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Amazon announced the Kindle 3 last night, and it doesn’t look too shabby at all. The most important part is the inclusion of the next-generation E-Ink display, previously only found in the too-big-for-casual-use Kindle DX. (The low price, $139 for the Wi-Fi version, certainly doesn’t hurt.) Immediately following the announcement, I saw something that confused me. For whatever reason, it seems plenty of people are comparing the Kindle to the iPad, almost as if these people want the Kindle to be the iPad. Why is that?

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HP reveled most of its tablet strategy yesterday at the Fortune’s Brainstorm conference. The Windows 7 HP Slate is headed to the enterprise sector this fall while the webOS-power Palmpad will go head-to-head against the iPad later. The plan itself really isn’t that surprising as I saw this coming shortly after Palmpad was trademarked. But what I didn’t expect was the outcry from consumers who actually want a Windows 7 Slate. It’s clear HP should take a long look a limited consumer market release for the Win7 Slate.

I’ve said it over and over and over. Windows 7 is horrible via a touch interface. It’s simply not meant to be used with your fingers. However, the HP Slate is said to come with a stylus and if said stylus is an active digitizer like Wacom tablets, it could be awesome and what’s been missing from Windows tablets for so long. I still believe webOS has a better chance to catch on as Windows tablets have been around longer than Apple has been making the iPod and have yet to sell well, but why not have both options available and let the market decide? At least our readers want it.

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When Reid Hoffman and David Sze of Greylock stopped in the office last week, they offered some advice for any entrepreneurs feeling emboldened by the recent surge in Web valuations: Just because you can get it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

If a valuation is bid up too high, future rounds are a challenge and a company can be opened up to downrounds that squeeze out common stock—typically the shares held by the people actually building the company. Angel investors can also get squeezed out in downrounds, since many of them don’t invest along a company’s entire life-cycle and that could be bad for future relationships.

There are other subtle ways a nose-bleed valuation can change a startup’s culture. It was, after all, at the time of Facebook’s $15 billion Microsoft valuation that the company suddenly went from David to Goliath, opening itself up to that Harvard lawsuit and the attentions of mercenary employees and other types of gold-diggers.

The natural caveat here is that VCs have a vested interest in telling you to keep your valuations low—they get a slice of your company for cheap. But a good many entrepreneurs swear by this rule too. As Hoffman says below, “You want to plan for the entire length and history of the company.”

We end this clip with some more tough love advice for those pitching Greylock: If you’re comparing yourself to existing hot companies, you probably don’t have a new enough idea.

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Now that Twitter did away with its monolithic Suggested User List, everyone can fight for followers on a more equal footing. Tweetmeme wants to help you gain followers with a new Follow Button you can place on your blog or Website. It looks very much like Tweetmeme’s ReTweet button, which is on 100,000 sites and registering 7 billion monthly impressions across the web, except it says “Follow” instead of “Retweet.” When you click on the Follow button, a window pops open that lets you sign into Twitter and follow the account tied to the button (usually the person or publication of the site the button is on).

The Follow button comes in different shapes and sizes, shows how many followers you have, and is tied into analytics services such as TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and TwitterGrader. The data from the Follow button should also appear in Tweetmeme’s own analytics.

Follow buttons are nothing new, but Tweetmeme has a lot of distribution muscle with its Retweet buttons. The question is, how many buttons are you going to gunk up your site with? Should we add a follow button to every post?

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