This is nice – I just found out that The OLED Handbook is #980 best selling Lulu.com book. Lulu is one of the most popular print-on-demand book publishers today. I’m very pleased with the sales of the Handbook, so this is not really surprising – but still nice
The Lulu sales rank takes into account the sales revenue and not just the number of books sold (i.e. the price of the book times number of sales). The OLED Handbook costs $149.99 for the printed edition. The digital (PDF) edition, costs $97, and is much more popular (about 4 times more popular, actually).
If you know me, you know I’ve been following OLEDs for years now. One of the most exciting applications of this new technology is lighting. OLEDs enable efficient, beautiful, thin area-lighting panels, which may also be color tunable, flexible and/or transparent. In the past few weeks, three companies sent me new OLED panels and lamps for review. If you want to see what the lighting of the future looks like, check out these reviews – the Philips Lumiblade panels, Lumiotec’s Hanger and Vanity lamps and Blackbody’s V-LUX lamp. And here’s a short video showing all OLED panels I’ve got:
Today I finally done it – I’m no longer offering Windows software. This was not an easy thing to do. I remember my first windows software from back in 1998 (it was called Bullsy, and I developed it together with my friend Alon Keinan when we were in the second year in University). It was a freeware mastermind game. I “established” Metalgrass and started offering Square-Off back in 2000 just before leaving to my after-the-army trip to NZ and Samoa.
Square-Off was an AdWare at first (I was working at Cydoor at the time, after all) but later I converted it to shareware. It was then followed by Karteset, SAM and finally AdSenseLog. I was selling those titles for over 8 years or so – but never managed to make it successful. In fact, in just two months I sold more Nonogram Kindle titles than all four Windows titles in all those years (although of course revenue from AdSenseLog was still a lot more as the price was $69.99 and the Kindle Nonogram costs just $2.99).
So now I’m focusing mostly on my technology blogs (mainly OLED-Info) and Kindle software. Maybe one day I’ll go back to desktop software, who knows?
Back in March 2010 I posted that OLED-Info is one of the world’s most popular blogs – the 928th, at least according to Technorati. Anyway, these ranking change wildly, but today I checked again and now OLED-Info is at number 844. It’s also the 52nd most popular gadget blog, the 90 on the Technology list, and the 2117 on the green list (okay, that’s not so impressive). Technorati ranks blogs according to their Authority, which measures a site’s standing & influence in the blogosphere. These ranking, like I said, change all the time, and doesn’t really mean anything, but I just wanted to brag a bit. I’m allowed to, ain’t I?
I just finished reading a great book, The Telling by Ursula Le Guin. Ursula is one of my favorite authors (and her “The Dispossessed” book is one of my favorite books) – and this is one of her finest books. It’s amazing how she’s able to create a convincing world with an interesting philosophy/religion in a small paperback. One of the best books I’ve read lately!
About three or four weeks ago I got a call from Nokia India. They said that Metalgrass software is registered in Nokia’s developer site and want to know whether I’m developing mobile applications. I politely said that I’m not developing any mobile applications (apart for my Kindle game) and I thought that was that.
After two or three days I got another call from someone else in Nokia saying the same thing. And then again, and again. Today I got the sixth or seventh call, and it’s starting to get annoying. I had to hung up on that girl – she just wouldn’t get off the line when I tried to end the call politely. Is Nokia that desperate? They sure are starting to annoy…
A while back I said I was working on three projects and the final one (the first ones being the OLED Handbook and the OLED-Info redesign) is now released too – my first Kindle game called Nonograms. Yes, this is a Square-Off port to the Kindle. It costs $2.99 and can be bought from the device itself or via Amazon.com (if you live in the US, that is). This is actually my first non-Windows software title (except for web applications of course) and it’s pretty exciting!
Kindle development is done in Java and it’s rather challenging as the Kindle E Ink display poses some serious restrictions. It was quite fun to develop and it took me quite a while to make it good enough for Amazon to publish. I started coding about six months ago, and now it’s live on Amazon’s store…
The OEA sent me their latest organic-electronics brochure, and with it a very cool demonstrator flashlight – that has an organic solar cell (OPV), a flexible battery, a printed electronics circuitry and a white LED. This whole thing looks like a bit of cardboard – but it actually works and is pretty cool…
I just finished reading one of the best books I’ve ever read – Playful Parenting, by Lawrence Cohen. Yeah, it’s a sort of guide to raising children, and it’s the best I’ve read to date. This book is filled with so many good ideas and tips that it’s hard to even give examples. Basically his advice is to ‘get down on the floor and play with your kids’ – but it goes much deeper than this. In the past few months that I’ve been reading this (yeah, I’m slow lately) I’ve started to put some of Lawrence’s advice to use, and it works great. If you have kids – buy this book and read it. If not, well, you better still read it.
Foxconn opened a new factory in Chengdu, China, to make Apple’s iPad2 displays. Work conditions are horrible – even by Chinese standards. Here’s something more to think about before you buy another useless gadget from Apple (or most other companies, probably, although Apple always scores last in environmental and work-conditions researchers…):
