Amazon’s new e-book reader has kindled a blaze of blogging reaction to the $399 device.

Reviews of Kindle have been mixed, to say the least. A selection:

PaidContent says that, despite Amazon’s claims “the screen isn’t like reading actual paper. It’s not as bright and there is glare if the light is too direct…this is very much a first-generation product. It’s not going to revolutionize the industry overnight.”

Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research analyst, praises its ubiquity, pricing and search function.

“The ability to access content from anywhere is important and the fact that there’s no PC involved makes the process a lot easier…the notion of $9.99 best-sellers appeals to me…the ability to find what I’m looking for is super important.”

Jupiter’s research (below) suggests only 23 per cent of online consumers are interested in reading fiction or non-fiction books on mobile devices.

Engadget says: “While the reader itself could be mistaken for a Handspring device from the 90s, the service itself certainly makes for a compelling proposition.”

In a poll on its rival Gizmodo’s blog, 51 per cent preferred Sony’s Reader compared to 15 per cent favouring Kindle, while 15.5 per cent voted “If it’s not made by Apple, who cares?”

Jeremy Toeman on his LIVEdigitally blog says Kindle “will fail, and fail terribly.”

“It’s pretty hard to argue that an electronic reader will vastly improve the book discovery, purchase, and consumption experience (unlike how much an MP3 player was able to do that exact thing). …How many people are really in a position where they need a mobile library of 200 books with them to choose from?”

Seth Godin is also highly skeptical:

“The beauty of real books is that they don’t require a reader, which means that millions of people are eligible members of the market. Even if you only have .0001% market share, you can still get your book read. The challenge that my hero Jeff Bezos has is that if he’s really really lucky, he’ll sell a million of these things in a year. And that means that at $10 a book, you need to have significant market share to make an impact. The Sony Reader has been out for months and it has sold, perhaps, a few thousand units.”

David Rothman of Publishers Weekly says Kindle is “like a prop from an old sci-fi horror flick… Maybe, as with the old VW Beetle, we’ll all learn to love the ugliness.”

Gadget freak Robert Scoble has already ordered his Kindle for overnight delivery but admits:

“Getting geeks like me excited by a new “shiny toy” is pretty easy. Getting a large market excited? That’s a LOT harder.”

There was a palpable atmosphere of dissatisfaction with YouTube this week at an online video conference where it should have been the star of the show.

An interview with Steve Chen, co-founder, at NewTeeVee Live was preceded by panels where YouTube’s business model and popularity were questioned.

“The lack of monetisation on YouTube today is astounding,” said Dennis Miller of venture capital firm Spark Capital.

“You’ve got the single best monetising machine that can’t figure out how to monetise all those eyeballs. There’s some paltry number out there for the millions of streams they serve.”

Mary Hodder, the founder of video search engine Dabble, said there was now enormous fragmentation of the market with a proliferation of online video sites.

She cited how six months ago she surveyed videos being referenced by Digg members  and found nine out of 10 were sourced from YouTube. Now only one out of 10 were from Google’s $1.65bn acquisition.

Steve Chen’s interview was interrupted by a heckler shouting “HD! HD!” in a criticism of the quality of YouTube’s videos and its failure to innovate with high-definition offerings.

“Someone scream out ‘Better Content!’,” added an audience member nearby.

Mr Chen, sporting a Kim Jong-il style quiff, argued there was little need for HD quality when YouTube clips were generally less than 90 seconds long.

He said YouTube was focusing on improving playback quality with technology that would detect whether a user had a broadband connection – many of its overseas users still lacked one.

The YouTube co-founder was vague on monetisation, but said that with users spending on average 15 to 20 minutes on the site, there would be revenue opportunities.

Asked about Viacom suing Google over copyright infringement, he said content owners could ask for material to be taken down or keep it up, use it as a marketing tool and work out ways with Google to monetise it.

The fact remains that YouTube has been months late in introducing Audible Magic’s content filtering and has missed out on high-quality content deals as leading media companies have lost patience with the service and set up their own sites, such as NBC and Fox’s Hulu.com.

It is still a young company but is now within a much larger one, and smaller rivals are beating it to new features and high-definition content.

But while there may be dissent among the videorati of Silicon Valley, YouTube’s status in the public’s eyes is still considerable. According to Nielsen Online, YouTube was the seventh most popular brand online in the US in October with a unique audience of 57m users.

It seems that BEA Systems can juggle numbers just as much as Oracle can (see note below.)

Announcing earnings on Thursday, CEO Alfred Chuang wanted Wall Street to overlook his gigantic stock option backdating charge (which virtually wiped out reported profits for the past decade) and focus instead on the software company’s rebounding profit margins. And not just any profit margins but pro forma figures which, among other things, excluded the costs of hiring all those lawyers and bankers to keep the barbarians (in the form of Larry Ellison and Carl Icahn) from the gates.

Shouldn’t expenses like these be seen as a normal cost of doing business, one analyst wondered?

It isn’t normal to come under fire from a hostile bidder and a shareholder activist at the same time, retorted BEA executive Bill Klein. "We don’t believe that both of these circumstances can continue for the long run." Is that reasoned analysis or wishful thinking?

Growing a company through acquisitions can feel a bit liking eating Chinese food. Two hours after you’ve had a meal you’re hungry again.

Larry Ellison must be starting to feel that way. When he bought PeopleSoft, he promised it would put Oracle on course for earnings per share growth of at least 20 per cent a year. He’s more than met that promise (that is, if you care to overlook the little matter of amortisation - more on that below.)

The trouble with strategies like this is, they only work if you keep buying. Prices have been going up and suitable big targets are getting scarcer - which explains why this has now become a preoccupation on Wall Street, to judge by the questions Ellison faced at his company’s annual financial analyst meeting on Wednesday.

Ellison’s message to the doubters: "We have found some very attractive targets, and we think we can do it for a while longer." Compared to the horizontal software plays he has bought so far, the next spate of deals might involve more "vertical" companies that specialise in specific industry sectors. "We can buy a typical vertical company that’s running at 5 per cent [operating margins] and run it at 30 or 40 per cent," Ellison boasted.

The trouble is, the bigger Oracle gets, the hungrier it becomes. According to Charles Di Bona at Sanford C Bernstein, Oracle will have to spend $52-58bn on acquisitions over the next five years to keep its earnings per share machine ticking over at the desired rate. So either the deals have to get bigger - in which case the risk of overpaying and the complexity of integration go up - or Oracle has to spread its net wide and trawl for large numbers of smaller transactions.

There’s no question that Ellison’s consolidation play has been a huge success. The outcome of his current circling of the beleagured BEA Systems should give some idea of how long he can keep it up.

Footnote: What is the right measure of earnings for a serial acquirer like this, anyway? Oracle likes to boast about its pro-forma earnings per share. But as the deals have flowed, the amortisation of intangibles has picked up: 12 per cent of operating profits in the 2006 fiscal year, rising to 15 per cent in 2007.

Look at it another way. Back in 2004, Oracle’s earnings per share looked roughly the same on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. In the three years since, the pro-forma number has jumped by 98 per cent: the GAAP number is only up 62 per cent. Like too much Chinese food, all those deals start to show on the waistline in the end.

San Francisco and the Valley are hardly the heart of the television industry, but that has not stopped the techno tyros here influencing the move of video and TV onto the internet.
I’m at the NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco’s Mission Bay where a host of online media companies and venture capitalists are discussing the future of TV on the net. Steve Chen, YouTube co-founder, and Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, are among the speakers and a number of new companies are launching.
A panel of experienced venture capitalists has just put something of a damper on the hopes of the start-ups demonstrating their services in the foyer.
Asked whether the comedian Will Ferrell’s FunnyorDie site made sense to him, Dennis Miller of Spark Capital said: "The  die part does."
"There’s too much money chasing too few ideas. There is already roadkill and there will be massive roadkill ahead."
Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners, a backer of Heavy.com and JibJab, said there was a place for original video content being produced online, but admitted: "It is very scary, but I think a small number of companies are going to make it."
George Zachary of Charles River Ventures disagreed: "I think it’s a humongous mistake to invest in content," he said.
He said the real money was to be made in aggregation and distribution of existing content with social networks in a good position to do this. He highlighted Bebo’s Open Media announcement yesterday in which it opened up its site for broadcasters including the BBC and CBS to distribute their content freely.
Video coverage of the conference is available on the NewTeeVee website.

An interesting first from CA. The software maker has just handed over all the R&D and future product development for part of its security portfolio to Indian company HCL. CA keeps control of the brand and handles all the sales and marketing.

It’s one thing for a bank or an industrial concern to outsource its software development, but something else entirely for a software company. CA already has 1,200 developers of its own in India, but this takes things a big step further.

CA executive George Kafkarkou denies that ceding all the development work for his company’s "threat management" products (think anti-virus, firewalls, etc) is a form of outsourcing. HCL and CA will share revenues from this business in the future, he says, so it should be seen as a closer business partnership.

Yet CA still calls the shots. Aside from control of the customer relationships and brand, Mr Kafkarkou says it will still own all the intellectual property created in future by HCL developers - though some details have yet to be completely ironed out, such as how exactly the "partners" arrive at future product roadmaps.

Threat management accounts for just under 5 per cent of CA’s $4bn in annual revenues. But as the first deal of its kind, this could point to a more fundamental shift ahead. If CA has decided it should stick to what it is good at, and that means marketing rather than building its own products, the next logical step is surely to go the whole way and become a "software-lite" software company.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the US, falls this year on its earliest possible date - November 23.

The big day of store sales when retailers are supposed to go into the black for the year also signals the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season.

The latest online retail figures from the comScore research firm suggest the industry will need all those extra days of shopping – Black Friday can fall as late as the 29^th – to avoid a disappointing Christmas.

It reports retail e-commerce sales in October grew 19 per cent on last year to $9.96bn. That compares to year-to-date sales growth of 21 per cent up to the end of September.

Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said October’s figures often gave a glimpse of what to expect during the holiday season:

“That online sales growth rates diminished slightly in October is not entirely unexpected, as many consumers are feeling the pinch of ballooning mortgages and gas prices, coupled with a decline in housing values. Even the rapidly growing online commerce sector appears to not be immune from these economic realities,” he said.

Apparel and accessories growing by only 5 per cent in October could be down to unseasonably warm weather, he added, and a recovery in this sector could change the picture for Christmas sales online.

There were also encouraging figures for some categories of retailers. Furniture, appliances and equipment grew 105 per cent on a year ago, while sales of the Nintendo Wii, Sony’s PlayStation 3 price cuts and the success of the game Halo saw the video game sector soar 264 per cent compared to October 2006.

By Michael Steen, FT Netherlands Correspondent

You’re sitting in a traffic jam, late for a meeting, watching the estimated time of arrival on your satnav’s display creep later and later as it takes account of the fact that, right now, you’re not going anywhere. Do you cancel, try another route, or wait it out?

TomTom, the Dutch maker of navigation devices, is claiming to put an end to this kind of dilemma with a new service it launched today in the Netherlands, dubbed High Definition Traffic. It tracks the paths of about 4 million Vodafone mobile phone users to expand the amount of traffic information available.

Traffic information on satnav devices is not exactly new, but they tend to depend on patchy data compiled by sparse roadside cameras and traffic detectors.

Vodafone can track the whereabouts of each phone to within 500 metres and monitor its movement, says Luciën Groenhuijzen, managing director for TomTom Mobility Solutions. He is quick to point out that the data is not linked to the phone users.

The tracking element allows TomTom to strip out pedestrians and people travelling on trains that run alongside motorways. Each user is tracked for one hour before being re-assigned with a new random number.

"We introduced that [the one hour limit] so that we can’t follow someone, even if we don’t know who they are, for a whole day," Mr Groenhuijzen says.

TomTom blends the data collected from Vodafone with existing sources and sends updates to one of its new, €399 units every three minutes. (TomTom includes a year’s traffic information in the price after which it will charge €9.95 a month.)

So does it work? A test of the gadget at the height of Monday morning rush hour in the congested Randstad area around Amsterdam seemed to suggest it does.

Driving from the coast towards Amsterdam, the navigation device shows an accident has closed a lane on the motorway and a parallel main road is also clogged up. The gadget sends our car under the motorway, along a canal and through a village that looks onto fields near Schiphol airport. One feels a little smug.

What happens if everyone buys the gadget? Don’t you lose your edge? Mr Groenhuijzen claims not. The system is so fast at updating, he says, that the TomToms stuck to people’s windscreens would not send them all haring down a B-road into the same village to create a new traffic jam.

The use of bingo competitions to win readers marked a particular low point in the UK’s newspaper circulation wars. It showed a fundamental lack of belief in the core product. In a mature market, the newspapers ran out of ideas for ways to set themselves apart.

So what should we make of Microsoft’s latest gimmick to drum up traffic for its search engine? It seems the order has gone out to try just about anything that might persuade people to switch from Google and Yahoo! According to this story on Marketwatch, Microsoft is testing the idea of giving away prizes like T-shirts and videogames to get people to use its search engine more. This comes after Live Search Club, which temporarily boosted Microsoft’s market share this summer by getting people to search while playing online word games. 

Search is not a mature market. Far from it. Bill Gates likes to say that search is still in its infancy, and that there is plenty of room left for world-beating innovation. So why is Microsoft behaving this way? With Google still forging ahead at full steam, it looks like desperation.

The mobile gaming industry has hit a bump on its road to growth.

Revenues for publishers declined by 9 per cent in the second quarter, compared to the first, when revenues were up 11 per cent on the fourth quarter, according to the iSuppli research firm.

Its report says the pace of growth is slowing and one of the main problems for the industry is the small number of subscribers for mobile games. It suggests the demographic could be widened if games could take advantage of phones and be more networked and multiplayer.

A week ago, shares in Glu Mobile fell 33 per cent after it predicted a fourth-quarter loss of 6 to 7 cents a share, compared to Wall Street expectations of a loss of 2 cents.

It blamed slowing business in Europe where carriers were ordering fewer games as they changed the way they managed their businesses.

Analysts said the industry was suffering from growing pains. ISuppli suggests carriers are turning to the mobile video market instead, which it says holds the most upside potential of premium content categories.

Greg Ballard, Glu’s chief executive, visited us recently. He admitted the US was trailing Japan and Korea, where companies such as Namco and Sega were moving forward with multiplayer games on more sophisticated phones.

Glu was also still very dependent on carriers – 95 per cent of its games were delivered through 160 carriers. He expects downloads to shift more to the Web over the next three to five years, as well as to sideloading at retail through memory cards that handsets can now increasingly accommodate.

Glu sees itself as the most independent of the big three mobile game players in the West – Gameloft is backed by the video game publisher Ubisoft and Electronic Arts has bought Jamdat.

David Gosen, the head of mobile publisher I-play and another recent visitor, said Glu’s flotation on the Nasdaq in March has helped the profile of the industry. He believes more user-friendly handsets, all-you-can-eat data plans and big brands entering the sector will unlock the market in a big way over the next 12 to 18 months.

ISuppli’s forecasts back him up – it expects mobile gaming revenues to nearly triple by 2011, growing to $6.6bn, for a compound annual growth rate of 23 per cent.

That makes this year’s second-quarter slump seem like only a pause in a game, before the industry leaps to the next level.