Audioboo is a pretty cool new app that allows you to record something on your iPhone and then upload it to your page on Audioboo.com, as well as syndicate it via widgets - as it says, it's an iPhone blogging app. Interesting? Check out my first 'Boo' below.
Thinking about the current Netbook craze I have a strong hunch that Apple may well jump in and roll out a new iPhone-inspired Netbook - let's call it the Apple iNet - that could be roughly 2-2.5 as large as an iPhone. A TOUCH-SCREEN device like this could easily become a major challenge to digital reading devices such as the Kindle (which I can't try here in Europe) and the Sony Reader (which I have but don't like a lot). I have found myself wanting an iPhone / iPod like device like this 100s of times already, especially while traveling.
If Apple does this - and I would certainly like that , let's just imagine:
Image via Wikipedia
A smart, Apple-style device like this (which may have similar elements to OLPC's XO2 but would not compete in the low price markets, naturally) would give a huge boost to the mobile content ecosystem - and it would also usher in an era of rampant and wide-spread electronic book sharing that would make music file sharing look like child's play.
Publishers: you may want to get ready for this sometime soon. My 2 cents: radically lower the prices for ebooks, start looking at bundles, subscriptions and flat rates, figure out how to monetize sharing with new advertising-supported models, gear up to provide added values all the time (value is around the content!!), start planning for those New Generatives - you've got another 12 months if you're lucky. Go!!
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Read about the Presidents of the United States of America: Bands bypass iTunes by streaming music through iPhone apps - Ars Technica: "If you're a Presidents of the United States of America fan, you can now
listen to the band's entire discography for a mere $3, but not through
the iTunes Store. Fire up your iPhone and grab it from the App Store
instead; the band has bypassed the record label bureaucracy and
released everything on its own..."
This is clearly a very cool idea, and something I have been looking at for quite some time: in the dawning age of rapidly exploding mobile app stores, on 5+ platforms, and with something like 2 Billion always-on smart phone users, we can now start selling music as software packages, i.e. in any UI/UX, multimedia, online/offline format that fits the artists' specific users and locations. Bands and artists, their managers, agents or labels and even publishers can select any combination of audio, video, pictures, texts, news feeds, games, twitter updates and social media 'rivers' to update the bands fans at any time, anywhere in the world.
My hunch is that most artists will probably have basic free versions available, at first, followed by premium apps that offer considerably more value and will cost from a few extra dollars all the way up to even $50 per user - and most importantly, lots of up-selling will be fueled through these apps. Think live concerts webcasts and downloads, premium video footage, remote backstage access, preferred access at concerts, merchandising etc - once I am hooked on the band, using this app, I make the perfect case for pitching something else to me.
I have said this a few 1000 times in the past, but here it is again: Music as a service (i.e. get / buy / bundle access first, and only then buy products), and now, Music as mobile software packages may well be the next format after the CD.
Take it a step further and think of how advertisers, brands and other partners could (and will) sponsor or co-present these apps, and therefore align with artists that make a good match with their branding strategy (see Groove Armada & Bacardi, Sting & Jaguar), and pretty soon most mobile music apps will be free or as I like to say, Feels like Free, for the users. Of course, downloading i.e. the ability to keep music must be part of it, as well - especially in the developing countries where easily available wifi/wlan is not that far along quite yet. I would expect that this will be part of many premium mobile music apps very soon. Stay tuned - this is a major trend, for sure.
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Watch these videos... and think.
Along with the free iPhone version of my 2007 Music 2.0 book, my new Lulu-powered eBook "Best of 2008 Blog Posts & Essays" is now available
to read on the iPhone, as well (yes, for free), using the very cool Instapaper iPhone reading app - and it works offline, too. Follow the instructions below, or add the Instapaper "Read Later" bookmark for this html page. I am still working on page breaks etc, so it's not very pretty yet - but if any of you can make a nicer-looking html file from the original PDF... please ping me!
This is what you need to do to read the free book on your iPhone (perfect for those long, offline airplane trips!):
Enjoy!
Found these videos via a Businessweek column; quote: "the iPhone is fast developing into a breakthrough product for mobile advertising". This got me thinking. Here are 2 videos from Admob, outlining how ads on the iPhone will work; I particularly like the 'In-application Advertising'. Food for thought.
Remember when we thought that the Internet was going to bring us the paperless office, and a 'greener' new world that would not rely on printed information at all times? This has not really happened yet but in 2009 this concept may finally become a reality for many of us. Looking around at what me and many of those clued-in people in my network do, I see the following trends:
1) Offline web-page and article reading. A lot of people will start reading their web-pages, RSS feeds and blog posts via new offline reading apps such as Instapaper (which I really love - check out their blog, here, *iPhone only), Read-it-later (very cool FF plug-in, just started using it, seems promising), the ubiquitous Google Reader (works on most mobile devices, and syncs great offline, too; with the amazing Google Gears engine), Opera Mini on my new E71 (supposedly offers offline reading), and many other cool apps that are becoming available for mobile devices (those small shiny boxes we used to call notebooks & computers;) right now.
Remember when we all had to print those top stories from all those feeds and sites we like so that we could read them on the plane, or in the train or taxi? Well... no more. On my end, I used to print 100+ pages per day (yes, sorry), and that's gone down to less than 10 now; thanks to Instapaper etc. Great!
2) Mobile apps courtesy of your favorite newspapers and magazines. If you are into reading those good old mass media newspapers and mags (no worries, I am, too!) now you can make use of some nice new apps that allow you to read them on your mobile phones. Sure, it feels different, it's rather smallish and obviously lacks the physical paper user experience, but it works well; it's free and first of all it's always there. Right now, mobile newspapers apps are available mostly for the iPhone - but this is changing very quickly.
I reckon that within 6-9 months we will see these apps become available for almost every mobile platform and OS, since this added value is indeed a major reason to buy a new smart-phone. Right now, my favorite is the New York Times app for the iPhone - it's well done, easy to use, does not crash, and gives me almost everything I need from the NYT (apart from that good old paper feel and smell;). I also like the AP news app (iPhone and blackberry)
So say goodbye to buying a 3-day old NYT at some airport shop in Europe and stuffing it into my briefcase along with my blog post print-outs (see above) - another nice time-saver, waste reducer, and minor money-saving accomplishment. And what's best for the NYT: I keep paying attention to them, and I won't be surprised if they ran customized ads on their apps, soon, too. Plus: I still buy the 'real' dead-tree NYT if I want to enjoy a more leisurely read. They've kept me as user, and that's what counts.
3) Reading entire books on your mobile device. Again, the iPhone dominates in this turf right now, as well, but this will change quickly. Wired has a good wiki on iPhone reading apps, btw. I don't use a lot of these apps yet, mostly because many of these services use bizarre copy protection schemes for their fairly limited range of eBooks, they don't have the books I want to read, and the publishers charge prices that will make you wonder if they want to punish you for trying out eBooks (hey - sorry, I thought that it's actually a lot cheaper not having to print and not having to ship anything - guess I was wrong). The leading apps include bookshelf, stanza (which I have), ereader, feedbooks etc - here is a good list. Again, for me, reading entire books - rather than just essays, PDFs, blog posts or articles - on my mobile devices i.e. cell phones is still a very tough interface challenge; therefore I prefer to buy the print edition and haul it around (especially if the eBook price is still very much the same) - but my hunch is that this will change in 2009, too. Maybe not for fiction, though - but for business books I can imagine it.
4) The coming boom in electronic readers such as the Kindle and, maybe, the new Sony Reader (the PS700 BC) which I just bought but have not received yet. It does sound very promising since you can read PDFs with it, bookmark paragraphs or pages and keep it running for weeks at a time.The Kindle is, sadly, not available here in Europe (due to mobile network issues I would think), so I haven't tried it, but I keep hearing good things about it; apart from people complaining about its design. The best comment on the Kindle is probably from Seth Godin, here 
(Seth delivers some great comments on ebook pricing, and 'books as social objects'), and which was summarized in my blog, here.
Summary and 2009 predictions:
Printer manufacturers and ink suppliers will start to feel the squeeze in 2009; people will still buy printers, of course, but probably a lot less ink, and much less paper. And, shrinking profits aside, I think that's a good thing.
Now, what this will do to the publishing business... another story, another post!
Note: related to this, check out Malcom Gladwell's 2002 New Yorker essay on 'the social life of paper'
Image by via CrunchBase
Some readers may recall that the very existence of Pandora, one of the biggest next-generation, personalized digital radio platforms was recently seriously endangered by the threat of having to pay outlandish and retroactive music licensing fees right after having been kicked out of Europe (also for similarly bizarre licensing reasons). Now, thankfully, a report reveals that Pandora has gained an even bigger (albeit only U.S.-based) audience by launching a free iPhone application that is, you guessed it, entirely supported by some apparently quite smart advertising. I wish I could see for myself but since I am in beautiful Switzerland I have been barred from the pleasures of Pandora - after all, why would the music licensing organizations even bother with Pandora's international users... right?
But anyway, what is so great to hear (see the press release) is that ad-supported music seems to work so very much better on the iPhone (and soon, many other mobile devices, I would hope) than it does on the good old computer - this, I think, holds great potential for the future of ad-supported, free or feels like free + freemium content on mobile devices. First music, then films / TV, then books (and games.... yes, of course: already there!)
A quote from the press release (December 4, 2008) sums it up very nicely (even if we remove the few instances of PR hype): "Since September 22, when Pandora began marketing its iPhone platform
to marketers, it's had a steady queue of the biggest national brands
anxious to deliver their ad messages to iPhone mobile users with
Pandora as the conduit. The first advertisers to launch on Pandora's
iPhone application were Best Buy and Beck's, followed by a list of
other top tier brands such as Target, HP, Nike and Kraft Foods. To
date, Pandora's iPhone ad platform has delivered over the twice the
response rate as its other ad products due to the highly interactive
nature of the device. Additionally, iPhone users can continue to
stream music while they engage with the ad so the user experience is
not diminished in any way"
Here is the key, in my view: it's all about the INTERFACE. The USER EXPERIENCE. That is what is so great about the iPhone (after all, it's really a lousy phone, in my view, but a great mobile computer and communication device), and that's what's so great about Pandora, too. The sum of the two really makes it tick, I guess. Next destination: Nokia?
I think users will pay to use the Pandora interface, the functionality, the build-in community features; and advertisers and brands will pay to align themselves with those tens of millions of keen and open, interested and fast-clicking users. And yet other users would probably pay to have Pandora without ads, too!
Now (add: sound of broken record) if only the labels, publishers and rights societies could actually allow them to make this work, economically - then we would have something that would show a real path to a mutually beneficial future; a future that will create many of those 'New Generatives' that Kevin Kelly writes about, and a future that is based on true collaboration in an open ecosystem.
Here is an another interesting fact from the release: "Currently, Pandora's iPhone users spend an average of 90 minutes a
day interacting with the application, accounting for nearly 1.2
million ad impressions per day..." This is pointing us straight to a future recipe of success: great interface + supreme ease of use + great content + great community features + freemium + ads2.0 = Success.
Pandora reaches
roughly one in every five iPhone users in the U.S., already (and is set to have 20 Million users by the end of the year) - so what would happen if the music industry took the lid off, and allowed them to broad/narrow/micro/social-cast worldwide, on the iPhone, the new N97 and Nokia's Ovi enabled phones that are coming down the pike, 3's Facebook 
phone, Google Android Phones...? You tell me.
Image via Flickr: ootunes and CNet
Other nice iPhone music apps inlude Last.fm and Sonos - not to forget!
Robert Andrews at Moconews has a good overview on what happened at the Nokia Remix London event on October 2, 2008: @ Nokia Remix Live: First Touch-Screen, Comes With Music, EMI On Board, Plectrum Included | mocoNews.net:
"Labels include: On top of the three other majors already known about, EMI repertoire was announced tonight, plus indie distributors The Orchard, Beggars Group, IODA, Minister of Sound and PIAS are on board for UK. There’s licensing through EMI Music Publishing, SELAS, Sony ATV, GEMA and MCPS-PRS.."
This is another very interesting version of the flat-rate I have been talking about for years - yes, it's not perfect yet, and it's funded by Nokia primarily as a marketing compaign, but still - Music Like Water, Finnish style, take 1, I would say.
Business week has a good column on Nokia's plans, here. CNet has a good summary on what the deal with the music is, here. Related video, here. Some more videos are below.
Disclosure: Nokia is a think-tank client of mine. However, this blog post is my purely personal opinion and in no way related to my speaking engagements for Nokia.
Now if this doesn't make you think I don't know what does: YouTube - SekaiCameraDemoVideo of TechCrunch50. From TonchiDot of Tokyo / Japan, this is a demo video for SekaiCamera. I found this via AFPR and Friendfeed. "Sekai Camera (World Camera in Japanese) is an iPhone-exclusive social tagging service developed by Tokyo-based mobile application provider Tonchidot that recently Demo'd their product at TechCrunch TC50. This video is a MUST SEE for anyone wanted to get a glimpse of their near (Mobile) future. In the video, their CEO, Takahito Iguchi delivers a presentation for the ages - garnishing a standing ovation for this crowd favorite at the end..."
UPDATE: My "Best of 2008 Blog Posts & Essays" are now available via the iPhone, as well (yes, for free). Follow the instructions below, and add the "Read Later" bookmark for this html file.
A lot of people have contacted me about wanting to read my last book, Music 2.0, on the iPhone. Since a 7MB PDF will not be so hot to read in your email or within Safari, I have put up the book's html file on my typepad server (yes, I know, no images yet, sorry), and then used Instapaper's READ LATER function to convert the entire book to the Instapaper txt format which makes reading it very easy - much better than a pdf. And it's all free!
So this is what you need to do to read the free book on your iPhone (perfect for those long airplane trips since it actually works offline, too):
Very cool. I think. You?
While there are many things I really hate about my new iPhone 3G (which is why I am still using my trusted Nokias and SEs and the Blackberry, too ;), the applications really make it worthwhile to experiment with it. My current favorite is Instapaper which allows you to bookmark a webpage and read it on your iPhone later even if you are offline (!), and in a much easier to read mobile screen format. This makes it really easy to catch up on some website reading when traveling, and not even have the usual costs associated with roaming (here in Europe, that's still huge) - and a much reduced temptation to click away, too. Since this can be done with PDFs, too, is this a new way of reading (albeit still with a very small screen;) The PRO version is well worth it btw - tilting the phone will scroll the text - cool! Some more details from another blogger, here
Remember when, a decade ago, being online meant sitting at a large, loud, and ugly machine that was tethered to a wire that got you the digital juice? Now return to today, where the Net lives in our pockets, inside silent, slick, always-on devices that are getting cheaper by the minute, propelled by bandwidth and storage costs that are plunging as well. What a difference this is making to how we consume media! Zoom forward another ten years and you’ll see Control of Media faded in the rearview mirror, a tiny blip thousands of miles behind you.
You will also see Anglo-American media dominance fade: Recent Infonetics statistics show that worldwide, 47% of mobile subscribers come from the Asia-Pacific region; 36% come from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; and a mere 9% come from North America. Geographical differences, electrical power issues, and a lack of wired infrastructure mean that many people will see their first webpage on a mobile device, not on a computer.
So, first, two clarifications:
1. A mobile phone is a computer is a media device is a copy machine is a radio is a broadcast tower — here, today, now. This mind-jarring convergence of devices and previously separate realms of technology is already upon us, and will be even more pronounced in the future. And yes, there will be no single user interface, no single type (or brand) of device that will dominate, like the good old transistor radio did. Instead, people of different ages, in different cultures, and in different locations will buy many different types of devices, some bundled with content, some not. Fifteen-year old kids in America may buy slick devices that are interconnected but mostly not used as telephones, 22-year-olds in Asia will want online chat rooms, virtual worlds, and VoIP-calling fully integrated. But either way, this is certain: the days of the single-purpose, stand-alone (i.e., disconnected) media player are over, and so is any chance to control what content can be stored in it. Technology has already led the quest for total control into absurdity; now we have to be smarter to generate some trust-based “control” (what I have come to think of as Trustol★) in this new system.
“The handset will be the world’s Internet platform, and it will be open.” —GigaOm
2. There is no such thing as the “mobile Web” — no special place to go if you’re on your mobile, no special technology to use, no plug-in to install, no special way of accessing the Net. There are, of course, vast differences in design and user interfaces (driven by size, power restraints, and display types), as well as wide-reaching differences in user behavior. And therefore, different kinds of content will be successful in different contexts. But when we talk about mobile media, we can no longer assume some sort of separate realm that is cordoned off the overall Net. Therefore, any hopes that mobile media will not go where the Web has already gone — albeit in a mostly tethered, desktopped, crude kind of way — are not realistic. Moreover, any hope of “protecting content” (a pitiful euphemism for setting up hurdles to somehow wrest unavoidable payments from the users) now seem quite far-fetched. Far better just to make the content available and meter its use.
Mobility is now the major driver in media, and this trend will become even stronger. First the People Formerly Known as Consumers★ got used to time-shifting (via cassette recorders, TiVo, VCRs, and DVRs), then they came to like place-shifting (witness Slingbox, Avvenue, SongBirdNest, et. al.), and now they can get it all, anywhere, anytime, even while moving around — and for what feels like free★!
Media companies used to be able to control not just what and when we consumed, but also where: whether in front of the TV (i.e., the living room), in the car (as with terrestrial radio), or, more recently and in a already much lesser way, in front of that clunky, tethered desktop computer. In the future, most of these tried-and-tested means of control are toast: People will consume their media when they want, how they want, and where they want — and chances are it will be while they are on the move, with the only real distinguishing factor remaining their customized user interface, their personal media canvas.
Now put yourselves in the shoes of a major media company, and you’ll get a glimpse of the annoying headaches this immanent change is sure to produce. Just tell yourself, “Most of my users — the people formerly known as consumers — will start using mobile devices for their basic content needs within the next five years, and the harder I make it for them to get my content, the less I will matter to them.” Loss of mattering equals loss of audience equals loss of revenues. Are you with me so far?
Just like every phone now also has a camera (and if not, it is by design, not by omission), every mobile device and every phone will soon be constantly connected to the Internet as well, and we will come to think of them as those little boxes that can do pretty much the same things as our good old desktop computers. The only difference will be the interface, of course — and that is where some elements of what I have come to call Trustol★ (i.e., some element of user control based on trust) comes back in.
Creators and their representatives (managers, media companies, and rights organizations) must therefore act urgently on the basic fact that all media is rapidly moving to mobile devices rather than being confined to computers or traditional media boxes such as TV and radio. If you thought it was hard to control what people do with your content on the computer, you should think again: Mobile devices will make this look like a walk in the park, with media-sharing via those “boxes formerly known as computers” representing only the tip of that 1,000-foot iceberg.
While only ten years ago mobile devices meant cell phones, PDAs, or MP3 players, today mobile devices are full-fledged computers. In many newly developing countries, in fact, many users will never even buy one of those Media 1.0 boxes. They will use mobile devices to listen to music, access the Web, connect to favorite social networks, watch TV shows and movies, and connect with each other at the same time. The previously disconnected media-playing device has now become part of the connected ecosystem — see the iPod Touch or Nokia N95. Soon, it will be hard to tell whether a device makes phone calls via the cellular network or via the Internet, connected through Wi-Fi or WiMAX. In fact, the very definition of “phone call” will likely be rewritten, since it’s not longer a phone making a call but just a mobile computer calling another mobile computer, “phone” UI or not.
Let’s consider the crucial characteristics of mobile devices and why they are control-stoppers in the purest form:
It is these endless combinations and possibilities that make mobile devices so powerful and habit-forming (and thereby impossible to control): All of a sudden we can read our customized, always-updated newsfeeds anywhere, anytime (including offline); we can identify songs we like, bookmark them and download them when near a broadband; we can pull up maps of favorite locations and send them to anyone on our buddy list; we can shoot a video and send it to our friends or upload it to a media portal; we can remix a ringtone and Bluetooth it to anyone in range.
Mobility is blowing the top off the house of cards that was “controlled media”; it’s the final nail in the coffin of DRM, TPM and whatever other M’s were cooked up in those disconnected ivory towers. With a click on the button, we are now connecting via the cellular networks, via Bluetooth, via cable, via WiMAX, via HD and DAB chips...and that’s only the beginning. With the price of some high-end mobile devices already surpassing cheap laptops and desktop computers, it is not surprising that mobile device capabilities are exceeding computers now as well, with the next big frontiers being fuel cells and new display technologies.
Now, it’s no longer the mere access we long for, it’s to have someone solve the Paradox of Choice for us: too much, too quick, too-many-options media content will pose much more significant challenges than getting access ever did. (I’ll address this opportunity in my upcoming chapter on the Paradox of Choice.)
Digital Natives: Hyper-Powered by Mobile Media DevicesJust imagine these powerful mobile devices in the hands of those pesky digital natives, the download generation, the echo-boomers: Five hundred gigabytes of media at their instant disposal as they roam public places, eat in a restaurant, or sit in a subway car. Instant connections made with buddies and new friends, on the spur of the moment. Music passed around like personal greeting cards, music being remixed by several users simultaneously, and then uploaded to their favorite social networks. On-demand streams of music and video, provided by more than a billion people who mingle on thousands of social networks.
New mobile media applications will be developed that will make Shawn Fanning’s original Napster look like a Model-T Ford, with installs of hundreds of millions for the hottest apps not unthinkable.
This is, naturally, manna from heaven for the hardware manufacturers, the companies that make these devices formerly called phones: people who want to connect, communicate, share, listen, and watch — while on the move — everywhere on the planet. And once the already omnipresent digital content actually is blessed with legality, in the form of blanket licenses and flat rates, it will be a boon for the telcos, too. (I discuss this in my upcoming chapter “Telco 2.0: More Dollars with Less Control.”)
If we can say one thing for certain it is that any restriction that could possibly reduce the users’ power will be avoided like the plague. Competition will be fierce, and with sales in the hundreds of millions of units, the profit potential is significant and any impediment to fast user adoption would be suicide. In other words, no mobile device or handset manufacturer, or operator, will risk alienating their users with content-protection related malware or other software hurdles; rather, the enormous potential of mobile media will further accelerate the adoption of flat-rated content and connectivity models — starting with music. (See Chapter 4.)
Now and in the future, media content is that crucial lubricant that drives the ever-increasing use and ever-faster adoption of new devices (and their related services); it’s the oil in the engine of communications, and the higher the performance of the device, the better the oil must be.
Looking at the first few groundbreaking devices that fit the “mobile computer” category, such as the Apple iPhone, Nokia N95, and Samsung F330, it is already quite apparent where this is going: more powerful means of media consumption and communication (which means more sharing, all the time), lesser restrictions designed to spur large-scale user adoption, and a seriously increasing pace of device convergence. Get ready to make Skype calls on your PSP, watch live television on your iPhone, listen to KCRW or Danish Radio or the BBC on your Oakley MP3 sunglasses, and receive RSS feeds on your wristwatch.
While Apple may, for now, try to cling to a tight control over what new iPhone and iPod applications can be developed and offered, I would already consider it a key “EoC Moment” when Apple concedes that it must actually open the iPhone platform to outside developments and make an SDK available. I predict that in the long run even their control concerns will fade. If indeed they want to become a truly dominant player in this turf and not just a cool, exclusive brand for individualists, they will have no choice but to open up their nicely walled gardens.
Watch for Apple to compete directly with Nokia, Samsung, LG, and Motorola for dominance in mobile entertainment and communication devices — and my bet would be on Nokia since it has the most longterm view of what it wants to do, the most balanced culture-vs.-business mindset, and the sheer tenacity that will be required to address a myriad of issues. But then again, there is Google....
Clearly, mobile media will be subject to even more competition for attention than media consumed on those big boxes in our living rooms. While you scan the news feeds on your mobile device, a new text message may arrive, a Bluetooth-powered friend may want to connect, or some location-based service may make itself known — and all this while your customized Internet radio station is playing and your emails are coming in. The user’s attention will be seriously contested, and that may change the way that people package the content they send.
Whether this is for the better or the worse remains to be seen. But a real concern is that due to the level of “attention competition,” any content that is too deep, too ambitious, or simply too long would fall by the wayside — and that would severely dilute the quality of media offerings.
In the meantime: Be mobile, be liquid — or be gone.
