Kindle Review – Kindle 2 Review, Books

This is the second in my series of Lab 126 Secrets posts (technically 3rd if you count the FrogDesign+Kindle 3.0 post – though that was design focused). All of this is freely available information on the internet (+ go into settings in your kindle + type 126 to get a list of all the people at Lab 126 – courtesy Igor again).

Here are the big, big things -

1. Lab126 is not a small company. They have a lot of people on LinkedIn, a few more that show up in CyberSpace – I’d estimate an overall size of 125-250 people.
2. A large number of the people on LinkedIn are ex-Palm people. Another large group are ex-Apple (including from the iPod team).
3. They have a Globalization Expert (ex-Yahoo) who’s been presenting at unicode.org conferences. The talk abstract included this -
   

   processing text in different languages; preparing for the localization (translation) of user interfaces; making applications “locale-aware”, including format and display differences; as well as approaches to delivering multi-lingual and multi-locale software or content.

   Which indicates that the internationalization of the Kindle is well underway. And we should be seeing it in other countries sooner rather than later.

4. They’re hiring aggressively with 6 job openings on their own site and job postings on a multitude of sites, including an internship posting at scu.edu ($25-$35 an hour; they also have a Stanford intern).
5. The heart of the design team are ex frogdesign.com people (my entire post on kindle 3 + frogdesign).
6. Lab126 has people who were earlier at  Motorola, Aria Data Networks, VMWare, Ariba, Inc., Collinear Corporation, Pulse Entertainment, SCO, Nokia, PalmSource, Inc., PalmOne, Palm, MontaVista Software, Ironport Systems, France Telecom, HP, Desktop Factory, nLighten Technologies, Synvasive Technology Inc, Quantum Corporation, Agilent, Google, Animatrix, Xerox, McAfee, DNNA (SonicBlue), Genentech, Qualcomm, HandSpring Inc., Shopping.com, Apple, Microsoft, IBM – Almaden Research Center.
   

   Lab 126 - The Ingredients

7. There’s a senior PCB engineer who works at both Amazon and HP – is there a secret collaboration?
8. They have someone from VMWare – just the thought of a virtualization expert adding something to the Kindle gets me all excited. I suspect it might be something much more mundane.
9. Here are some key people and where they came from -
   

   * President – Earlier, VP at Palm, and VP at Apple PowerBook Engineering.
   * Head of Human Resources – Earlier, was Sr. Director, Human Resources at Apple.
   * Senior Corporate Counsel – Attorney at Microsoft Corporation.
   * Director Industrial Design. – Creative Director at frogdesign.
   * Director Product Management – Vice President, Product Marketing at PalmSource, Inc. + ex-Apple.
   * Chief Wireless Technologist – Entrepreneur at several start-ups.
   * Director Hardware earlier was Director of System Engineering at Palm.

10. The MySQL offices are in the same building as Amazon’s Lab126.