Saturday, May 9, 2009

Kindle and Obama; Ballmer on VC; Aspen Medtech's closure

The read-aloud feature of Amazon.com's newer Kindles has generated a fair amount of controversy over copyright issues. Now the New York Times reports that the robotic voice of Kindle mispronounces a fairly important name: Barack Obama. That could be a problem for the new large screen Kindle DX, which Amazon is targeting at newspaper readers. Amazon is reportedly fixing the problem.

Will Amazon ever open a Kindle App Store in the style of Apple, opening the platform to third-party developers? Don't hold your breath, says Silicon Alley Insider. The blog spoke to a product manager at the Kindle DX launch this week, who indicated an app store is not a priority. Ian Freed, the Amazon exec in charge of Kindle, expressed a similar view in an interview with TechFlash last November.

Bsquare Corp. reported a two percent drop in revenue and a net loss of $90,000 for the first quarter, with CEO Brian Crowley saying that he was pleased that the Bellevue provider of mobile software solutions generated cash and increased service and software revenue on a sequential basis. The company's revenue was $16.7 million for the quarter, down from $17.1 million.

Bellevue's nGenera Customer Interaction Management, the company formerly known as Talisma, has named Nikhil Govindaraj to the position of vice president of products. 

Amazon has a new distribution channel for its MP3 digital music business. The online retailer is working with ABC's new "Music Lounge," which streams and sells songs from the network's popular TV shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "Gossip Girl." Amazon will handle sales of music tracks.

Bellevue medical device incubator Aspen Medtech -- which had raised $1 million in funding from Three Arch Partners and Prospect Venture Partners -- has shut down, according to a report from the Venture Capital Dispatch Blog. The firm was led by Seattle Medical Technologies executives Daniel Hawkins, John Adams and Clif Alferness. Adams and Alferness -- well known Seattle area medical device entrepreneurs -- also were involved in the medical device incubator Scout Medical Technologies.

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