People who attended the "D6: All Things Digital" event in May know that I asked Jeff Bezos an impertinent question. Why, I asked, did Amazon insist on using up the primo spot on my landing page to promote Kindle, when I already owned one and Amazon knows that I own one. (For those who haven't taken the plunge, Amazon actually pre-configures your Kindle with your customer information when they ship it to you. So presumably they know who has one and therefore doesn't need to be promoted to buy another one.) Bezos's response was classic: "Because," he said, "you only have one." Bezos sent me an email today, asking me to check out Amazon.com. Lo and behold, the ad for Kindle ...

This week, TopSchool Inc. is introducing itself to its world, which is the world of for-profit, post-secondary educational institutions. That's a mouthful, but it's a significant mouthful because those schools, ones designed to address specific educational needs and to make a profit while doing it, have grown into about a third of the entire college-level educational system. That's right: A third of the money paid by people attending school after high school is not paid to the institutions we all identify as our college and university system. Instead, there is a large and vibrant system of schools -- small and large, broad or narrow -- that are run as profitable businesses. And our company, TopSchool, has developed the software to provide ...

We so LOVE hot new products, the Geek and the Gadfly do. We’re getting pretty excited by Amazon’s new Kindle. Amazon has done an amazing thing with the Kindle, which is to get it right enough in its first version that you can see how it will play out and be a successful product. It is, indeed, the iPod for book readers. First clue: Multiple people from different walks of life who don’t know each other each have remarked to the Gadfly on how interesting and engaging they find the idea of the Kindle. The Geek (of course) was the first to do so, by ordering the Kindle early enough that he got one of the first. ...