While the news of a possible Microsoft/Yahoo! acquisition/merger has been on the front page of every periodical including every Blog on the planet, I’d like to add my 2 cents with linking to this article from Information Week - kudos to Stephen Wellman for a thought-provoking article on why Nokia should buy Yahoo! without thinking another second. I’m in favor - anyone else?
Under the category of “it’s about time!”, we see Motorola getting agressive with alternative energy sources for powering cellphones - check it out here and other comments by CrunchGear here.
Of course, as my title suggests, this allows for wider distribution and logical use of cell phone technology in countries where electrical power for recharging is unpredictable at best and possibly not available at all in the worst case. Since other devices have been using solar power for self-charging for some time now, I think this could be a great step forward for large-scale adoption of solar power.
Wow, it’s been a while again. For those of you that read this blog from time to time, I apologize. It’s been a bit of a whirlwhind.
I’ve started a new project, which has put me on an around-the-world trip, starting in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. We are touring factories of MP4 players, whether flash-based or HDD-based. Flash capacity for most manufacturers in Shenzhen has increased dramatically, but not yet to the capacity of the iPod Nanos. For example, the highest capacity I have found that someone will sell me is 4GB, with an SD card slot for an additional 4GB.
HDD based manufacturers are able to support easily 20GB, and some 40-60GB. We have one supplier now that can support up to a 120GB HDD Media Player. That will hold a lot of music, movies, training, education, etc. That’s bigger than the HDD on my notebook I’m writing this post on!!
6 factories in 4 days. Considering Shenzhen has about 10 million people in the city, that’s a lot of traffic to navigate, my friends. And, we’ve collected “city” coffee mugs from some of the many Starbucks in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
Next stop, Dubai. Then on to London. Then home (Dallas). 17 days; 25,000 miles (give or take a few); 4 major cultural groups, 4 languages; Starbucks, McDonalds, Chili’s, Pizza Hut, KFC - they’re everywhere and the same.
Ignore my sarcastic view of the PR sweet-spot words in this otherwise notable press release from Adobe. Flash has made a big comeback with it’s popularity driven by applications in YouTube and other media aggregation sites.
Some of you may say - “Comeback - have you been under a rock or something? Hasn’t Adobe’s Flash been a critical element of web design, rich media ads, etc for years?” and to some degree, rightly so. Here’s the reason for my choice of words “Comeback”: Flash grew popular in the late 90’s and early 00’s for visually stunning mulitimedia websites. Then came search engine optimization and search engine marketing best practices, which looked down upon the use of Flash in websites, as search engine spiders could not “read” a Flash file. So, it’s been out of vogue if you wanted your website to be search engine friendly.
With the advent of YouTube and other media aggregation sites, Flash has become the new poster child for media distribution capabilities. Now that it has an even newer lease on life on cellphone platforms, it may be here to stay.
So, strategic question - will the use of Flash media files take the place of MP3, MP4, due to the ubiquity of the Flash Player? Of course, you technology strategy geniuses out there are saying “Ed - I had that figured out 2 years ago - what took you so long?”.
This would have just a LITTLE impact on the current technology that drives music, film, podcasting and iPods, etc. If cellphone MFRs implement Flash as their media technology of choice, the ramifications are pretty large…..I’ve already said that cellphones replace the iPod and other MPx players in the end game. Maybe this accelerates the end game.
I guess it’s about time to discuss the iPhone. I’ve procrastinated on writing this post, due to the potential impact the iPhone has on the market and yet weighing the risks to Apple and other phone manufacturers. It’s somewhat difficult to be unbiased on either side of the battle that has begun.
First, let me say that the pictures of the iPhone (check here with my friend Blake Burris of CocoaRadio for some great firsthand shots) look great. The concepts of the OS and Software the phone is built around sound great. Watch Steve present the Keynote at MacWorld for details.
Question - how will we like typing on a completely flat surface (the phone screen)? It may take us a while to conform to a new manner of typing. We’ve all gotten comfortable over the course of our lives with the raised keys with “finger curves” and the feeling of pressing down to create a keystroke. I’m sure we can adjust, but wow - it will take some committed early adopters to stick with it!
Visual voicemail is new to cell technology, but old hat to VOIP users. I’ve had it for 3 years now - a great invention. Glad it’s finally coming to cell phones, although, since I have a Blackberry, technically I’ve been able to do this for a long time.
As usual, Steve blows people away, generally until they walk away and go…”hey - I’ve been doing this for a long time - how come he made it seem so special?” Welcome to the mystique that is Steve Jobs.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m looking forward to seeing this on the market and how it will force all the other manufacturers to get moving on some creativity. We, the consumers, will all benefit. Let’s be glad!
Finally, some real numbers regarding these threats are shared in an article in the WSJ Online today (subscription required) by reporter Li Yuan. Sony Ericsson has sold 16.5 million Walkman phones in 14 months (not bad!), Motorola has sold 15 million MP3 enabled phones to date. Nokia is projecting that in 2006 they will have sold 80 million music phones, which means that in 1 year, they will have outperformed the cumulative sales of Apple iPods (approxmiately 70 million). So, between the 3 largest cellphone handset manufacturers, that means that there are approximately 110 million MP3 enabled phones on the market today and growing rapidly.
Will Apple roll out the iPhone soon? One would expect they cannot ignore these numbers - it certainly is momentum that will not stop.
In the article, the Yuan mentions that Motorola states that about 50% of the MP3 enabled phones are used for music playing purposes - so true penetration and use of a multimedia phone is still some ways off.
As we’ve said here many times - the end game portable media device is the cell phone - not the iPod or other MP3 player.
Well, Reuters breaks some news picked up by CNET which opens my eyes to some of the barriers for cell phone use and penetration in what would be considered 3rd world countries. It appears that state-owned telcos are not happy with other wireless carriers operating their own gateways to the world. Hey - you let the competition in, Zimbabwe. Now you have to pay the price.
Apple wins the battle of dealing with crises with this reponse to the Chinese manufacturing issues that were raised a few months ago and written about in this blog here but originally reported on MacWorld UK.
General response (and I agree) has been tremendous at the transparency and hard work of Apple to diligently investigate and report both the good and the bad of this situation. Don’t just take my word for it - check it out Gizmodo, Boing Boing or The Unofficial Apple Weblog to name a few others that have supported their efforts, findings and general response to the issues raised.
Good job, Steve and the crew at Apple. Thanks for showing us how to deal with a crisis.
Saturday, July 29, the NY Times had an interesting article that generated some buzz. You might look at the title of this post and wonder the connection between the three. Well, let me explain. There has been a lot of discussion both here and other blogs, articles, etc. regarding phones as media players. As a matter of fact, as many of you may know, I believe it will ultimately replace the autonomous mp3/mp3 player market.
3G wireless systems have been the buzz in the U.S. for 6 years or more. Will WI-FI or WIMAX over mobile handsets make 3G irrelevant? In the short term, probably not. In the long term? Maybe so. By demanding access to multi-media files on the handsets, consumers will definitely be pressing for this ability. I don’t think 3G has the download speeds to satisfy over the long haul.
As podcasting becomes more mainstream, this too will increase demand from consumers for true broadband (1.5 MBps download speeds) over their wireless systems that support their phone calls. I believe the downloads/portability drives this, rather than “streaming live” in the short term - in that too many things have to be perfect to support that. I can’t always get a perfect live streaming experience over a wired broadband connection today - I think the frustrations would be disastrous in today’s U.S wireless market.
That being said, Japan has been watching live video on their cell phones for 6 or 7 years now. South Korea appears to have at least 1 million receivers (as of June 2006) that have been sold to utilize a system that allows this.
Everyone is trying to get everyone else to adopt their standard. Standardization gets to be a problem when pride gets in our way. On top of that, we have business models that “guaranteed” a certain return to investors - they’re not going to be happy about watching that change. That is a macro discussion that will affect Wi-FI, podcasting, and phones. If the current wireless carriers push the consumers to accept less speed for downloads by lobbying against WI-FI or WIMAX adoption, then the consumer will suffer and the related adoption of media downloads of all types to phones will be delayed. Hmm. Big potential problem, don’t you think?
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.