Hasta La Gadget!

Updated at 5:30 p.m. Eastern to add comment from K-NFB.

This week, K-NFB, an e-reading company founded by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation for the Blind, launched its much-anticipated Blio reading app and e-book store. Blio was immediately and widely panned by publishers, developers and readers.

“Many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility,” wrote Laura Dawson, a digital reading industry consultant, formerly of BarnesAndNoble.com. K-NFB initially promised to make e-books more accessible to blind readers; yet Windows, currently its only enhanced books platform, has known text-to-speech conversion issues.

K-NFB and Kurzweil responded by saying the software had been released before a fully-accessible version was ready, and that they plan to release an improved version next week.

“People understandably have very high expectations,” Kurzweil said in an interview with Wired.com Thursday. “We believe Blio is very usable and has many features other book formats don’t. And there are many features that we want to add.”

In addition to bug fixes and other tweaks, an accessibility release scheduled for October 25 will work with Freedom Scientific’s JAWS, screen reader software for Windows specifically tailored for blind users. The 1.0 version released Tuesday relied on Windows’ built-in text-to-speech capabilities.

K-NFB spokesperson Peter Chapman acknowledged the problems with Blio’s text-to-speech in an interview with Publishers Weekly, but blamed the platform, not the books: “the TTS software on most Windows machines isn’t very good.” Yet many Windows XP users were unable to even install Blio’s software. (This has since been resolved.)

K-NFB also confirmed that an iOS 4 version for iPhone and iPod Touch is currently in private beta, and that an iPad version will shortly follow the iPhone, probably sometime after November’s release of iOS 4.2. Android and Mac OS X versions are also in development.

Users weren’t the only ones frustrated with Blio. Hadrien Gardeur, founder and CEO of free e-books site FeedBooks, complained on Twitter that Blio was offering downloads from FeedBooks’ catalog without permission: “Hey Blio, next time that you add our OPDS [Open Publishing Distribution System] catalog to a commercial product, send us an e-mail first.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Gardeur noted that FeedBooks only allows other systems to include their catalog under the following conditions:

• full support for the EPUB standard (Blio converts EPUB into its own format and can’t support EPUB with other companies’ DRM)
• support the entire OPDS catalog (Blio only includes some of FeedBooks’ feeds)
• Add other OPDS catalogs to its library (Blio can’t do that)
• allow payment for commercial content through open standards (Blio doesn’t)

For these reasons, Gardeur asked Blio not to include FeedBooks’ content in its initial launch; according to Gardeur, K-NFB went ahead and included part of Feedbooks’ OPDS catalog anyways. Since FeedBooks has a planned system update forthcoming, it will most likely break Blio’s access to the catalog.

Kurzweil stated Thursday that K-NFB was continuing to work with Feedbooks and other free book providers; he credited the dispute over Blio’s use of their feeds to a miscommunication.

Finally, as we noted earlier this week, Toshiba launched its own branded version of the Blio application, store and e-book catalog called Toshiba Book Place. Toshiba is offering 6,000 titles at launch; Blio 11,000. This puts Blio at a distinct disadvantage against the 700,000 e-books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers for sale from Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s library of over 1,000,000 e-books.

It’s not precisely clear why there’s a gap in the number of books offered by Toshiba and Blio. But the brand and store fragmentation is another confusing component of a deeply confusing product launch. It’s especially troubling for those who have been hoping for serious innovation in making e-readers accessible to users of all abilities.

Image via Blio.com

See Also:

• UPDATE: Toshiba, Blio Jump In With Enhanced E-Books For Laptops …
• Singularity Proponent Ray Kurzweil Reinvents the Book, Again …
• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Apple's Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev's Creation
• Amazon's Kindle 2 Pits Authors Versus the Blind
• Apple's iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Free E-Books …
• Copyright Owners Fight Plan to Release E-Books for the Blind …

It’s like the saying goes, patent infringement suits make strange bedfellows. Or something like that. Microsoft has been joined by an impressive cast of companies, in its battle against i4i.

The software giant appealed to the Supreme Court back in August, in an attempt to reverse a $290 million award over a feature in Microsoft Word said to infringe on an i4i patent. The company is looking to redefine the way patents are validated–and it has some high-profile allies.

Some of the biggest corporations in the world (including a handful of Microsoft competitors) have filed amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs, including Apple, Google, Intel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Facebook, Walmart, and Toyota.

Microsoft is battling to lower the bar for the defense in such suits. Says SeattlePI,

During infringement lawsuits, courts apply the “clear and convincing evidence” standard to determine whether a patent — one already approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — is indeed valid. Microsoft, and other companies that deal heavily in intellectual property, would like to see the standard changed to “preponderance of evidence.”

The new rules, at least in theory, would help protect large companies from so-called “patent trolls.”

When I saw this Raytheon XOS 2 suit, I immediately thought of the scene in Iron Man 2 where a poor “volunteer” soldier is almost broken in two, his body snapped and wrung by an experimental exoskeleton he is wearing. So you can see how surprised I was to see Agent Phil Coulson from Iron Man wearing it in this YouTube video.

The XOS 2 is an upgrade to the original XOS built for military use by contractor Raytheon. It is lighter, faster and uses half the power of the XOS, and – according to one of the uninjured test-soldiers – lets you press 200-pounds or do pushups with 150-pounds on your back without even feeling it. Check this thing out:

While the suit is clearly perfect for fighting, when it makes it into service in five years it will be used just like Ripley’s power-loader in the movie Aliens. A tethered, full-body XOS would be used for loading weapons and supplies (and, of course, fighting Alien queens in airlocks). A pants- only version, encircling legs and waist, could be used in the field to help troops carry heavy loads.

After seeing that soldier twisted like a pretzel in Iron Man 2, I have had an irrational fear of exoskeletons. But I’d love to take this one out for a spin. Imagine doing sports with this thing: you’d slug every ball out over the stadium walls.

For more on exoskeletons in the military in general, and suspiciously timely celebrity appearances in particular, check out the coverage over at our sister blog Danger Room.

Raytheon Unveils 2nd Generation Exoskeleton Robotic Suit [Raytheon]

See Also:

• Real-Life Iron Man Outfit Hyped in New Video
• Secrets of Iron Man's New Suits
• Iron Man For Real: Raytheon XOS 2 Exoskeleton – Video – Wired
• Raytheon XOS 2 Exoskeleton (Unedited) – Video – Wired

Well, here’s a surprise. During its customary new product teardown, iFixit discovered a full 8GB of on-board storage inside the second generation Apple TV, in the form of a Samsung K9LCG08U1M 8GB NAND flash chip.

That’s not a ton, granted (especially in light of the fact that its predecessor had either 40- or 160GB), but a bit more than expected, given the fact that the device isn’t designed to serve as a hard drive for media, in the way the first Apple TV was.

iFixit notes that the chip is the same as the one discovered during a teardown of Apple’s iPad. “This is a pretty remarkable amount of storage for a $99 device,” the site wrote.

The storage is most likely used to cache media streamed to the device, so you don’t have to deal with buffering, should there be a lag in your connection. Still, iFixit puts it best, “we wonder what else you could do with 8 GB of exploitable storage.”