Hasta La Gadget!

Kobo, the e-reader and tablet company owned by Rakuten (aka Japan’s answer to Amazon), is today taking the covers off four new devices — three new Android-based Arc tablets and a new Aura e-reader. And it is using the occasion to kick off a redoubled effort to focus on a specific segment in the market — die-hard bookworms — to help itself gain an edge over Amazon and differentiate itself better in the market. Now, in addition to its catalogue of 4 million books, Kobo has built in integrations with Pocket, new reading-focused storefronts (starting with a store for children’s books and one for magazines), and two new Android feautures, a launcher Kobo calls “Reading Life” and a new Reading Mode, both designed to put reading front and center on tablets more than it has ever been done on tablets before.

“As Netflix is to video and Starbucks is to coffee, we want Kobo to be the name people think of for reading,” CEO Michael Serbinis said in an interview.

Aura E-Reader. Despite analyst speculation that e-readers are dying, they continue to be an important route to tapping dedicated customers, Serbinis tells me. “In the U.S. specifically there has been a slowdown in e-reader sales but for those who buy them we see very high purchase intent.”

And Serbinis notes that even if it sounds limiting to focus only on a small and shrinking segment of the market that are avid readers, so far this has actually paid off well in its e-reader lineup. When the company launched its limited edition, power-reader-friendly Aura HD e-reader earlier this year, sales expectations were not very high. “We thought that they would be one to four percent of sales,” he said. “The quickly became a quarter.”

If the existing Aura HD was an attempt to recreate some of the aesthetics of a hardback book experience, the new 6″ Aura launching today, Serbinis says, takes its cues from the world of tablets, with an edge-to-edge display, and at a thickness of 8mm and weight of 174g, a thinner and lighter body. Like the HD it is front-lit but without as high-resolution a screen.

New Arc tablets. Sebinis says that the three new tablets — 7″, 7″HD and 10″HD models, going on sale in October — are all multipurpose Android devices, running Jelly Bean and full of all the specs you would expect in devices like this. But like the Aura e-readers, they are built with a very specific intention in mind: targeting those who buy these devices to consume books, magazines and other reading materials. “We think there is a space for us. No tablet has really been designed for readers,” he notes.

Kobo came to this conclusion, he says, by canvassing users. “We have a lot of data from users around the world and those who download apps on our tablets read for minutes, not hours. They read once a week versus daily.” So Kobo asked its top 10,000 customers, why don’t the read on tablets? The answer, he says, was that it was too distracting. Too many alerts and other things happening on the screen, and “also they are generally too hard on the eyes, and weight is a problem. Basically, it’s pretty obvious tablets up to now have been multipurpose first and reading second.”

So Kobo decided to concentrate on these points. The screens on the HD devices, he says, are “better than Apple’s Retina display,” at up to 2560×1600 on the 10HD model. And on top of this, Kobo has developed a launcher that it calls “Reading Life.” This is essentially a user interface that sits on top of Android, that tracks what you’ve been reading, and offers recommendations for new titles to read, presented in a “Pinterest-style” scroll, he says. (It’s not an integration with Pinterest, although he doesn’t rule that out for the future. More on that below.) It’s in Reading Life that Kobo is also integrating Pocket, the app that lets users tag something online and save it to a list to read later. Swiping to the right takes you back to a “standard Android experience.”

On top of Reading Life, there is another reader-friendly service that Kobo is incorporating, which it is calling Reading Mode — essentially this is like an automatic airplane mode that you can turn on to cut off alerts from other applications, and at the same time it uses sensors on the device to optimise lighting on the screen. The third thing it does is automatically turn off all other processing functions on the device that is not needed for reading mode, also to help extend battery life. Serbinis says that Kobo has patents filed for this, and “We will be building this out as a feature on our devices” in the future.

Content. In addition to the new devices and the new reading applications, Kobo is kicking off its new strategy to present storefronts for specific reading categories. The first two coming out are for children’s literature, with 100,000 titles at launch, and magazines.

The magazine storefront, starting with “hundreds” of magazines from Hearst, Conde Nast and other top publishers, signals some other interesting developments for Kobo. It has been developed with technology from Aquafadas, a French startup it acquired last year that offers a technology for “guided” reading on magazines — essentially more tablet friendly than straight PDF renders but at the same time preserving the layout of the original magazines and therefore less like apps, Serbinis says.

I also asked Serbinis about a number of other topics, which give a bit more insight into how Rakuten, and Kobo, see their business developing in the future:

On forking. Absolutely no plans to follow Amazon and Barnes & Noble down this road, he says. “What we’ve found is that the customers looking for a device and everything that it can do. They don’t want to be shorthanded on all the things that their $199 or $299 will buy them. Theyt want access to gmail, YouTube and importantly Google Play apps. With the very first Kobo Arc we were pretty set on offering that and have not deviated. We see ourselves as a Google partner. Yes, we’ve provided Reading Life to make it great for reading but it’s open Android and upgradeable. We never went down that road on purpose.”

On Pinterest and other Rakuten holdings. This, of course, is one of Rakuten’s key, strategic investments, and Serbinis says that there are discussions with Pinterest already, but nothing concrete yet. “What makes Rakuten successful is that they’ve built an amazing ecosystem in Japan and they’re building that around the world. It’s a direction that we will support as Rakuten continues to expand, including preloaded shopping apps. It’s part of our future. When we think of some of these experiences, I’ve always thought that reading is an entry point, it’s how someone tells us, I’m interested in something. You can see the bridge from from content to commerce in that. One place you may see it first is in magazines. When you see an ad for a tennis racket in a paper magazine, you are at a dead end, but now all these tools are tappable. It’s a tap through to make a purchase or set up a demo or whatever. That kind of deeper integration is definitely in our sights.”

He notes that there are a couple of reasons why this is not there yet. “Part of this is technology and part of this is the industry catching up with tech and retooling. I suspect it’s within the next six months because the tools are now available with this launch the initial hurdle of getting that content. Now we’re through that it’s time to educate and help publishers leverage these tools to do the more fun and imaginative things.”

Wifi versus cellular? These tablets and the new e-reader remain Wifi only, he says. “We’ve talked to carriers pretty extensively and the price points are important. Offering 3g devices take you well beyond that price point and adding extra cost is not something that makes sense for us. But it’s not out of the question.” He says cellular connectivity will be important to crack certain markets. “In India you just don’t see the same kind of Wifi penetration that you do in the UK, U.S., and other countries. So 3G becomes more of an important feature to support so it’s something that we’re strongly looking at.”

Distribution. How best to battle Amazon on the retail front? Serbinis describes this task as “David battling Goliath,” and he says that the solution is “you have to leverage a bunch of friends.”

“While we don’t have the massive direct channel, we have partners that have the best book-buying and book-loving customers. For our competitor they are running out of direct channels as they expand internationally that means it’s more expensive for them.”

All the same, Kobo will be going “beyond booksellers” in the future. “We are looking to different kinds of partners, educational institutions, government and telcos. There are ways we can partner with them and being a neutral content provider is a pretty attractive thing.”

In the UK, the Kobo Aura is selling for £119.99, the Kobo Arc 10HD for £299.99, the Kobo Arc 7HD £159.99 with 16GB and £189.99 with 32GB and the Kobo Arc 7 for£119.99. Prices in the U.S. start at $150 for the 7″, non-HD tablet.

Apple continues its selective content partner rollout today with an update to Apple TV software that adds Vevo, as previously rumored, as well as Disney Channel, Disney XD, The Weather Channel and Smithsonian via new dedicated apps, as 9to5Mac reports. All those content providers are live in the U.S., but U.K. users and other regions will see only select channels via update.

The Apple TV update actually marks the first time that Apple has provided weather information on the Apple TV, something which now seems like a long overdue addition to the platform. With that addition, the Apple TV starts to take on more of a general services dashboard tone, in addition to its video and entertainment content sources.

Vevo was rumored to have been preparing a dedicated Apple TV application last week, the Wall Street Journal reported, which is part of its efforts to distribute content from its network more widely outside of YouTube, which currently powers a huge share of its views through a licensing agreement between the music industry joint venture and Google.

Disney content appearing on Apple TV via dedicated channels is also something that isn’t all that surprising, considering the cozy relationship that exists between Disney and the Mac maker. Disney CEO Bob Iger sits on Apple’s board, and Steve Jobs famously sold computer animation studio Pixar to Disney. Disney has been a strong, longtime partner for the iTunes media store, as well.

Apple building out content relationships for Apple TV seems to be the way the company prefers to welcome third-party material to the platform, rather than via opening up an API and providing an application store as it has done on iOS. The new partnerships today could help boost the device’s appeal among the teen set, as well as with younger kids thanks to Disney and Disney XD, and overall more content sources = a wider potential audience, but Apple clearly wants to make sure that new content sources also fit with its overall vision for a home media streaming device.

Rumors of a dedicated Apple television, or of a new next-gen media streamer launching later this year continue to swirl, so a staged content buildup could have something to do with those plans, too.

If you had any doubt that chucking in your entire life and building that iPhone case with a bottle opener you’ve always envisioned (the perfect design, honest) would be difficult, look no further than a couple recent Kickstarter failures that have been a long time in the making for proof. The Levitatr Keyboard and the Syre iPod nano Bluetooth watchband are both projects that were germinated in the heady wild west days of Kickstarter’s first beginnings, before it started to tighten the reins on hardware campaigns, and they’re both case studies in what happens if even the most well-intentioned hardware startup goes south.

Kickstarter has never claimed to be a storefront by any stretch of the imagination, so projects running into problems and failing to deliver should be familiar territory to any and all backers at this point. Anyone who has used it for any decent amount of time knows that you will get projects that just don’t materialize, and you’ll get ones that do finally ship, but that also massively under-deliver. But sometimes, you get projects where the founders are so transparent about the problems they encounter that it’s worth taking special note of what went wrong.

Levitatr Failed To Get Off The Ground

One such project is the Levitatr keyboard. Originally conceived in 2011 as an iPad and tablet keyboard accessory, this project by James Stumpf impressed with a design whereby the keys would magically appear out of slick flat surface once the accessory was powered on. Designed by Dayton, Ohio-based entrepreneur James Stumpf, it met and surpassed its $60,000 funding goal in 45 days and seemed to stand a reasonable chance of shipping by its November 2011 anticipated shelf date.

Stumpf declared Levitatr a failure via an update for backers posted to Kickstarter on August 12, 2013. He cited overly ambitious goals for the product, a shortage of funds, numerous failed licensing negotiations and his own general inexperience as the major motivating factors behind the project’s failure. The money he gathered to fund the project was all spent on attempting to build it, Stumph says, and he’s offered up an itemized list of just where it went to prove it. Stumpf also claims to have incurred considerable personal debt in the process.

Levitatr collapsed because it was more concept than concrete, with a physical prototype that promised one thing that ended up being immensely challenging from an engineering perspective to deliver. Stumpf blames a lack of willingness to compromise as part of the reason behind the project’s failure but that really engenders biting off more than one can chew: promise only what you know you’ll be able to build at project outset, in other words.

Many Kickstarter projects simply disappear into the night, but Stumpf has gone out of his way to publish a long list of supporting documents via Dropbox to support his account of how things went down, and he has been good about keeping backers up-to-date on his trials and tribulations via update. Kickstarter is designed to be a space where things can go wrong, and I think Levitatr is a perfect example of the best case scenario you could hope for in a failure, since it at least provides some guidance for others looking at building a hardware startup company.

No Crown For The Syre

Another decent example that has maybe done a bit too much apologizing and not enough explaining is the all-but-dead Syre Bluetooth watch band for the iPod nano. Right away, you see the problem; this is a project that was built for Apple’s last-generation iPod nano, the small square one that fit nicely on the average person’s wrist. The fact that it hasn’t shipped yet, well after Apple has stopped selling that device, is definitely Not Good.

The Syre was intended to solve the major oversight of the sixth generation iPod nano by adding Bluetooth to the mix via a simple, low profile dongle embedded in a watchstrap accessory. The mock-ups that the project raised funding based on showed an attractive compact device that helped the project raise nearly double its $75,000 target in August, 2012. Then, later updates to backers showed a much different device as a final engineering prototype, which was essentially a rubber nano strap case with a large, unsightly Bluetooth dongle sticking out the end – essentially, all the value of its sleek design went out the window, and backers were vocally disappointed in the change.

Syre isn’t dead technically, but it’d be fair to say the patient isn’t showing any brain activity. Project founder Anyé Spivey posted an update today that describes the project’s status and go-forward options, and both are pretty grim. Apple’s decision to change the iPod nano’s design and introduce Bluetooth to the new model had an understandably negative impact on demand both from consumers and potential distributors for the Syre: like any other 6th-gen nano-focused product, it essentially now has an extremely circumscribed potentially audience and exactly zero growth potential.

Kickstarter is meant to help get projects off the ground that wouldn’t necessarily make it to first production on their own, not to provide the funds to underpin a business in the longterm, so even with $133K in the bank Syre faced problems with money right away. The design wasn’t finalized, engineering was still only sort of half-conceived at outset, and Spivey says he was “misled” by Apple’s Mi team and also had to spend a lot on simply locking down nanos for backers who selected a reward level where the iPod was included.

Since both these projects were conceived and funded, Kickstarter has made considerable changes to the way it handles hardware projects. The site is much more cautious in approving hardware campaigns to go live on the site, and requires that a functional prototype exist in each case. Generally speaking, far more hardware projects over the past year have been production-ready on Kickstarter than ever before, which is a good thing for the site, for backers, and ultimately for founders and creators as well. New rules or not, however, failure is still bound to be a flip side of this kind of startup funding (just as it is with traditional methods), and there’s a lot to be learned from the projects that go wrong.

Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch is poised to be the next big news in wearable tech, and it’s also rapidly becoming one of the worst kept secrets of the tech world. Today, Samsung Executive Vice President of Mobile Lee Young-hee told The Korea Times that the Galaxy Gear would indeed be unveiled in Berlin on Sept. 4 two days ahead of the IFA conference opening, and that the new smartwatch would be powered by Android, and would not feature Samsung’s fledgling flexible display tech.

The Galaxy Gear will be a device to “enhance” and “enrich” the smart phone experience, according to Lee, which makes sense given the recent reports that it would be more of an accessory device than something that stands separate from a smartphone and is capable of making its own calls.

Lee also characterized the Galaxy Gear as a “wearable concept device,” saying that Samsung has been working on the smartwatch category for a long time now, and noting that is aimed primarily at “young trendsetters” in the interview with the Korea Times. All of which combines to make it sound like Samsung is designing this not only as something that’s aimed at early adopters, but also as something of a fashion accessory.

Earlier, GigaOM reported that the Galaxy Gear would have a 2.5-inch display, with 320 x 320 resolution, and a dual core processor. It’s designed to pair up to devices with Bluetooth 4.0, and will likely require an app provided through the Samsung dedicated app marketplace in order to work, making it likely an accessory exclusive to Samsung’s own smartphones.

The September 4 event will also definitely see the introduction of the new Galaxy Note 3, which will reveal what’s next for the phablet category Samsung basically pioneered with the original Note. Some new rumors suggest the Galaxy Note 3 will shoot 4K video, and be powered by a Snapdragon 800 processor with a 2.3GHz clock speed, with a 5.7-inch display and 3GB of RAM.

As more reports of ARM-based Windows and Apple devices continue to fill the airwaves — the latest being reports of a Surface 2 and Nokia’s first Windows tablet, along with upcoming iPhone handsets — the Cambridge, UK-based semiconductor technology powerhouse is pressing ahead with its bigger ambition be at the heart of all connected devices: today the company announced that it is acquiring Sensinode Oy, a Finland-based startup that develops internet-of-things software.

This is a bolt-on purchase: ARM says that for now it will continue to sell Sensinode’s NanoStack and NanoService products to existing and new customers, alongside its ARM Cortex® family of processors and collaborative mbed project.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ARM’s move to develop for more than smartphones and tablets — the two areas where you are most likely to hear its name these days, specifically in connection with companies like Apple, which designs its own ARM-based chips for its devices — is not a new one.

When its longtime CEO Warren East stepped down last year to be replaced by insider and former engineer Simon Segars, ARM emphasized how it was taking a long-term view of how the company would grow. The implication at the time was that it would be beyond the devices we typically refer to as “mobile” today, to cover cars, ovens and other appliances, factory robots, and really anything that you might need or want to be connected up in your work or leisure life — as the illustration here, taken from Sensinode’s site, shows.

The list indeed is long: “IoT technology can be used in wireless sensors, smart connected appliances, home health applications, and wearable electronics. The technology is also applicable to M2M applications using cellular connections and the new OMA Lightweight M2M standard for device management,” ARM notes.

“We take a very long-term view about our business, and we believe that now is the right time to bring in new leadership, to execute on the next phase of growth and to plan even further into the future,” East said at the time of his resignation.

In that regard, today’s acquisition news is evidence of how this is playing out. ARM projects (via analysts IMS Research) that there will be 30 billion connected devices by 2020. Compare that to the 8.7 billion ARM-based devices that were shipped last year, and combine that with ARM’s existing repution, and you can see why ARM sees this as a clear opportunity for the taking.

“ARM is dedicated to enabling a standards-based Internet of Things where billions of devices of all types and capabilities are connected through interoperable Internet Protocols and Web Services,” said John Cornish, executive vice president and general manager, System Design Division, ARM, in a statement.

You can also see how it’s important for ARM to continue pushing in this development against competitors like Intel, which is also hungrily eyeing up the IoT space.

ARM describes Sensinode as one of the “pioneers in software for low cost low power internet connected devices and a key contributor to open standards for IoT.” Those standards include creating the 6LoWPAN and CoAP standards for low cost low power devices; and contributing to IETF, ZigBee IP, ETSI and OMA standardization efforts.

This is a win for Sensinode because it gives the startup a much bigger platform and audience of developers who might build chips and devices on its technology. “By making Sensinode expertise and technology accessible to the ARM Partnership and through the ARM mbed project we will enable rapid deployment of thousands of new and innovative IoT applications,” notes Cornish.

This looks like it’s only ARM’s second acquisition ever. The first was just as strategic: it was in 2011 of Prolific, which developed nanotechnology software tools.