eInk . The lack of good resolution, high contrast screens is something that has held back reading documents electronically for me. It just tires the eyes too much to read anything more than a few pages on a computer screen. And while I did often carry ebooks on my Palm device in the past, the screen was just too small. Well, that doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore. I was also really impressed by the weight and thinness of the unit and the fact that the battery is good for 7500 page views.

Here is a video I took of flipping through some pages on the Reader, and I uploaded some pictures as well. The unit is small and light enough that you can hold it in one hand and just flip through the pages as opposed to paper books which require you to hold them with two hands or least use two hands to switch pages. I thought the user interface was very good and easy to use without much instruction. With just a few moments of instruction we were up and running and I am sure we could have figured out how to use the Reader without that.

I liked the fact that you could change the font size easily to make the text easier to read. This is something of course what you cannot do in a real book. The docking station is really handsome. I liked the fact you listen to audio at the same time as you are reading. I liked the bookmark system. I liked that the device could natively read PDF files. They connect store reminded me of the iTunes store and I thought that was good. I think the Sony reps said they expect to have about 10,000 or more books available at launch.

I am hoping that this product will be successful and that there will be follow on versions and further innovation in this area. I admire that Sony is trying to reinvent the category of ebooks. Here are some things that I thought could be improved upon in future versions or updates:

• I was disappointed the device is not natively support HTML or connect to the Internet directly or through an accessory like a WiFi modem. This seems especially strange to me given the importance of the web and user generated content.
• I was surprised that by default when you buy books from the Connect store you have to manually drag them to your device for them to sync. I expected that they would just sync automatically.
• The unit could look slicker. If you compare the industrial design of the Reader with something like the Mylo, VAIO UMPC, or the PSP it almost doesn't look like it comes from the same company.
• I was surprised that the cases don't have pockets where you can put notes or business cards, so this is an obvious opportunity for people who make cases. I don’t.
• I was disappointed that you need an external backlight. They showed us a third-party backlight that at only $10 seemed very reasonable. If you like to read in bed, I think you need one.

Everyone knows I love Sony gadgets. Last week, I got my Sony Mylo device. I finally got it connected last night, so now I can write about it. “Mylo� stands for My Life Online. Mylo is the new WiFi communicator from Sony. Here are some pictures of what you get out of the box for $349.

First of all, the hardware is impressively small and sexy. The industrial design is very appealing and they pack a lot of stuff into a tiny package. Sony hardware engineers did an impressive job. The Mylo can play videos and MP3s, show pictures, and includes Opera web browser, Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, and more. It is an 802.11b device. The Mylo is multi-tasking so you can listen to music while you do other things, and you can keep all the communications apps running simultaneously. I found the device quite responsive.

The controls except the keyboard are well designed, and the device is fairly intuitive to use for a proprietary device. The battery life seems good. The device is lightweight, and the rechargeable battery is removable like most cellphones so you can carry a spare. It comes with some nice headphones. The device has 1GB of internal RAM plus expansion which is pretty good. You can buy it in black or white which is nice.

While the Mylo definately is a cool device, I thought some things could use improvement.

Even though I have relatively small hands, I found the keyboard a little too small and the repeat rate on the keys is not good. It doesn't have a good feel. Worse however, is that the keyboard is not backlit so I cannot use the device without good lighting. That is a pity because the screen is otherwise quite bright.

I have two WiFi access points, and I could only get it to connect to one. A third public access point in my neighborhood (yes, we have free WiFi in my Silicon Valley neighborhood) it kind of connects to but not really and it fails. And if you don’t have WiFi, the device is cute but not so useful. The process for connecting to WiFi access points while not bad, could use some improvement and robustness. It would be good if the device also supported Bluetooth (for connecting through a cellphone), or 802.11g. All the devices at my house are 802.11g so I had to switch my router back to mixed from “g-only� to get the Mylo to work. Otherwise, I would have been 0 for 3.

Since the Mylo is all about being online, I expected to see more of an online portal and wireless services for the device. When you register for your Mylo ID, you don't get too much more than 3 offers from third parties. Moreover, this device is supposed to be targetted at young people from the "Myspace generation." I tried browsing to myspace.com but the experience is not so good--I could not navigate the site. If the mylo could be used with myspace, I imagine my daughters would want one! And youtube.com videos I couldn't see either because the browser lacks Flash. :(

The Mylo is only being promoted and sold online. That kind of makes sense to me. What I didn't get is the campaign “Rush Mylo� which is some “Animal House�–esque spoof on fraternities. I know I am not in the target market for Mylo anymore, but I was in fraternity in college and I found the campaign bizarre and somewhat offensive. I don’t see how it would appeal to the vast majority of students who are not interested in fraternities at all either. I hope I am either wrong, or they come up with a better marketing campaign.

A friend of mine asked me to write about how I am starting my new software company with (almost) no money. The answer is very carefully, remotely and with some open source. Here are some resources I am using on almost a daily basis: craigslist, rentacoder, and elance. I am not saying these sites are full of great programmers. In fact, I have had plenty of horror stories in the past with off shore resources I found on those places. But when you have little money, you don't have much choice but to try. And I have a few friends who claim to have had success finding resources on these sites. I would love to hear any success stories people have had and best practices on these sites. This process reminds me of the show "Junkyard Wars." I did manage to connect with one really good logo designer recently on eLance, so if you need a good logo I have just the place for you.

Another one of my bad consumer experience stories. I have just tried for about 1 hour to get through to Sears home delivery, Hillsdale Mall store, for a friend of mine. It is impossible to reach a live person. There are no humans to answer the line, and neither is there voice mail to leave a message. When I asked to speak with a manager at the store, I was transfered to someone in the shoe department. They told me there are no managers around. So basically the store is being run out of the shoe department. Finally, I tried to contact them via their website and leave a complaint. Well, they will not have any of that. Eventhough I filled in all the info, I got, "In order for your request to be processed, please enter your name, a telephone number, an email address, as well as your comment or concern." Of course, there no customer service email address. Sears cannot be long for this world....

Here is my first YouTube video. Which actually turns out to be two videos as you will learn in a moment. The specific content of this video may not be interesting to you unless your kids also go to the same school as mine. I took this video at the dedication ceremony for my children's new school DIscovery Charter School. What I found interesting is how difficult and how time-consuming it is to upload something like this to the Internet. There were no completely free tools to do this acceptably either that I could find. I started by taking this video using my Samsung Digital camcorder which has the great advantage of capturing video directly to AVI files. The dedication ceremony was 18 minutes long and at highest quality that resulted in an 872MB file. My first problem was to reduce this to a manageable size. I attempted to load the video into Apple QuickTime Professional but it would not accept the large original file and just died. I could watch the video in Windows movie maker but they were reading the options that I found useful to export it to a better format. I often go to YouTube, a popular video sharing site, so I decided to try to upload the file there. You cannot upload files that are larger than 100 MB or longer than 10 minutes. YouTube also prefers 320x240 videos in MPG format. My video was very different so knew I had some serious work to do. I searched and downloaded a variety of video conversion tools attending to find one that would resample the video into something manageable. After much searching I settled on Ulead Video Studio 10. First I had the video converted to iPod format but this was still too large. So after some tweaking using the custom save as option I was able to get the right format file and make the entire video under 100 MB. Unfortunate still too long for YouTube, so I had to cut the video into two pieces. For me, Apple QuickTime professional was the quickest way. These conversions all took a long time, and I have a very fast PC with a lot of RAM. Finally it took over half an hour to upload the pieces on to YouTube site. Part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOLlWMTlOc Part two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXxyCZ-w_XY

If anyone knows how to hard reset an LG-2000 cell phone, let me know. My daughter has forgotten the PIN code to this phone. There doesn't appear to be anyway to reset this phone back to factory settings to clear this. We even went to the Cingular store and got no where. They told me to throw the phone away. Basically, the phone is now a $169 paperweight. Incredible. Thanks, LG.

Update: 9/25. It turns out that I got bad advice from the Cingular store that I went to, and LG is not to blame. I went to another store and they were easily able to unlock the SIM card. Again, incredibly, the first Cingular store I went to told me to throw the phone away. Wow, how incredbly knowledgeable these reps are....

I will be at the Handango Partner Summitt and CTIA in Los Angeles next week if anyone would like to meet and catch up. And while I am there, I might have to stop by the Commerce Casino.

As of yesterday, I have started fundraising for my new startup. It's interesting so far the conversations I have had with people since just putting this word out, and what I am learning. A really freaky coincidence happened to me today too which maybe is some sort of omen or just randomness. A client of mine needed me to deliver something urgently to them at a top VC firm on Sand Hill Road where they were making a pitch. If I wrote the name of the firm, and if you follow Silicon Valley news, you would probably recognize it. I don't get asked often to come to these places, so I spent some time in the lobby of the firm looking at the memoribilia they displayed of their successful investments and it was cool.