In case you were watching Bill Clinton's DNC love-in for Barack Obama Wednesday night, it may come as news that Amazon teased its new Kindle devices during the NFL season opener. Rumored to include the Kindle Paperwhite, the official press conference begins today at 10:30 a.m. PT in Barker Hangar and will be covered live. [Update: more details here.]

CNET reported last week the debut of two 7-inch Kindle Fires, “including a high-end model with a zippy processor, a camera, physical volume controls, an HDMI port, and larger storage than a second, more bare-bones version.” 

Amazon’s uber-strategy is to sell the devices at a low enough price point to ensure deep market penetration, and then make money on higher-margin content, e.g., e-books, video, games, apps and music.

"The swing factor in the expectation on the upcoming Kindle Fire could be on how much lower pricing can go," said So Young Lee, analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. "Introducing a tablet below the $150 mark could be compelling and another game changer in the industry where the $199 price point is no longer unique."Continue reading...

A Business Insider column titled “Why Quora Is Wikipedia's Worst Nightmare” argues that the crowdsourcing startup, founded by Adam D'Angelo and other ex-Facebookers, will overtake the ten-year-old free encyclopedia. Despite some controversy, Wikipedia considered the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, with 22 million articles.

While Quora, the San Francisco-based $400 million startup, is still “a tiny gnat compared to Wikipedia's traffic,” notes BI, it has “trajectory [that] shows an enormous amount of promise, and given Quora's buzz, shouldn't be ignored.”

In addition to a growing database, Quora is flexing the muscle of a Q & A site widely attractive to the tech industry. Microsoft’s Bing has integrated it into its social search build-out, further leveraging the use of Facebook data first integrated in 2010 and augmented by a social sidebar this year.Continue reading...

The newest kid on the media block is Medium, somewhere between a social network and a collaborative publishing tool, and given the pedigree of its founders, Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, it’s well worth attention.

Obvious, Williams and Stone’s post-Twitter startup that was announced at the Aspen Institute festival in July 2011, has already given the world Blogger as well as Twitter, and describes itself as “more of a philosophy than a company or product. We focus our long term view on ideas and technology that can be generally described as 'world positive.' When opportunities resonate with our worldview, we do what makes sense to help them succeed.”

Medium is their “world positive,” lightweight tool for self-expression with text and images. Users — anyone with a Twitter account — can post once or several times a day, and create original collections. Posting is presently open only to those who register.

Medium is a fervent democracy and posts are ranked by ratings rather than chronology. The nascent promise is that everybody should be able to publish without the dual pressures of becoming a full-time blogger and amassing a following.Continue reading...

Sephora, the high-end beauty retailer owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, operates more than 1,600 stores worldwide where customers can try and apply make-up before they buy. Under digital head Julie Bornstein, Sephora is in the midst of its own “social and mobile makeover,” bridging the worlds of offline and online — stylishly, of course.

Case in point: today Sephora announced a partnership with Pantone, the global color authority, for a digital app. Dubbed SEPHORA + PANTONE COLOR IQ, it's described as "the most advanced foundation matching solution available in North American beauty retail. Using Pantone’s color capture and measuring technology, SEPHORA + PANTONE COLOR IQ is the first and only beauty system to scan the surface of the skin, assign an official PANTONE® SkinTone™ number, and match a scientifically precise foundation shade from Sephora’s 1,000 foundations, brands and formulas." The service launches today at Sephora's Times Square flagship in New York, and on August 2nd in San Francisco.

Social business, as Brian Solis calls it, is de rigueur for brands today, iterating from social to digital and experiential. That's why Sephora is taking its digital operations to the next level in a redesigned website with amped up search, an iOS mobile app and a new mobile website, Sephora is installing iPads in more than 100 of its stores in an integration with Pinterest replete with “Pin It” buttons for all its product pages.Continue reading...

Intel has built a new social publishing platform called “iQ” that leverages the social actions of their global employees and curates content that is capturing Intel’s collective attention, much as it's been doing externally with such consumer-facing social digital projects as The Museum of Me Facebook integration.

According to Bryan Rhoads, iQ Editor-in-Chief, “Our modern world is the product of Moore’s Law. Every piece of technology we own or online service we consume has Gordon Moore’s 1965 law as a common denominator (Moore's Law = # of transistors doubling in microchips about every two years). It’s the innovative spark that created new industries, spawned new forms of communications and revolutionized the global economy.” 

Rhoads highlights the iQ approach:Continue reading...

Expanding on its Museum of Me interactive campaign, a digital brand experience invited the public to "create and explore a visual archive of your social life," Intel is now pitching a musical version of your Facebook timeline — find out more at intel.com/musical.

The AT&T MLS All-Star Game taking place this week (July 25) in Philadelphia will be the world's first "smart soccer match" and will feature the new adidas micoach professional soccer team tracking system, billed as the next step in player performance analysis technology.

The tool measures everything an athlete does, and the All-Star game is a prelude to a broader rollout with Major League Soccer in 2013. That's when all 19 Major League Soccer teams will start using the micoach Elite System in a bid to make MLS the world's first smart sports league.Continue reading...

As London's museums and galleries get in the swing for the Summer Olympic Games, Google is powering two unique installations that harness the power of its cutting-edge web technologies.

The Science Museum this week unveiled the the Google Chrome Web Lab, a series of five interactive experiments that showcase web technologies and a first-of-its-kind web-based exhibition marries cyberspace and physical space. “We hope to inspire people around the world by showcasing the magic that the Internet makes possible,” blogged Jayme Goldstein, Product Marketing Manager for Chrome.Continue reading...