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"One defends when his strength is inadequate, he attacks when it is abundant."—Sun Tzu, The Art of War The Apple iPad isn't even available yet, but already it is forcing Amazon to respond in a variety of ways to protect its competing Kindle eBook business. Amazon just snapped up a touchscreen technology startup, presumably to update the already ancient-looking Kindle. Emboldened book publishers are pushing back on Amazon's $9.99 pricing now that they can sell the same eBooks on the iPad for $14.99, and Amazon is capitulating. And the Kindle team at Amazon, which once had an arrogant approach towards publishers when it was the only game in town, is now bending over backwards to solicit their loyalty, says one editor at a publishing company who has noticed the change in tone. The coming battle between Apple and Amazon will occur on many fronts, but place where Apple can really hurt Amazon is on pricing. Just as Apple initially did with 99-cent songs on iTunes, Amazon imposed a uniform $9.99 price on bestsellers in the Kindle Store.  A single price helps to establish markets for new product categories, especially when that price is at a discount to the physical alternative.  While the 99-cent strategy worked well for Apple in digital music, in books Apple doing a jujitsu move on Amazon by allowing publishers to have more control over the pricing. Now Macmillan is demanding that Amazon sell its eBooks for $14.99, and News Corp's Rupert Murdoch is making similar grumblings about  HarperCollins.

SlideShare just announced that it now offers businesses the ability to create their own custom channels on the popular document sharing service. These channels allow businesses and enterprises to share their presentations, e-books and whitepapers with a wider audience. Microsoft , Ogilvy , Adobe and Razorfish Marketing are among today's launch partners. The White House also now uses a SlideShare channel to share over 1,000 documents with the public. In addition, you can also find a our own custom ReadWriteWeb channel here . Sponsor
According to SlideShare's CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha , SlideShare current gets over 25 million unique visitors per month. For now, SlideShare is only offering these new channels to larger businesses. This is clearly part of SlideShare's monetization strategy and fits in well with SlideShare's other business-oriented products like AdShare and LeadShare , both of which are part of SlideShare's strategy to position itself ...

As an entrepreneur, blogger and the investor in charge of the Founders Fund seed investment program , Dave McClure knows the importance of a proven revenue model. In a recent blog post he makes the assertion that "subscription models are the new black" despite the fact that startup monetization has focussed heavily on cost-per-click advertising. He writes, "This Don't-Be-Evil-AdWords-Click-Happiness..It's made us a bunch of lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI...We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy & venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models." While we might not have chosen this exact phrasing, we cannot agree with McClure more. Sponsor
Nowhere is freemium model failure more obvious than in the streaming music space. Even with millions of users and licensing deals with major labels, Imeem was acquired by MySpace last year and quickly dismantled. The cost of licensing content to unpaying users was enough to put the company ...

Late last week, I wrote a post about how netbooks running Chrome OS and the iPad were on a collision course. Some people took exception to that, noting the iPad was only a touchscreen device while Chrome OS was created to be used with more traditional computing form factors, like netbooks and laptops. But there's a new concept video that has surfaced on a Chromium Project page that very much shows how the two could and should compete head-on in the touch tablet space. Again, this is just a concept video at this point, but it clearly shows what the people building Chrome OS are thinking about for future products. Oh, and in case you're worried that since Chromium OS is an open source project, this is just some random person making these videos that Google is unlikely to use for Chrome OS, they were made by Glen Murphy, a Googler working on Chrome (with a sense of humor).