Have you seen a Kindle in the wild?

You have probably seen a succession of puffs from Amazon about how the Kindle is its "best-selling item" - but without any numbers to back up its claims. The company's secrecy isn't surprising, but it's problematic for several reasons - not least because people are now starting to make major bets on the future of their businesses based on those claims. That thought process is what led me to write a piece about that secrecy, and how Amazon's refusal to talk about sales figures could cause a number of problems . In addition to the people quoted in the article, I just spoke by email with James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester who keeps track of the electronic book market, to get his view. Amazon doesn't reveal sales figures because it's the market leader, he says. "It's hard to argue that Amazon hasn't been successful in its business, so correspondingly it's hard to pinpoint any way in which Amazon's secrecy has hurt it," he said. "They know that to lead requires marshalling all your resources to beat everybody else even to obvious strategies. To do that, you often have to keep your lips sealed." The big question - how many Kindles are being sold right now - remains slightly elusive. But according to Forrester's analysis, the market will keep growing during 2010 in a way that suggests it will have an "iPod moment" (between 2003 and 2004, iPod sales rose by nearly 500%). "We estimate that by the end of 2010 there will be 4 million ereaders in the US, with more than half of them Kindles, probably close to 2.5m or so." He admits that even those numbers make the Kindle a long way from being mainstream, however. "Even at 2.5m possible Kindles in the market, that's less than 1 for every 100 people in the US - so while there's a lot of room to grow, it means that very few of the people around you at any given moment are likely to be Kindle owners. Plus, given that people do most of their reading at home – only 5% of the population travels regularly for business, an obvious Kindle target customer – it's unlikely that we'll see Kindles reach the public visibility that iPods and their white headphones had back in 2003." And there's the extra difficulty in divining what Amazon means when it says the Kindle is the biggest selling item on its site: it feels that the hype is a bit off base because, while I've seen people reading chart-topping books on the bus and train, I have yet to see a Kindle in the wild. Paul Biba from Teleread.org told me that he's seen them being used

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Have you seen a Kindle in the wild?

New Xbox 360 ‘Jasper’ spotted in the wild

Xbox-Scene reports that some readers now have Xbox 360 games consoles with long-awaited Jasper motherboards. These should run cooler and should mean the end of the Red Ring of Death, which featured on a recent Guardian Technology cover . The Jasper board has the new 65-nanometer version of the ATI graphics chip, which ran hotter than Xbox motherboards could sustain, over the long term. This should run cooler and it also costs less to produce. It's not easy to tell which machines have the new board. However, they have 150W power supplies with a different plug, whereas Falcon boards have 175W power supplies. Maybe someone will figure out the numbering scheme so it will be possible to tell from the box. Jasper boards also have 256 megabytes of Flash memory to store the new avatar-based (Wii-style) user interface, with space to spare. Earlier models had only 16MB of Flash. At VentureBeat , Dean Takahashi (who has written two Xbox books, and wrote our cover story) adds: What exactly was wrong with the older 90-nanometer graphics chips and the boards that came with them? I've gotten some new information about that.

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New Xbox 360 'Jasper' spotted in the wild