Reuters : Prime View said on Monday it would pay about $215 million for E Ink, whose flexible digital displays are used in Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. … E Ink Vice President Sriram Peruvemba said the deal would provide the financing and manpower needed to fuel development of color displays, slated for mass production at the end of 2010. Previously: ⌦ Fujitsu Flepia is slow, expensive, but heralds a color e-paper age … ⌦ Fujitsu's Prototype “FLEPia” Color ePaper eBook - Boing Boing Gadgets ⌦ Warmer, warmer: e-paper with sub-second refresh - Boing Boing Gadgets ⌦ “Readius” Fold-Up e-Paper Reader is Now a Phone, Too - Boing Boing … ⌦ Steven Johnson on eBooks - Boing Boing Gadgets

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E Ink acquisition sets stage for color epaper by 2010

J. Christenbury blogs this hilarious exchange that occurred on Twitter between a Time Warner Cable marketing stooge and a customer who had real ideas : @jeffTWC: Please RT: working on customer loyalty programs and would love your ideas/input - raffling an iTouch on Thurs to constructive suggestions jchristenbury @jeffTWC I have a whole handful, where do I send them? jchristenbury @jeffTWC I want to choose and pay for the channels I want. (I know this is not a TWC decision but TWC has the clout to push it) jchristenbury @jeffTWC I want the CS reps to listen when I tell them I have already rebooted my computer and its not on my end. #customerloyalty jchristenbury @jeffTWC I want a bill that I can understand that doesn’t have cryptic misc. charges. I want to know what the charges are #customerloyalty jchristenbury @jeffTWC I want Higher internet speeds. the US has the lowest speeds of all. jeffTWC @jchristenbury Thanks for your tips here — but we’re not really addressing industry problems with this, just creating a marketing tool jchristenbury @jeffTWC These ARE things that will increase customer loyalty. [via Consumerist ]

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Time Warner Cable asks customers for "loyalty" ideas but doesn’t actually want to improve service

Elevation Partners’ Roger McNamee, on stage at the D7 conference along with Palm’s Jon Rubinstein, as transcribed by Joshua Topolsky : ⌦ “This product has the best alien technology.” ⌦ “And it eats iPhones for breakfast!” ⌦ “It’ll be at precisely 4:20.” McNamee was responding to Walt Mossberg’s question about an earlier boast about when iPhone users would switch to Pre . Later, in another non sequitur: “4:20 in the afternoon.” ⌦ “It has a mirror on the back… there’s never been a phone like this for women before.” ⌦ “Show of hands in here, was anyone offended by me talking about a mirror?” ⌦ On an “express line” for iPhone customers: “Yeah, outside the rings of Saturn.” ⌦ “If I were RIM or Apple, I wouldn’t worry about it. In America you’re not going to pay so much of a premium to get a smartphone that you can justify not getting one.” An executive in charge of millions of dollars in venture capital likes to make marijuana jokes. I can’t tell if I love him or simply think he’s fantastic. If anything, it gives me hope that I will be able to become a powerful Valley exec and still do boatloads of drugs, even while I’m on stage.

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Mad Money: Is Elevation Partners’ Roger McNamee batshit crazy…like a fox?

Palm is rumored to have a mini-Pre in development for release later this year. [TechCrunch] Apple is to start designing its own chips , just for iPhones and iPods. [WSJ] Amazon is to charge 15 cents per megabyte, rounded up to the next whole megabyte , when you transfer documents wirelessly to your Kindle . [Amazon] Verizon says Cablevision’s 101Mbps option is a “trick ” which will fail if more than a handful of customers in any given neighborhood try to get it. [DSL Reports] Prophecy of the day: Google Android will cause the netbook market to splinter . [MIT Technology Review]

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Rumors and Horrors! Minipalm, Apple CPU, Kindle price hike

Associated Press : EAU CLAIRE, Wis. - A Radio Shack employee faces disorderly conduct and battery charges for punching a customer. Police said the customer was trying to return an item Sunday, but the employee wouldn’t let him. The customer then asked to talk to a manager. That’s when the 52-year-old male employee began punching the man. [via Crime Scene KC ]

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Radio Smack

Enjoymentland has published their sales data for the first month of Locovore , their produce awareness application for the iPhone. It looks like if you can score a modest sales success (#64 in “Top 100 Paid Apps” for that month) and get featured on the front page of the App Store, you can pull in about $12k net. A healthy amount, but only if it keeps up. As you can see, even the best press wasn’t as effective as being blessed by the Apple Marketing team. Not sure what that means in terms of how to best market apps… basically, it leaves all of us at the unbeatable first law of marketing and promotion: build something interesting.

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App Store success: It helps if Apple likes you