Amazon’s new tablet is much less kindle and a whole lot more fire. The recent announcement of the “Kindle Fire”, is proof that they’re finally ready to break out of the e-reader game and step into the ring with the big boys from Cupertino.

Amazon has been building up the needed infrastructure, from the kindle store to their cloud player, and more recently their video streaming service, to create a content rich experience that consumers have come to expect on a tablet. In fact, they’re counting so much on the profitability of that content that they’re losing almost $10 for each device that they sell. A big risk, considering they’re practically giving them away at an industry low, $199.

The hope is that each user will purchase well over $10 in media. With enough volume, this can be very profitable however, history has also shown it to be more difficult than expected.

At launch in 2006, the Sony Playstation 3 was losing over $200 for each unit that they sold and have only recently begun to turn a profit on the device. The major difference is that the PS3 was still so expensive at $599, that volume was too low and too few consumers were buying games and accessories.

The Kindle Fire’s low price point should get them the large amount of customers that they need to make this model work. At the very least they’re about to steal a solid chunk of market share from Apple. This is Amazon’s big step out of the browser and into your hands, what do you think, is it a step in the right direction?

- Philippe Gagnon

Philippe Gagnon is the founder and writer for Craft Beer Culture. Currently residing in Orange County California, you can find him at the local brewery drinking craft beer or online through Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Stacked, a new restaurant in San Diego, incorporates iPads into the meal experience. - Justin Bridle

People all seem to have the same nightmare at one point or another when grabbing a bite to eat, whether it be in a five-star restaurant, a casual cafe or a swank little happy hour spot. You sit there for upwards of ten minutes before the server even comes to the table. Your server forgets your water, or your beer, or your side of bleu cheese or what have you. Your order gets lost in translation between you, the computer and the kitchen, and it takes forever to get to your table. Your meat isn’t the right temperature. You skip dessert because all you want to do now is get out of there, but the check takes ten minutes. You slip your card in right away but another ten minutes goes by before it’s picked up. You feel betrayed by your server, so you leave a lousy tip and leave with a lousy taste in your mouth.

So where does this madness end? How do we eliminate all this red tape in our dining experience? How can we take back control of our destiny? Enter: Stacked, a progressive new restaurant at Fashion Valley Mall in San Diego. Their solution? The mighty iPad.

Upon entering Stacked during a rush, you can put your name in with the host and view your position on the wait list up on a large computer screen, much like arrivals and departures at the airport. That said, it most likely won’t be an issue since dining time is so varied. Upon seating, all you have to do is swipe your card into your table’s iPad, select your drinks and hit Send To Kitchen, and they’re on the way automatically. Your server comes over with your drinks to say hello and explain the system to you. Should you have any additional questions at any point during your dining experience, there is a little Help button on the bottom corner of your screen.

“It takes all the awkwardness out of serving,” says my server, Brilan. “The iPad anticipate people’s needs so well that it lets me enjoy conversation more with my tables and focus on recommendations.”

Stacked has a pretty simple menu; you can choose from an array of signature burgers, salads, pizzas, sausages and ice creamy desserts, but you can also “Stack Your Own.” This is where it gets fun. Customers can choose what type of bun they would like (brioche, pretzel, gluten free, just to name a few), the sort of patty they would prefer (salmon, turkey, angus beef, pulled pork, etc.), their choice of lettuce, cheese, toppings (fried egg, chili and homemade potato chips are among them), sauces and condiments. Every labeled photo modification is dragged across the screen using your finger. The mods and toppings fit together in attractive designs of juxtaposed shapes and colors. Want something on the side? No problem, there’s a special column to drag your sides to as well. Getting a pizza but want different things on your respective halves? Just hit the Split button. While you’ll have to agree on the same crust and sauce, anything else goes. Once you’ve put your personal concoction together, just hit Add To Order, then when everyone’s ready, hit Send To Kitchen. If you second guess your order, just hit Cancel.

When you’re finished, there’s no need to flag down your server and ask for the check, because you already have it on your iPad; just hit the Checkout button to view your total. You can split your check as many ways as you wish, itemized or by dollar amount, and tip using either dollar amount or percentage. And get this: you can choose to forgo a receipt, have it printed up for you, or just email it to yourself.

When a busser comes to clear a table at Stacked, they swipe their card, making the iPad screen go black. This shows the hosts that this table is being cleared. Wow.

“The guys from the Apple Store come in all the time because they’re already so well-versed in the technology and they’ve got only a half hour to grab lunch,” Brilan says. “So they get in, eat real quick and get out well within their alloted time.”

Brilan also points out the Member button, which you can enter your email into and save your previous meals at Stacked, so the next time you come in, you can just log in and it’ll remind you what you enjoyed last time. Stacked also plans to link their program up with Facebook, so that you can Like something you’re especially impressed with, and then your friends can view what you had and try it out as well. Oh, the possibilities of Food Networking…

Is this the wave of the future for the restaurant industry? It could very well be. Incorporating this type of technology lights a fire under the ass of efficiency itself, eliminating waiting across the board and literally putting all the control in the customer’s hands. Next thing you know, they’ll have Angry Birds built in for the customers to play while they wait. But, with that said, there is still something to be said for quickly choosing what you’d like to eat and letting someone take care of everything else; whether that’s done well depends entirely upon the server.

- Jennifer Karnan

Patrick Dillon and Jimmy Hendricks of Deal Current

Local San Diego tech start-up ‘Deal Current’ was one of the first full-service, white label, daily deal software vendors in the world.  The success of the software has grown the company’s revenue by over 1,000% since 2008, and if you’re looking for a cool, hip, energized place to work, they’re hiring. Not too shabby for a couple of highly driven young men who ran their HQ out of a shared apartment in North Park just five years ago.

“Daily deal” companies such as Groupon, Living Social, Buywithme, and CrowdCrave are all the rage right now, but at the forefront of the social commerce market, are two local tech gurus that offer million dollar solutions, at a fraction of the cost. In a recent interview at their Little Italy offices, James Hendricks the CEO and Co-founder said, “What separates us from other daily deal companies is the fact that we have an amazing support team. It’s our service, and our training tools that make us unique. We provide, for a marginal fraction of the revenue generated by a deal site, complete service solutions for constantly evolving space. We  train our clients how to use our tools effectively. If a smaller to mid-size company were to hire their own staff to provide all of these services, it would be cost prohibitive”.

The software itself is ‘white label’ meaning, for all intents and purposes that it’s blank, and can be ‘skinned’, or dressed with, the logo’s and graphics of the company that purchases it.The software allows a company or organization to market their brand to the public with daily deals and much, much more.

Deal Current offers a robust suite of social commerce solutions and unparalleled sales force training tools as well. The training tools include digital videos that teach clients how to sell daily deals to merchants, how to market their website, and how to attract affiliates. Hendricks describes the marketing software platform  as a ‘toolbox’ for virtually any type of web-based business that wants to increase site traffic and grow their business. “The small businesses that make it are the ones that are marketed properly and profitably. If you can do that you’ll likely be a success, but how many times have you been to a great little restaurant, that’s completely empty? It’s all about how you market yourself.”

President and co-founder Patrick Dillon offers a ‘big-picture’ version of his sales and marketing  perspective, “When the internet started, it was all about getting the information out there but there was too much out there.  Then social media came along and changed everything. Now purchasing trends are based on the social influences of one’s peers. Social commerce is where the money is going to be made now.” And that’s exactly how Deal Current works. It taps into social media trends for results that are trackable, increase site traffic, and combines member acquisition and loyalty programs.

Contact Deal Current to see how your business can capitalize on social media  and tap into the social commerce market.

At lunchtime August 9, 2011, Apple was trading at  $367 per share, giving the company a valuation of more than $341 billion, briefly surpassing what Exxon Mobil was worth at that time. The independent valuations of the two companies have since been leapfrogging one another in a  hectic week on Wall Street.

Which company will be holding the golden ring at the end on Wall Street remains to be seen, but the eventual outcome seems inevitable.  According to Reuters,  Apple has seen 80 percent annual growth in sales amid slipping oil prices and a U.S. environmental plan that is focused on reducing the use of fossil fuels and dependence on foreign oil resources dramatically over the next 20 years.  Apple has been gaining ground fast on Exxon Mobil since reporting record iPhone and iPad sales over the last two months. At that time, Apple was worth just $4 billion less than the oil giant. When Apple passed Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable technology company 15 months ago, it represented a valuation of $222 billion. According to tech columnist Robert Cyran however, that is not an accurate valuation. “If you put Apple on the same PE (projected earnings) multiple it traded on in 2006, it would be worth almost $900 billion.” Additionally, Apple sells more per quarter than it did in the entire fiscal year of 2007. Could this mean an Apple worth $1 trillion some day? With the emerging Apple  technology leaning toward the expansive growth in areas like social media marketing and mobile device applications, it certainly seems possible.

According to eMarketer data compiled in January 2011, the U.S. virtual goods market is expected to generate $653 million in revenue this year, up 28% from 2010.  Virtual goods, in case you’re not a shut-in, are digital representations of goods for which one pays actual, real money. An example would be a digital sweater for your avatars girlfriend in an online virtual community. …$653 million. Or, a powerful, digital sword or weapon upgrade for  your character in a virtual game online…did I mention $653 million? This ‘fake-goods-for-real-money’ market has spawned a moniker for games known as “Freemiums”, or, free online gaming communities, with premium upgrades available for everything from nicer houses to luxury cars and digital bling. The upgrades of course, cost real money. $653 MILLION.  The popularity of social gaming and social network marketing has catalyzed tremendous growth in virtual goods monetization. Game developers, virtual worlds and social network providers are driving this economy, which is projected to grow substantially in the next several years.   Keep your eyes open for the virtual sweatshops.

• $792 million projected earnings in 2012
• Virtual goods totaled  $7.3 billion worldwide in 2010
• Between 2007-2010, 70% of all Virtual Goods were sold in Asia.
• In 2010, Swedish gaming company Mindark sold a virtual space station for $330,000 USD…… Sucker!

- A.R. Templeton

Visa says that the transition to these types of chip technologies will help to prepare retailers for the arrival of NFC-based, mobile-phone payments (Near Field Communication) by building the necessary infrastructure to accept and process chip transactions that support either a signature or PIN usage at the point of sale. In other words, your phone is getting so smart that it can now manage money.

In a press release on August 9th global head of product at Visa, Jim McCarthy said, “As NFC mobile payments and other chip-based, emerging technologies are poised to take off in the coming years, we are taking steps today to create a commercial framework that will support growth opportunities and create value for all participants in the payment chain.”  So, I guess everybody is getting a piece of the action then. Except the consumer, that is. Why is it not comforting when the head of Visa promises that ‘everyone is getting paid on this one,  folks.’ ? Consumers can expect to see an additional terminal for mobile phone payments at registers as early as the fall.

PRNewswire reports that Visa will continue its range of cardholder verification methods including PIN, signature, and no-signature requirement for low-risk transactions. In the long term, Visa expects that verification methods such as signature and PIN numbers will be reduced or eliminated entirely as new, and increasingly dynamic forms of cardholder verification are implemented with chip technologies. Fingerprint verification or retinal recognition technology via mobile phone is already being experimented with to avoid the possibility of a lost mobile phone becoming the equivalent to a lost or stolen credit card. This illustrates another benefit to the consumer as well. In contrast to a traditional wallet, a smart-phone is a wallet you can lock. That is, there are multiple levels of security; there is the phone lock, a required PIN number, credit card information encryption, and your credit card number is never fully displayed at the register or on your receipt.

Ultimately what this means for consumers is that your phone can now be used as a car key, a phone, a camera, a video-camera, a communication device, a GPS, a laptop, and now (drum roll) ….A BANK!  Just wave your smart phone over the terminal at the register, and the funds will be deducted from your account or more likely, added to your credit card balance. Going into debt has never been so easy! It’s a brave new world folks. The bad news is when you get mugged next year, the crook will just say “Hand over your phone mister!”.

According to the August 9^th press release by Visa, they will require U.S. acquirer processors and sub-processor service providers to be able to support merchant acceptance of chip transactions no later than April 1, 2013.  Merchants will receive free hardware to facilitate the switch, but will thereafter incur a small transaction fee similar to the one they suffer now for credit card transactions. Chip acceptance will also require service providers to be able to carry and process additional data that is included in chip transactions, including the cryptographic message that makes each transaction unique.

Visa will provide additional guidance as part of its Business Enhancements Release for acquirer processors to certify that their systems can support EMV contact and contactless chip transactions. By 2014,  50 percent of smart-phones will have NFC built into them — that’s 150 million devices. Could this new technology diminish the need for purses and wallets, or perhaps spawn a new device for carrying lipstick and chewing gum? And most importantly, will it give rise to a whole new spectrum of mobile marketing?    -AR Templeton

Circles; In the immortal words of Offspring we often want to “keep ‘em separated”, that is, groups of friends, co-workers, ex-fiancé’s and the like. Google+ lets you separate posts into groups where they will only be shared with certain recipients. This feature  goes one step further than Facebook, by ensuring that the pic of you doing a keg-stand isn’t re-posted to your boss accidentally by auto-blocking anyone you haven’t specified as a recipient. It also has posting fail-safes that are more deliberate than those on Facebook.

Hangouts: Hangouts are video-lounges where you can invite individuals or whole ‘Circles’ to join you for a debate on the merits of pet-neutering, or just a little one-on-one flirting, a la Skype.

Sparks: What makes sparks fly in your life? This feature allows you to follow a huge variety of topics ranging from the mundane to the bizarre, and even allows you to create your own category for direct content discovery. Into fly-fishing? Spark it, and you’ll be kept up on the latest in fishing from waders to wall-eyed pike.

+1: Sounds like you’ve been added to a list at a hot nightclub, right? Alas no. This is similar to the ‘Like’ button on Facebook, and automatically stores the content you’re viewing on your profile; all the easier to transfer the topic to your ‘sparks’ later on.

Is Google+ that much different than Facebook? Not to the casual observer. But, remember that all of this programming is ultimately designed to generate ad revenue from increasingly streamlined targets and the best way to do that is to let your client do it for you. The way that Google+ divides (it’s users), allows their sponsors to conquer. That is, the user categorizes his or herself by customizing their profile, likes and dislikes, and that makes it easier to pinpoint and maximize the specific demographic for an ad campaign or service using social network members as brand recruiters. Is your company using social media to maximize the effectiveness of your ads and the reach of your brand?

LinkedIn employees watch site hit 100M mark

Professional Social Media site LinkedIn leapfrogged MySpace last week to take the number two slot in the industry under the number one behemoth Facebook (160 million users). After a splashy public offerings debut in March the site hit 100 million users, the holy grail number for emerging social media sites. According to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner the recent snowball in members can be attributed to a number of factors including the unemployment rate. Many Facebook users network on Facebook, but LinkedIn has been marketed as the premier social media site to find a job, to recruit talent, to source new deals, or even start a business. LinkedIn has been branded as a site where these goals aren’t eclipsed or overshadowed by posts of holiday pictures and invitations to high school reunions. On Linkedin, in other words, it’s ‘business time’. Currently in use in over 200 countries, half of all users are outside the U.S.. LinkedIn is currently garnering a million new users a week at a rate of more than one per second.

How do you use LinkedIn? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

I’ve got a problem. I’m a blogger who likes to use visual content but Twitter is just too short with a 140 character max and doesn’t offer simultaneous visual feed. WordPress lacks the ability to instantaneously update followers on breaking news in real-time. Along comes Tumblr: the technological girl of my dreams. She’s a hybrid of a social networking site and a blogging platform where new and curated content can be shared without length restrictions. I think she really ‘gets me’…

Tumblr also boasts loads of other features on its dashboard that make it feel like a social networking site.  You can post personal blogs, text, links, photos, media and more. The fact that there are no restrictions on the length of posts and it’s real-time dispersion of information has quickly made it the preferred tech for ‘on the scene’ reporting by journalists and reporters.

Tumblr is proof positive that the Facebook explosion has developers clamoring to incorporate a sense of community into their sites to increase their user-base and Tumblr has done that in spades, tripling the number of users in the last six months. According to a report by Steve Rubel, the majority of the billions of page-views on Tumblr occur within the dashboard rather than on the individual domains they offer, making it more like Facebook than WordPress.com. This fact will give Tumblr a good deal more weight with companies looking to market on social network sites.

Tumblr growth triples over the past six months.

Google announced last week that voice-activated searches and quicker search time technology will increase ease and efficiency for PC users on their search engine.   Google’s big announcement on June 17 comes amid a slew of ambitious product-debuts this summer as the “Big 5” (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL) battle for supremacy in the expanding online consumption market.  Google first introduced the technology in mobile devices over a year ago, a nod to the fact that quick-searches for bars and restaurants spike at night and on the weekend, and mobile searches overall have increased 500 percent in the last two years.

Utalkmarketing.com reported that The PC version of the voice-activated search requires the use of Google Chrome and a separate microphone plugged into the PC. It would not be unusual for manufacturers to follow the Internet leviathan’s lead however, and make built-in microphones standard in future PC models.  Two additional features the company unveiled at the San Francisco conference are ‘Instant Pages’, which will potentially  knock 2 to 5 seconds off the loading times of web pages and enhanced image recognition (EIR), with which users can search the Internet  by dragging images into a box.

As demonstrated by Google’s new tech, the nature of the beast is ‘more, easier, faster’. Companies need to maximize their presence to consumers via social media and internet outlets as consumers become increasingly enmeshed in our digital society.  As such, it hardly seems necessary to have the futuristic jet-packs promised to us by The Jetsons anymore as shopping,  searching and personal interaction no longer require leaving the house much less flying around strapped to a missile. Nowadays, the mountain comes to us. Search engines and social media outlets are now the leading means of marketing products to the public, and now consumers simply need to tell their PC what they want in order to find it. The future is here and it resembles ‘I Dream of Genie’, more than ‘The Jetsons’; if you want something simply ask for it and it appears. The only difference is the genie requires a valid credit card.

At worst this technology is another building block in America’s move toward immobility, at best it will engender a new era of green advertising and marketing as monolithic billboards and tacky neon signs go the way of the dinosaur.  For certain it means that the best way to reach consumers is through their internet connection. The question is this; as advertising and marketing ascend into the technosphere ™, is your company maximizing or missing your opportunity? And when they’re searching, who’s saying your company’s name?