Last week I published that this year might be the year of "The Tablet", and with the Consumer Electronics Show just ending there are no end to the number of Tablets that have been introduced. While none of them have all the features that the Mythical Apple Tablet might have, they are fully featured devices. One software piece that is needed is an e-reader. There are e-book readers, Stanza, Kindle for iPhone, Barnes & Noble e-reader, etc... they all lack certain features - text-to-speech, highlighting to name a couple.
Well, that all changes with Blio. Developed by Ray Kurzweil, creator of Kurzweil 3000 and pioneer in Optical Character Recognition, synthesizers, and lots of other things, Blio is a full color, full featured e-book reader (to be released in February)! Here are some posts on Blio:
First Look
Blio e-book reader
Interview with Ray Kurzweil
Some of the features include:
*multiple platform support - iPhone/iPod Touch, PC (sorry no Mac at this time), mobile devices, netbooks, etc...
*Full Color - it looks like a book, not just text like the Kindle
*embedded graphics, hyperlinks & video!!
*Text-to-Speech, with word highlighting
*adjustable font size & reading speed
*insert notes, drawing, images, video, or recording into your text
*over 1,000,000 free books available
*synchronization between platforms - so where you left off on your iPhone is updated to your laptop!
This software alone could make "The Tablet" a success. I can only imagine a world where every student has a tablet that they can customize, and use on a regular basis to read and help them! Blio could completely change the way we read books. I can imagine so many possibilities for this software and devices like "The Tablet"! I can't wait to see what happens!
Patrick
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