The Reach - Podcasting and other Portable Media Strategies

Robert hits a softball thrown by Peter Davis, regarding podcasting as an inefficient medium.  Radio and television are therefore inefficient mediums as well, but somehow, those two industries have managed to survive .

Since Robert is moving to PodTech, he has to provide a good defense, which he does.  As I’ve pointed out here before, portable media players are what makes podcasting go fast.  Portable media consumption is the name of the game, baby.  It’s here to stay.  And longer than Peter Davis believes.

This is great news, as ESPN delivers a story about the Colorado Rockies baseball players using iPods and in-house video to improve their games.  I believe that stories like this will finally begin to expand the current thinking about what podcasting can become.  As we’ve discussed here before, podcasting is more than grass roots new media contributors - it’s another distribution channel for radio and tv content, and certainly is effective for training and education for people that would rather not be shackled to their computers.

Great news!  Congrats to the Rockies for being early adopters.

Bruni Giusanni’s Lunch over IP has a post here, discussing the Informa Telecoms & Media research report stating that there are now more cell phones than people in 30 countries.  Bruni discusses the point that some of this is due to personal and corporate phones, as well as businessmen and other travelers using prepaid SIM cards in the countries they’re visiting.

Regardless, this is a stunning number and I imagine we haven’t seen the end of the growth rate on that either.  He lists the countries and some other useful data on total GSM subscribers.

Fractals of Change shares the true issues at hand on ‘net neutrality and I think skewers the right people and lifts up the right people.  Thankfully, there are a few out there that get it, but it will be an uphill battle.  The boys with the big PR and lobbying dollars have been at it longer.  Let’s catch up - the games not over yet.

This will dramatically affect those of us that are dealing with large file transfers for media distribution.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - it’s not our fault that the telco’s made bad investments or that they’ve fought the wrong battles - we shouldn’t have to pay for them going forward - they should.

Monday, Macworld UK uncovered a story of Apple’s iPod manufacturing partner in China - originally published by Mail On Sunday and the blogosphere went nuts. At issue was living conditions, monthly pay, and hours worked. Apple was quiet initiallly and now has responded.

Considering that we just returned from a business trip to SE Asia, where a portion was spent in Shen Zhen, China, it’s necessary that I read these articles with an open mind. I wrote about that portion of the trip here. I should read with an open mind, consider what I personally saw in the factories which we buy from, and then act accordingly.

While the factories we were in weren’t the cleanest places I’d ever seen, I didn’t see any evidence of poor treatment of the workers or conditions that were unreasonable. When we arrived, the factory workers were taking a lunch break, and since ostensibly we were there to see the working factory, it was decided that we would go and eat lunch ourselves. Lest you think cynically of us that maybe we were naive, we did see the factory workers leaving the building en masse as we drove up.

We asked questions about working conditions and hours, but didn’t ask specific questions about monthly wages. We generally were satisfied with the responses and attitudes of the people we spent time with.

Now, my response to those that are up in arms about Apple - let me ask you this: In the U.S., we demand ever increasing profits so that share prices and company value will rise, therefore lining our pocketbooks or nests or whatever you want to call them. In order to accelerate that (and keep the buying public consuming at prices they are willing to pay), U.S. companies have been driven offshore to find the lowest possible cost of goods sold. Now, when they do, we have heart attacks over where the companies choose to have their products manufactured. Is that completely fair?

Now, let me be clear. I am FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. People should have the right to work, they should have the right and choice to work in decent conditions and make a decent wage (btw - those wages mentioned in the articles are somewhat reasonable for that area of the world, depending on what neighorhood you live in - just like here in the U.S.). Workers shouldn’t be required to work long, unhealthy hours. I didn’t see anything conclusive in the articles to state that these workers were being abused. If, in fact, they are being forced to work 15 hours days, particularly without reasonable compensation and choice as to work those hours or not, then I agree - that is abusive and Apple has the power to change that. One way is to threaten to end its relationship with Foxconn or completely sever it, if the relationship breaches Apple’s own code of conduct, mentioned here (same link as the response above, but included here for convenience), referring to the EICC.

It is a global economy and we do have to ask the question “What is the cost of low cost?”. And, we do have to ask if we’re closing a blind eye as consumers in order to fatten our bank accounts and get new toys at a lower cost. Hmmm.

Robert Scoble, the famed blogger of Microsoft, is moving on, as he discusses in multiple posts here, in response to his outing by Tom Foremski and others over the weekend.

This has been a blogging and podcasting phenomenon over the past few days that is worthy of mention. One man’s career decision has made news worldwide. Previous to this, people changing firms would only generate news if there was a corporate power struggle like at Morgan Stanley last year or Jack Welch retiring. Now, we have a mid-level individual contributor that has generated more PR juice over a weekend than many high-level execs generate in an entire career.

Robert is heading to Podtech.net, home of John Furrier. It will be interesting to see what a highly visible social media guy will do with and to that startup organization. I’m encouraged that podcasting is continuing to generate this much momentum, both in audio and video formats.

I only know Robert from being a frequent reader of his blog, both on his site and via RSS feeds. While I think this will allow him to feel much more in control of his destiny, his voice may now be so influential that it doesn’t fit in a small startup where one wrong comment could impact a year’s worth of revenue in one moment of time. I believe it will make PodTech or break them - time will only tell. I wish them both the best.

In a WSJ Online article posted today, Zuo Tao is taking on an interesting role.  While this is not related to podcasting, I can understand his perspective, having returned recently from a business trip that included his home town, Shenzhen.  He is a blogger and has used his internet voice to turn up the heat on the local real estate community by saying that prices are out of control.

The supply of apartments and high-rise real estate seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds when we were there.  If, in fact, there is plenty of supply and the prices are sky-high, then the real estate community in Shenzhen is truly attempting to make unfair profits.  On the other hand, if the building and growth that we saw are just an attempt to keep up prices are being temporarily pressed upwards, that is another very real challenge of being in a popular, high-growth city.

I hope the people of China can resolve this issue without unfair treatment of individuals.  This is an interesting opportunity for free speech.

Well, it’s nice to be in good company. Apparently, eMarketer is saying the same thing as what’s been running through my mind - the end podcasting device is the mobile phone. Telecomasia writes about it here. Rob Greenlee of mobile podcast pioneers Melodeo, writes about it here, commenting on the Telecomasia article.

As downloading gets easier to accomplish, I see a lot more users actually synching their phone to their computer to copy over podcasts, rather than download them over the wireless network - it gets expensive to do that, although the wireless carriers very much want that to be the workflow.

Several things need to happen to make this come about more quickly - larger storage on the phones themselves and software that easily allows updates to your playlist on the phone. Oh - and increased battery power - let’s not forget that .

Interesting article from CNET about new players from Zing that use Wi-Fi to pull down content when in a hotspot. Conceptually, a good idea; practically poor, since it only has 8MB of storage. I think cell phones will have a much great possibility of impact, as mentioned here before.

More and more cell phones are MP3/MP4 enabled and include Wi-Fi - so what’s the compelling reason to buy a Zing? Upgrade your phone instead, which will have more native capacity, as well as a flash memory/SD card expansion slot (most likely).

To say nothing about “just one device” and the utility of it all….