Want to get Kindle books on your iPhone/iPod Touch or PC? Here’s a hack, ok, call it a tip. This is not illegal, you still have to pay for the book. It’s just a way around the restrictions Amazon has in place to stop non-residents of the US from buying Kindle books. Let’s get to it.

What you need:
1. A PC (not on Mac yet) or an Apple iPhone/iPod Touch.
2. A credit card
3. An Amazon account. If you don’t have one, register for one. Some Amazon shopping experience will help too. Now who hasn’t shopped at Amazon.com these days?
4. A US address

1. INSTALL THE KINDLE READER SOFTWARE/APP

Installing for the PC:
Download and install the Kindle for PC software.

Installing for the iPhone/iPod Touch:
This is a little trickier. You can only download the Kindle for iPhone app from the US app store. Don’t mess with the account you have right now. Set up another app store account with a different email, a US address and don’t enter your credit card info.

If your app store is in the Malaysian app store, you can easily change that by clicking on the Malaysian flag icon at the bottom right and change it to “United States”.

Now, download Kindle for iPhone app and sync. You shouldn’t lose your information. Once you see the app on your phone, you can log out of the US app store and login to your usual one.

2. Set up your Amazon account to go shopping.

First, use your credit card to buy a gift card that you will send to yourself. The books I buy usually cost around $10-15 so I bought a $50 gift card which should get me 3-4 Kindle books. Don’t log out yet, wait for email. Once the email with the gift card claim code arrives, click on “Start shopping”. This will credit the amount into your Amazon account.

Remain logged in. Go into your account and remove all credit card information. This is what’s making Amazon stop you from getting into the Kindle store. Also change the region or country of origin to the US. If you’re asked to enter a US address, you can use the one above.

Now you’re all set. Click on “Kindle Store” and go shopping.

3. When you’re ready to buy.

Click on “Buy now with 1-click” and tell Amazon where you want the book sent – to your iPhone/iPod Touch or to your PC.

It will come with instructions on how to retrieve the book from the app on your PC / iPhone / iPod Touch.

Enjoy!

BTW, you can leave your second App Store account alone, it may come in handy in the future. I use mine to download other apps that are not available to Malaysians just so I can drool at what I can’t have.

If you are now wondering what this foursquare thing is all about, here’s the pitch. More info at http://foursquare.com/businesses/

Even though I don’t have a kindle, I have been reading ebooks since 2003. I get the pdf versions from ereader.com and back then I was reading them on a Palm V.  One of the first apps I installed on my new iPhone 3Gs recently was Barnes and Nobles ebook reader – for the fun of it. B&N’s weird, they won’t sell me the ebooks like Amazon but they won’t stop me from downloading the reader unlike Amazon.

I do know a way to download the Amazon reader and buy kindle books but it’s a tedious process. This regional restriction put in place by publishers is stupid. If physical books can be shipped anywhere by Amazon why can’t ebooks be sold as well? For the first time in Amazon’s history, they sold more ebooks than physical books this Christmas. Ebooks are the future. No, ebooks are here today.

Ebooks are great, they don’t take up anymore space on shelves in homes or at the bookstores. They don’t kill more trees. They don’t contribute to carbon footprint moving around from printer to distributor to retailers and finally to a reader. They cost less and save consumers more. They can meet consumer demands faster. They weigh nothing so you can carry a small library in your pocket. More copies of a book in digital form can be sold because it’s a personal copy once it’s purchased, I can’t really share an ebook as easily as I can a physical book. More sales, more money, everyone happy. No? The one bad thing I see with ebooks though is that I can’t get an author to autograph it. I’m sure someone somewhere is working on a solution where I can have a video of me kissing the author and a digital scribble with the words “Last night was amazing. Sign” attached to the ebook.

There are so many reasons why an ebook is better than a physical book and why regional restrictions need to be tossed out the window. Who’s with me?

Check out:  The Business Case for E-Readers.

This is a social media aggregator disguised as an elite social media hall of fame. Vocanic Ltd, a company based in Singapore started a social media campaign in search of Malaysia’s top 500 social mediaphiles to take part in a secret project that was revealed yesterday in a “briefing”. I had the invite but I had better things to do on a Sunday afternoon.

With an eye on twitter I watched the briefing unfold. It became clear that this was a cheap stunt to collect data from unsuspecting social media users.  The company had little clue how to develop a service and now they need the 500 people to give it some direction. Or maybe this was another disguise because what they were really after was user information. There must have been more than 500 people who have given their information in the 6-page registration process.

I’m especially disappointed at being misled into a beta testing program and having to fill 6 pages with personal information that the developer couldn’t even use to create a service that’s half decent and launch-worthy. Then again, the 6 pages of questions were so badly structured, flawed and irrelevant, I’d be amazed that any meaningful data can be extracted to help an application developer. Just take a look at the pages I’ve screen capped.

I am ever happy to beta test new apps and volunteer feedback if a developer makes it clear that this is an invitation to a beta test. And if it’s a beta test, don’t collect personal information that has little relevance to product development.

So would I be willing to participate in this further? No. This is now Project DELETE.

Personally, I see twitter lists as another ego stroker. You know it is when people start thanking each other for adding them to a list or getting upset when they have been left out of a list and proceed to block, unfollow or both, the list curator.

I curated a list of Malaysians in Social Media for Listorious.com yesterday which I deleted today because it’s just not worth the emotional hassle. Some names are obviously left out because I don’t have every social media person on my follow list. Even if I did, I don’t count having 18K followers or someone who does not engage with others as being in or having a huge influence in social media.

Ego “twisting” aside for personal lists, there are great reasons for brands to curate their own lists.

Here’s my short list:
1. A brand can show what’s important to them with a list of tweeps they follow. It’s like Tony Hsieh’s alltop page where you’ll find blogs on customer service, lifestyle, fashion, shoes and tech. Knowing what Tony has accomplished in zappos, I want to read what he reads too.

2. I agree with point #5 on this list. Gives brands an opportunity to aggregate multiple accounts. Some brands have different names for different departments. Sometimes I wonder why. Customers want one website, one phone number and one email to reach a company.

Sometimes it works. If different twitter accounts are already established, a twitter list with all the brand’s accounts will help a lot. A great example is how AMC promotes the tv series Mad Men on twitter. Twitter accounts are set up for some of the main characters. One to check out is Betty Draper’s (a character in that show) twitter account. On her profile is a list of the other Mad Men characters which she has listed in her rolodex. It’s incredibly fun to read if you’re a fan of Mad Men like me. Betty also has a list of other people she finds interesting and she has them listed in Mad Men of the future (today’s mad men and women).

3. A brand’s staff/member list can also tell others who work or belong to that organization. Especially useful when someone in your organization deals with other people representing your company. When @xyz representing a publication asks me for an interview for example, I’d like to know if they are legit. Seeing their name listed on the staff list of the publication’s (account verified) twitter account gives me some confidence that he or she isn’t a competitor who just wants to get information on a new product I’ve released to the press that’s under embargo. Good example is the New York Times staff list.

Only three from me. There’s more from the many articles written by twitter pundits which you can do a search on. Final note, if you manage a brand or an organization on twitter, do get your list up soon.

Twitter introduced the list feature a few weeks ago and announced it on their blog on October 30. I saw it on my twitter profile some time around October 20 and was adding people to lists I’ve set up until it became tedious. Please excuse me if I have not gotten you into a list. I’ll get around to listing everyone soon.

I like that I can put the people I follow into lists so whenever I needed answers to technical question, I could look up my “geekeratti” list and tweet them, for example.  I would like it even more if I could send @ messages or DMs only to the people on one list. Can’t do it yet but until then, it’s still a good tagging system. If you’re unsure of what lists to create, perhaps I can help. Here’s what I have:

For people I think everyone should follow in October, they are in my @thechannelc/vip-october:

For people who would likely not add me back, I put them into my @thechannelc/follow-back-chance-is-nil:

BTW, Chris B is not on my follow list anymore but the tag I have set up for him is still there. I really don’t care whether he follows me back.

For people who usually don’t reply  tweets, I have them in my @thechannelc/doesnt-reply-tweets:

Lists can be a lot of fun. When you add someone to a list or two, it shows up on their profile. They can also see which of your list/s you’ve put them into:

And did you know you can add yourself to your own list?:

Finally, lists can be set to private and no one but you can see them. This is good if you want to create a private “pain-in-the-ass” or a “jerk” list.  Remember though that if someone who could make your life difficult is on the PITA list, triple check that it’s set to private.

The first Google Wave Hackathon for Google developers in Malaysia was held last Saturday at iTrain. Nazrul, Chief Thug of the Google Technology User Group in KL (GTUG KL) sat down with me and recounted the events of the week that almost led to a non-event. People had no Google Wave accounts up to 10am that morning. Thank gawd Google came through by 11am and everyone got down to business around noon.

If you’ve missed this one, you can look forward to the second hackathon which should be before Google’s public preview on September 30th. Follow @nazroll on twitter or join the GTUG KL facebook group for updates.

Found out I could play augmented reality games on my Nokia phone so I spent the whole afternoon playing an old (circa 2008) AR game called Tower of Defence. Graphics and gameplay is unsophisticated but the AR is very cool.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyWVH6jkDHg[/youtube]

Augmented Reality has been around for many years and is a technology that combines real-world and computer-generated data. The gaming industry was probably the first to exploit AR. Games have been developed using AR like the one above and many others. It’s a fascinating technology that is also useful in education and business. Brands like Ford and Topps have used AR in their marketing.  There are AR business cards too but the most impressive AR app I’ve seen so far is Layar for the Android phone:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08[/youtube]

These are all old news but worth looking at again because we will see AR used more and more. Coming to the Apple iPhone 3Gs soon is:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH6r2tIaRXU[/youtube]

The Layar and AcrossAir’s AR app are not first of it’s kind. A Japanese company called Tonchidot first came out with this for the Sekai camera and demo’d a concept at the 2008 TechCrunch50 Conference (2009 update). What I find really cool about the Sekai camera is the crowd-sourced content. This app will debut on the Apple iPhone 3Gs after the next OS update in September (AR only works on the iPhone 3Gs). Take a look.:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTwSXK_5dg[/youtube]

Apple does not have any AR apps at the moment and only just released the iPhone SDK 3.1 b3 with AR friendly API to developers.

For the latest updates on AR, follow @AugmentedAdvert on twitter.

More on AR:

Five Addictive Augmented Reality Gaming Apps Wired. July 28, 09

When I was a kid, I hoped to grow up to be an astronaut. I blame “Lost in Space” for inspiring unrealistic dreams. As bad as Barbie dolls that says you’re not pretty if you don’t have huge tits and blonde hair down to there. I adjusted that goal in my late teens when the hopeful became hopeless and I went off to business school.

I then wanted to be on TV, if not, I wanted to be paid watching TV. So now that I am paid to watch TV and market TV programs, it seems being on TV might be an achievable goal. I have appeared on TV when a TV crew came to the Agency to interview the team who created that fantastic campaign everyone was talking about. That was thrilling. Now I’d like to be my own director.

Reporting live on Qik.com…