Day: November 18, 2011

There’s an old joke about the vendor in New York that bragged that he sold his wares cheaper than anyone else. “Yeah,” said his competitor, “but you are selling BELOW the actual cost of the item!” “Ha!,” said the vendor, “I make it up in volume!” Get it? Selling below cost, even at volume, nets you no profit! However, that is what Amazon is doing! But they WILL make it up in volume of books sold!

Kindle Fire teardown puts build cost at less than $3 above retail price

Computerworld – Teardown experts at IHS iSuppli found that it costs $201.70 to build Amazon’s new Kindle Fire — that’s almost $3 more than the device’s $199 retail price.

Many analysts expected Amazon to take a much larger loss on the Kindle Fire, if only to better compete against other tablets such as the iPad 2, which has a starting price of $499, or the Nook Tablet, which starts at $249. Amazon is expected to make up the loss through sales of products and apps to Kindle users.

According to iSuppli’s tally the Kindle Fire’s hardware costs $185.60 and the cost of manufacturing the device is $16.10.

The $201.70 figure is an actual teardown cost estimate that was derived from taking apart one of the Kindle Fire tablets, which were released Monday. That total is $7.83 less than the $209.63 virtual estimate that iSuppli made in September.”

HTML5 and Webm video rocks! It is smaller in size, streams well… and is simple! So, let’s all move to it!

Revision3 bets on HTML5, drops Flash player development

“Revision3 was faced with a dilemma: Its Flash player was getting a bit long in the tooth, but Flash isn’t supported by a growing number of devices that its viewers are using to watch its videos on. The company had already built an HTML5 player to be used by viewers with iPads and other HTML5-compatible devices, but it wasn’t as advanced as what the startup had built into Flash. As a company with limited resources, updating both players wasn’t really an option, so it had to choose between updating its Flash player, or placing more emphasis on HTML5.

So what did it do? It bet on the future.

Revision3 rolled out a new, HTML5-based video player Thursday to help standardize the video experience across web browsers online and those on new mobile and connected devices. At the same time, Revision3 made a strategic decision to phase out support of Flash and throw more development resources behind HTML5 instead.

The new player went live on Thursday, as the default option for Revision3 viewers. In addition to being available on more devices, Rev3 CTO Rob DeMillo told us in a phone interview that the new player has some other immediate benefits: The new player loads more quickly than its Flash player, and scrubbing through a video is much more responsive. It also supports all the same advertising and analytics that Revision3 had from the Flash player.”