[nabs-l] NYT article on Ray Kurzweil and Blio

[Corbbmacc O'Connor]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/ray-kurzweil-vows-to-right-e-reader-wrongs/

Ray Kurzweil Vows to Right E-Reader Wrongs
By ASHLEE VANCE

There’s Amazon.com’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook,
Apple’s iPad and a bevy of iPad and Kindle clones. Still, Ray
Kurzweil, the famed inventor, thinks people deserve yet another option
when it comes to reading books and magazines with an electronic
device.
Rick Friedman for The New York Times Ray Kurzweil at his home in Newton, Mass.

And so, Mr. Kurzweil presents Blio, a software package that can run on
everything from PCs to hand-held devices. It displays colorful images
and varying fonts with formatting similar to what people find in
physical texts.

The Blio free software should become more widely available to
consumers over the next two months, Mr. Kurzweil said, as large PC
makers and retailers like Wal-Mart begin to offer it on their own
devices.

“Wal-Mart is very excited,” Mr. Kurzweil said. (Melissa O’Brien, a
Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said, “We speak to manufacturers and suppliers
all the time regarding new products, so as a general rule we simply do
not comment on speculation about what may be coming to Wal-Mart or
Wal-Mart products until plans are absolute.”)

Mr. Kurzweil argued that the existing e-readers and tablets had
limitations in the text formats they support and the way they handle
the original images and layouts in printed texts. Blio preserves the
original formatting, making it particularly attractive to publishers
of things like cookbooks, how-to guides, schoolbooks, travel guides
and children’s books.

“The publishers will not give things with complex formats to these
e-reader makers,” Mr. Kurzweil said. “They destroy the format.”

He said, “The iPad launched with just 30,000 books, which are all in
the ePub format. Apple showed one jerry-rigged Winnie-the-Pooh book on
TV, which they had to craft by hand.”

Mr. Kurzweil has a long history of dealing with this type of
technology. He created the first scanning systems for blind people
that could read aloud everyday texts and went on to pioneer
text-to-speech and voice recognition software technology.

He has also made a name for himself as a predictor of technology
trends. In some of his books, Mr. Kurzweil lays out a series of graphs
that show how things like chip speeds, Internet bandwidth and memory
price-performance grow at exponential rates. He has even used these
observations as the basis of a life philosophy that promises great
technological advances in the years to come, which I described at
length in a recent article on the Singularity.

Over the years, Mr. Kurzweil has made millions of dollars selling his
technology and companies. But he thinks Blio and its associated
bookstore could end up as the real blockbuster even though it appears
somewhat late to market, especially considering the success of the
Kindle.

“This shows every potential to be the biggest business we have run,”
Mr. Kurzweil said.

When not making e-reader software and predicting man’s future, Mr.
Kurzweil spends some time building automated financial trading systems
for hedge funds through a company called FatKat.

Only so much about FatKat can be revealed publicly, Mr. Kurzweil said,
because the Securities and Exchange Commission frowns on boasting
about gains in the hedge fund arena.

“I can say that we have an arrangement with a multibillion-dollar firm
that gets all of its money from one multibillionaire,” Mr. Kurzweil
said. “They’re eager for us to manage $100 million or $200 million,
and we are almost there.”

The pattern recognition software makes bets based on fluctuations in
the markets, and Mr. Kurzweil’s company takes 30 percent of any gains.