The Reach - Podcasting and other Portable Media Strategies

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.

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….

Our first day in Hong Kong was primarily arrival and trekking about to Stanley Market, a western tourist trap for seconds of brand name clothing. Decent deals were had, but nothing to “write home” about.

The second day was our trip to Shen Zhen and then our third day was in Hong Kong where we were to meet up at the Golden Computing Center to get a demo unit of a particular device we’d seen at the MP3 factory in China. Prior to going there, our partner took us to lunch for Dim Sum at a restaurant overlooking Hong Kong harbor - what an incredible view (this was on the Kowloon side, so we were looking straight out at “Hong Kong” (as in the pictures and postcards we all see). As we were driving to the restaurant, my wife had seen the Hard Rock Cafe, so in keeping with my attempt to buy HRC memorabilia in our travels, I picked up my HRC cap to add to the collection.

Our trading partner had made contact with the rep at the GCC showroom, but after wandering around for about 45 min, the guy at the show room never showed up. At least we got to see the famous Golden Computing Center - so busy you can barely walk through it, but I will say that for the items I was interested in, the prices didn’t seem to be any better than eBay!

After all this trekking around (again, horrible traffic), our partner took us to dinner with his wife and two adorable daughters (11 and 5). The unique portion of this experience was that we traveled out to the New Territories (in between Hong Kong and China) and went to select our live fish from the fish market prior to taking the bags of fish to the restaurant which then prepared them for us to our specifications. Once again, we were at a “local” restaurant, with no Anglos anywhere to be seen. What a tremendous gift it was to see true life on that side of the world, without having to be westernized by the cuisine.

When we got back, I recorded a podcast, which you can find on The Media Swamp.

Pronounced Shenshen, this is a city that 10 years ago was little more than a fishing village, on the other side of the China border from Hong Kong. Now, it is a crowded city of 10 million. Bigger than Hong Kong.

The city is sprawling - from the suburbs to downtown is at least an hour in traffic. And that’s in the middle of the day! It took us a full day to visit two factories.

We met our trading partner in Hong Kong about 9am and took the train from Festival Walk (a very Western mall in Kowloon) up to the border of China. After going through customs, we then traveled by another train up to the end of the subway in the suburbs of Shen Zhen where a company car and driver from the MP3 player factory picked us up for the meeting and tour of the factory. Given the train, customs, another train, and ride in the car, we showed up at the factory at 12 noon, when most of the factory workers were at lunch.

The sales manager of the company suggested we go to lunch as well, so back into the car, for a 2 block, 40 minute trip to a true Chinese restaurant. (They asked if we wanted Chinese food - my wife and I looked at each other as if - what else would we be eating here?! - so we said of course!). I’m not sure if any anglos had ever been to this restaurant - great food, tremendous experience. Our Chinese hosts were very gracious and tolerant of our ignorance of Chinese customs and original food, but we learned quickly and they seemed surprised that Laura and I were eating with chopsticks.

The factory itself was a great assembly process to watch, with good quality control - they can churn out 300,000 units per month, in terms of capacity. They have exciting new products, of which one of them is a 7 inch video display, battery powered, using an SD Card for the source content. This will play any digital audio/video file - MP3, MPEG4, WMA, WMV, AVI, etc. Should be fun to see the applications. it’s certainly not pocket sized, but easily portable - much smaller and lighter than a portable DVD player.

The second factory we sent to was near downtown, in a much older section of town. Dark back alleyways and up a dark stairwell and then you find an entire custom circuit board manufacturing company with Yamaha automatic circuit board pressing equipment. That day, they were making Lenovo webcams. We buy our FM transmitters (similar to the iTrip) from this manufacturer. It’s run by a 30-yr old capitalist who apologized for the appearance of his factory - but, with a grin, he said “We’re profitable” (in only Mandarin to our trading partner). We were impressed - not with the looks, but how determined he was as an entrepreneur to grab hold of opportunities.

We got back to our room in Hong Kong about 7:30pm and then went to dinner to think through our day and what had happened. Our conversation centered around the phenomenal growth of Shen Zhen, the traffic, the new relationships that we had established and the thankfulness for this opportunity to have our eyes opened further to how flat the world really is.

Steve Rubel, on the Micro Persuasion blog, asks if podcasting is evolutionary or revolutionary. He compares it’s impact to blogging, for which he is a professional spokesperson and model, so to speak. He ends up in the evolutionary camp on podcasting, revolutionary on blogging, to no great surprise.

His argument is that podcasting is not very social, and blogging is. A lot of discussion around Web 2.0 is around the social aspects. I agree that podcasting is not social, but then again, neither is broadcasting. It certainly has more social possibilities than traditional podcasting ever did, but social is probably not at the top of the list. On the other hand, just because a trend is not social does not mean it’s not revolutionary.

Podcasting is revolutionary! It is revolutionary because of the perfect storm of portable hard drives with headphones (known as iPods, MP3/MP4 players, portable digital media players ), cheap bandwidth, RSS, and consumers being fed up with poor programming choices from media giants.

Some people have expectations of miracles in this trend of podcasting and the world to change overnight. If it (a new trend) doesn’t satisfy instant gratification needs, it is deemed a losing proposition. My experience says that sea change comes like a Tsunami. It starts with a violent crack way down below the surface. You don’t see it coming until it’s almost too late. Unfortunately, often it is too late for some.

But, the change comes….