Lots of people are hopping on the ebook bandwagon.  For example, Stieg Larsson has become the first author to sell over one million ebook copies of a novel.  More will be on the horizon.  In three years, ebook sales have already surpassed sales of hardback books, and that’s not going to slow down, especially since Amazon is cutting the price of the third generation of Kindle to only $139.

That’s not a bare-bones Kindle, either.  That’s with an improved E Ink screen and built-in WiFi connectivity.  If you’re somewhere with WiFi, you’re at an ebook store.  Just think, the prices are only going to get lower, and the functionality is going to get better; it’s only a matter of time.

As more people buy ebooks, and more people get ebook reading programs, readers, or whatever, you’ll start to see a razor and blade situation.  They give away the razors at cost (or lower) in order to sell you the blades. If they can get the price of the Kindle under $100, that makes it an impulse buy, or a reasonable gift buy.  Then the floodgates open and ebook sales are going to go through the roof.  You can bank on that.

Want to see a video that will blow your mind?  You’re here, so I’ll assume that’s a yes.  The following is available for TweetDeck (my Twitter client of choice) and Echofon for Mac.  It’s Twitter’s new real-time user stream API.  Basically, it’s like a constant stream of Twitter activity that never needs updating, refreshing, or any of the other things that you currently have to do if you want a live-ish view of what’s going on in Twitter.

When I say it’s what’s going on in the Twitterverse, I mean it.  Real-time tweets, favorites, retweets… basically everything everyone does that’s viewable to the public.  Twitter has dubbed it “Twitter at the speed of WOW” and I can see why; there’s just so much going on with it that it can be really intimidating!

I’m not sure I need instantly instant Twitter updating.  At least, not on this scale.  That’s really a lot of info to process at once.

Check out the whole gallery on Flickr, via io9.

It’s an event that was literally years in the making.  For 12 years, fans have been waiting breathlessly for Blizzard to unleash the next expansion in the StarCraft universe.  In the meantime, the game has become something of an international sensation.  It sold somewhere between 9 and 11 million copies and has become South Korea’s top spectator sport.  Now, with the release of StarCraft II:  Wings of Liberty, old pros and new fans alike have been given a modernized StarCraft with stellar graphics, movie-quality cut scenes that still retains all the quality of the original StarCraft’s game play.

Or at least, that’s what it’s supposed to do.

Truth be told, nobody but beta testers knows just how good StarCraft II might be, because the video game press wasn’t given prerelease copies to test.  Apparently, Blizzard and new headmaster Activision know what they’ve got on their hands and just how long people have been waiting for it, so they realize that they don’t need any extra buzz on top of the massive buzz StarCraft II has been generating on its own.  Looks like we’ll all be finding out together if the game is any good!

The devotion of Apple fans is downright amazing at times.  No matter what the company does to them, they’ll keep coming back for more.  Antennagate hasn’t slowed down the company in the slightest; in fact, the company’s more devoted fanboys are grasping onto Antennagate as a chance to take a peek behind the doors of the Cupertino company’s top-secret testing labs.  It’s an almost religious devotion that some scholars are actually arguing IS religious in nature.  There’s a great article breaking down the religious aspects of Apple’s official public story.

The core of pretty much every religion ever can be broken down into four key elements:  creation, a hero, a villain, and some sort of resurrection or victory over death.  If you look at it, that’s definitely the official Apple narrative.  The company was founded by hero Steve Jobs, they’re opposed by villain Bill Gates and the forces of Microsoft, and when the company had forced out its founding hero, he came back just in time to save the company like a black turtleneck-wearing John Wayne to save the day.  Obviously someone in Apple’s PR department knows their Joseph Campbell (or at least their Star Wars).

What’s been kind of amazing about this whole episode is that otherwise smart people have refused to acknowledge that Apple has released a flawed product in the iPhone 4.  Or, conveniently, they’re ignoring all the evidence of the iPhone’s flawed design and continue to lust after the 4G because, well, it’s an iPhone and they want it.  I guess you want what you want, and it’s hard to argue against faith, be it faith in a religion or faith in a gadgetmonger.

There are computers, cheap computers, and then there’s the very cheapest of the cheap.  The government of India, seeking to save some money and provide computers for its population of several billion people, has decided to do OLPC one better.  The inexpensive laptop computer has been one-upped as India’s Human Resources Minister, Shri Kapil Sibal, has unveiled the country’s $35 laptop.

Best of all, the company hopes that the $35 laptop eventually gets driven down to $10 via competition.  Now, the device isn’t the most capable thing on the market, but considering that it’s got a color touchscreen display, 2GB of memory, a USB port, and the ability to play YouTube videos.  If you throw in a very lite word processing program, I think you’ve got pretty much everything you could possibly need on the go at an incredibly low investment.

Here’s the question:  how’s it even possible?  To roll out a laptop for significantly less than the cost of a cell phone, even with India’s billion-population buying power and ability to access very cheap manual labor for the making of these machines, is mind-blowing.

Image: Speed Bump, via The Cynch.

It’s the summer.  That means it’s time for watermelon.  At every gathering, and at every picnic, cookout, or what-have-you, there’s going to be watermelon everywhere.  It’s just so fresh and cool and delicious.  It’s like scooping out a big mouthful of summer’s brain.  There’s no much better than watermelon.

That said, there’s not much worse than hot watermelon.  I mean, it’s still pretty good, but it’s just such a huge disappointment to have it not be all cold and delicious.  As such, you’re faced with a dilemma.  Do you sacrifice precious cooler space for a massive mound of melon?  Of course not!  You simply roll out your trusty portable watermelon cooler!

You mean you don’t have a watermelon cooler?  Well, the Joybond Watermelon Cooler is about the best watermelon cooler (or heater, for non-watermelon foods) you can get your hands on.  For $230-ish, they’ll even import it from Japan for you!  Despite being only about 14 pounds, this gadget can hold up to 14 liters, so it’s perfect for just about anything you’d want to keep cool!

Last week, I showed off 10 fun facts about Apple.  In the interest of equality amongst the OSes, here’s a corresponding list of 10 fun facts about Microsoft, including one of the most adorable things I’ve ever read:  MS’s Redmond, Washington, campus is full of abandoned baby bunnies.  That’s way cuter than the infestation of hipsters on Apple’s campus in Cupertino!

Also among the cool facts about Microsoft is that the company is actually a lot hipper than people let on.  Not only do they ask some incredibly strange questions in their job interviews, the Windows boot-up noise was actually composed by avant-garde musician and generally experimental sound guy Brian Eno, who has worked with everyone from David Bowie to U2 and Coldplay. Like record producers, the company also gives code names to pretty much everything, in an attempt to obscure products before they hit the market (like how movies are shipped to theaters under fake names to prevent bootlegging straight from the 35mm film or how record producers give albums false identities for the same reason).

Another fun fact about Microsoft is that employees celebrate their anniversaries with M&Ms.  No, they don’t get them, they give them!  Specifically, they have to bring in a pound of everyone’s favorite chocolate candy for every year of employment with Microsoft.  Who gets those M&Ms?  Probably the company’s thousands of employees each get one.

Really, how can people hate on a company whose first staff photo looks like the inside of a Doobie Brothers album?

Well, Apple held its big press conference today, and it’s nothing you wouldn’t have expected if you’ve ever seen a corporate butt-covering session.  Among the factoids trotted out by Steve Jobs was the fact that they’ve only had about 15,000 complaints to AppleCare out of 3 million iPhone 4G purchasers and that the iPhone 4G only drops calls at a slightly higher rate than the iPhone 3GS (which was also notoriously bad about dropping calls).  Of course, that ignores just how many actual calls per 100 are dropped by the iPhone in general and how many complaining customers have called AT&T about their crappy phone, but whatever.  Spin is spin; you can’t expect Turtleneck to give you a straight answer.

However, Apple does have a solution to the problem.  You take your beautiful iPhone and conceal its lovely design with an obnoxiously-colored rubber baby buggy bumper!  That’s right, the solution to the iPhone’s poor internal design is to ruin its lovely external design with a rubber and plastic cover-up.  That’s like taking a supermodel and making her wear a potato sack!  Sure it means she won’t get a sunburn, but you’re still ruining the best thing about her.

If there’s one good thing about the bumper crop of Apple bumpers, it’s that they’re going to be free to iPhone 4 owners.  If you’ve already bought one of Apple’s $30 rubberized monstrosities, you’ll be reimbursed for your expense.  People who bought a cheaper third party accessory to allow them to use their phone like a normal person will NOT be getting a refund, because they didn’t pay the Apple Tax.

Image: OSX Daily