The Breakfast Meeting: New Amazon Devices, and Apple\'s Plans for Digital Radio

September 7, 2012, 9:22 am

By NOAM COHEN

The intimate connection between digital media and the devices that play them was in full effect on Thursday, as the online store Amazon.com announced a range of new Kindles for reading, listening and watching. Also on Thursday, it was learned that Apple was working on adding an Internet radio service to its devices, along the lines of Pandora.

• At a news conference to introduce the new Amazon devices, including a much more powerful Kindle Fire, Jeff Bezos, the company's chief executive, took on Apple and its iPad directly: “We are not building the best tablet at a certain price,” he said. “We're building the best tablet at any price.” Amazon, Nick Bilton writes, now has models ranging from a bas ic black-and-white-screen e-reader to a color tablet. The largest version of the new tablet - the Kindle Fire HD - challenges the iPad most directly, with an 8.9-inch display, a front-facing camera, 16 gigabytes of storage and the ability to have cellular data connectivity. It also clocks in at $200 less than the iPad.

• Meanwhile, Apple, which has transformed the music industry through the sale of digital songs and albums at its iTunes store, is said to be in the early stages of creating a digital radio service, Ben Sisario and Nick Wingfield write. The scope of the plans, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, are still not clear, but the idea would be to compete with Pandora Media by sending streams of music customized to users' tastes â€" perhaps based on the music already on Apple devices. Like Pandora, the service is expected to incorporate advertising.

President Obama‘s acceptance speech Thursday night ended the political co nvention season, as the campaign shifted to battleground states. Mr. Obama's opponent, Mitt Romney, announced a new series of 15 advertisements, Jeremy W. Peters writes, tailored to the issues in eight states: Colorado (military spending), Florida (real estate prices), Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

• This Sunday, Mitt Romney will appear on “Meet the Press,” a departure from his preferred interviewers, Jodi Kantor writes, including Fox News hosts or Bob Schieffer of CBS News. She adds: “When challenged, he can become the Mitt Romney that aides don't want anyone to see - visibly irritated, annoyed at being questioned.”
• The colleagues of Dan Balz, political writer at The Washington Post, took to Twitter to congratulate him on his 1,500th front-page byline for the newspaper.

The operator of an online eyeglasses store - with the perverse idea that terrorizing his customers would generate Internet publicity abo ut his business and improve his Google search ranking - was sentenced to four years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges of fraud and sending threatening communications, writes David Segal, who profiled the man, Vitaly Borker, in 2010. In response to the article, Google announced on its blog that it had adjusted its search algorithm so that “being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google's search results.” Mr. Borker read from a statement to address the judge, saying at one point: “I had a big mouth and I couldn't control it.”