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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and Amazon creates its own URL shortener for products  

Amazon.com has quietly created its own URL shortener for products sold on its sites. People can now type "amzn.com/" and a product number to create a short URL, without the need for sites like tinyurl.com and bit.ly. Amazon appears to be positioning itself to take better advantage of popular microblogging service Twitter and mobile texting to generate buzz about merchandise.

It works like this: If I’m looking at Dan Brown’s upcoming book "The Lost Symbol," and want to tweet about it, I take the book’s ISBN number (listed on the product page) and put it on the end of amzn.com/. "The Lost Symbol" ISBN number is 0385504225. So the short URL would be amzn.com/0385504225. 

For other Amazon products that don’t have an ISBN, you use the ASIN number (Amazon Standard Identification Number), also on the product page. The tool also works for Amazon Wishlists. You type "amzn.com/w/" plus the Wishlist ID number, which is usually at the end of a person’s Wishlist URL.

Thanks to Mike Koss of StartPad.org for alerting us to this. Mike himself blogs about the Amazon URL shortener, writing, "As Twitter becomes more popular, I think more sites will be incorporating URL shorteners into their applications, enabling their users to share their pages without resorting to 3rd party services."

As far as I can tell, Amazon hasn’t officially announced this tool, though a few people are using amzn.com short URLs on Twitter. Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith didn’t respond to questions on the subject.

Various Amazon business units have their own Twitter accounts. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was an early personal investor in Twitter, and Twitter uses Amazon’s cloud compute storage service S3.  

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and Seattle CTO Bill Schrier talks budget cuts and blogging  

Bill Schrier is chief technology officer and director of the department of information technology for the City of Seattle. An Iowa native, he was an army officer, a street cop and a high school teacher before entering city government. Today, he heads what is essentially Seattle’s IT department, and is responsible for the city’s data centers, desktop computers, website, utility billing systems, and municipal TV channel. Schrier spoke to TechFlash about his background, how Seattle’s budget woes are affecting his department, and his embrace of blogging and Twitter.

Tell me about your background.

"I was appointed by the mayor in October 2003, so it’s been about five years now. I worked in city government prior to that. Essentially I became CTO after working my way up. Though they did a national search for a CTO, so I actually had to apply for the job. I’ve done a bunch of other stuff in the past. I’ve been an army officer and an army reservist, a police officer — not in Seattle, elsewhere. I was a street cop for four years and I was a high school teacher. High school teaching was the hardest job, let me tell you."

What was teaching like?

"There are discipline problems and the classroom is kind of chaotic the first year and I wasn’t very much older than the kids the first year out of college. Let’s just say I’ve got great respect for teachers."

What are your job duties as CTO of Seattle?

"Eighty percent of the job is running the internal technology of city government. I’ve got 215 people in my department. We call it DOIT, which stands for department of information technology. The budget is about $59 million, which sounds like a lot and it is a lot, but that’s out of a $3.9 billion city budget. So it’s only like two percent of the city’s overall budget. And most of that is running an internal city phone network and desktop computers and data center — a 24-hour, seven-day a week computer center that does mundane tasks like the utility billing system for Seattle City Light and Seattle Public Utilities. Then there’s a smaller part of my job — the Seattle Channel, the municipal TV channel is part of my department. And the city’s website is part of my department and we also have a community technology part, which is trying to bring technology to people that don’t have access to it in neighborhoods, putting computers in community centers where people who don’t have access to computers can use them. For the most part we do stuff that’s internal to city government, but we do some external things that touch the lives of people in the city."

How has the economy and budget cutting affected your department?

"There were a set of 2009 budget cuts which the mayor announced this year. And the cuts for my budget were on the order of $750,000. That’s for this year — for 2009."

What do you expect going forward?

"I think the deficit the city is facing — that number will be three or four times larger (than $750,000) next year. We’ll have to find reductions on the order of three or four times that amount."

Do you anticipate layoffs?

"For those cuts in 2010, we will undoubtedly have cuts in services and probably layoffs. Here’s another number for you — about 40 percent of my budget is people and 60 percent is things like phones and computers. Whereas other departments might be 80 to 85 percent people. So in my department I would hope to avoid layoffs because my personnel number is so much lower, but I don’t know. That’s something I have to work through over the next few weeks."

You have your own blog. How did you get started?

"I started it about a year ago. It was April of last year. I was trying to expose what goes on with information technology in the government to give it more transparency. If you’re a resident of the city, you know technology is there. You know there is video in police cars. You know when you receive your water bill it’s computer generated or tracked. But you don’t know all the work that goes into it. I was trying to expose that internal work."

You’re also on Twitter. I noticed a few months ago you tweeted about an internet slowdown in Seattle city government, which you attributed to overuse of Facebook.

"On inauguration morning January 20th, the networks went under stress because of all the video feeds. Everyone was watching it on the internet. It’s OK for city employees to watch this on government time because it’s about the orderly transition of government. But nevertheless our networks spiked up and we had problems with the network that morning. It didn’t go completely down but things were very slow because of the video use. I also blogged last year about how I felt it was inappropriate for city employees to use the internet (at work) for certain sorts of things – shopping, for example, gambling, dating sites, and we might very well consider how to block that kind of use."

What kind of reaction did you get on that?

"It’s kind of across the board. Internal to city government, I think most people tend to agree with that, that people shouldn’t be using gambling sites or dating sites. But Facebook, for example, if you’re on your lunch hour, can you update your Facebook? And should city government have an official Facebook presence? And I think the city will have a Facebook presence in the next couple months. That’s kind of a gray area in terms of city employees because of the public outreach part of it. The same thing with Twitter. My Twitter address is twitter.com/billschrier. I Twitter about a whole variety of things. I just tweeted about the UW’s $73 million in budget cuts. I tweeted about that because I thought that’s so relevant. The UW produces graduates that are used by our economy, by Microsoft and tech startups."

What else do you tweet about?

"I tweeted about the iPhone I gave my wife for Christmas. In city government, we buy HP equipment and the Windows operating system. That contract was competitively determined. The reason we buy HP and Microsoft Windows is it’s easier for us to maintain. People don’t have to worry about going to an HP at some desk and a Dell and a Compaq at the next. You don’t find Macs in city government. We don’t have Macs because they don’t run Windows, which is the standard business software, and Windows computers are cheaper than Macs. I like to joke about having a mixed marriage. I use Windows at work and at home, and I use a BlackBerry. And my wife is an iPhone person, she uses an iBook and I gave her an iPhone for Christmas."

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A closer look at Bill Schrier

Age: 60

Hometown: Traer, Iowa. Schrier grew up on a farm that’s been in his family for 110 years.

Hobbies: Astronomy, running, cycling.

Education: Masters in Public Administration, University of Washington. Bachelor’s degree from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, in physics and math.

If you were not CTO of Seattle, what would you be doing: “I’d be city manager in a smaller city someplace, a city like Renton or Kent or Burien. I’m interested in all aspects of government, not just the tech part. I’m not sure I would actually run for office. It’s kind of crazy.”

Car: 2001 Honda CR-V. 

Favorite tech gadget: Sony digital camera.

Vacation destination: National parks — Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon.
 

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A big night for Picnik  

By the time Picnik co-founder Jonathan Sposato walked on stage for the last time last night at the inaugural Seattle 2.0 awards, he was pretty much out of material. And with good reason. Sposato’s online photo editing startup was the big winner at the packed event at the Pacific Science Center, taking home top prizes in four of the 10 categories.

"I feel like we are the Slumdog Millionaire of the night," said Sposato, after winning the award for "Best Seattle Startup." His company also won in the categories of "Best Bootstrapped Startup" and "Best Startup CEO." Picnik’s Peter Roman was named the "Best Startup Product Designer." As Sposato was routinely called up on stage, he kept referring to his winning way as a "fluke."

That was especially the case in the "Best Bootstrapped Startup" category where he pointed to the efforts of fellow nominee Steve Murch of Big Oven, who he said had built an amazing service by himself.

The funniest part of the night came from TeachStreet founder Dave Schappell (appropriately named as host Renay San Miguel pointed out) who introduced the winner for the best venture capitalist. As a Seattle entrepreneur raising cash, Schappell was careful not to upset any of his potential funders.

Schappell said he wanted to go on our record that "we like all four of these nominees equally."

He then went on to offer condolences for the three three losing VCs, posing as a venture capitalist who was turning down an entrepreneur looking for money. Using all of the catch phrases that venture capitalists say when passing on a deal, Schappell had the crowd of entrepreneurs cracking up by the end of his remarks.

Madrona Venture Group’s Matt McIlwain won the award, with partner Greg Gottesman accepting on his behalf since McIlwain was celebrating a wedding anniversary with his wife.

In fact, Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s Bill Bryant was the only venture capitalist nominee in attendance which prompted him to humorously proclaim that you’ve "got to be present to win."

Voyager Capital’s Geoff Entress, an investor in more than two dozen startup companies in Seattle, took home the top prize for top angel investor. He thanked the entrepreneurs in the crowd who he said are trying to change the world.

Nat Brown of iLike was named the "Best Startup Technologist."

Josh Maher of Lunch 2.0 — whose two boys were handing out promotional stickers for the networking event — won the award for "Best Social Event for Startups." Later, fellow nominee Nathan Kaiser of nPost joked with his friend that the voting was rigged.

Shannon Swift of Swift HR Solutions and a member of TechFlash’s new "Top 100 Women in Seattle Tech" list was the only female winner, taking home the top prize for "Best Service Provider."

And TechFlash won for the "Best Blog for/about Startup." (Thanks to our readers!!! And thanks to Seattle 2.0 for hosting a fantastic event.)

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