Category Archives: iphone

something even cooler then the iphone or ipod touch…

Posted by Todd Sawicki on September 20, 2007 View Comments

So as cool as I think the jukebox in the sky was back in the day, as cool as the iphone or ipod touch seem to be, what I think’s even cooler is the jukebox in your pocket.

I am enjoying all the hysteria and hype in the cult of mac section of the blogsophere over the iphone and the ipod touch (daring fireball and ilounge are too good examples).  And with the inclusion of WiFi in both mp3 players (the iphone too me is an mp3 player with a phone thrown in not the other way around not that this is a problem or a criticism just a point of view), there is a lot of interest in downloading and sharing music OTA (mobile industry geek speak for over the air).   As someone who helped manage the development of the first commercially approved jukebok in the sky (back when I was at Loudeye during the first web boom), you would think seeing the jukebox in the sky vision come to reality that I would be excited.

To be honest, I am amazed that we’re still downloading music to devices.  Yep you heard that correctly.   That’s why I think the discussion about wifi and comparing the iphone and touch is missing the point.  Given storage capacities for portable storage – you no longer need to download compressed music.  It should all come pre-loaded. Literally every song commercially available in the U.S should come pre-loaded on your favorite new mp3 player.  And trust me – I have to believe that would be a game changing device.  In fact, even way cooler then the iphone or touch.

No way you say, that would be way too much space.  Well back when we were at Loudeye and we built an online digital archive of essentially EVERY (yes EVERY) commercially available CD in the U.S.  That ran to about 400,000 CDs.  At an average length of around 40 minutes in uncompressed WAV format that equals 400 MB per CD.  400,000 x 400 MB sounds like a really big number and that comes out to 1.6 TB.  Now back in 2000 when we built that system – a single instance of that much storage was a multi-million dollar expense.  When compared to bandwidth it’s easy to see why a single instance was a lot more practical then imagining a day when 100′s of millions of instance would need to exist if it’s meant to be carried around in everyone’s pocket.

So what does that same 1.6 TB storage solution cost today?  Now what’s interesting is that a terabyte hard drive costs a few hundred dollars.  Yes, my technically knowledgeable friends are saying – in a few years we’ll likely have the 1.6 TB ready to go into an iphone or ipod.   Ahhh – hold on – we don’t need to wait any longer.  If we compress that music the way Apple already does in iTunes suddenly we don’t need 1.6 TB, we only 160 GB!  That’s right – the entire iTunes catalog of music could come pre-loaded on the latest and greatest ipod classic.  What I surprised is that some entreprenuer isn’t already doing this.  Every teenager in the US would kill to own EVERYTHING in the music space.   And in the word’s of Seth Godin, it would be one hell of a purple cow.

Now that would be cool.  And it’s going to happen.  And Mark Cuban can’t wait.

how the iphone price cut lost its cool

Posted by Todd Sawicki on September 7, 2007 View Comments

The iPhone’s (aka JesusPhone) price cut is the price cut heard round the world.  But why are folks up in arms?  Because suddenly the cult of cool might not be nearly so exclusive anymore.

It’s not about $200 – it’s all about having your uncool, cheapstake friends now saying – heh I can get a JesusPhone too now.  A bunch of folks are arguing whether its fair but that’s not the point – fair isn’t the issue – the crying foul is about losing its coolness.

Part of being cool is being early, being exclusive essentially above the crowd and definitely not being mainstream.  When things go mainstream they lose their cool.  It’s a fact of life that has been plauging marketers of luxury and seemingly cool goods for years – the trade off between mainstream profits and revenues vs. the chic of being hip and exclusive where the hipness sells the product for you.  There’s a reason why BMW doesn’t sell a $20k car or that Porshce doesn’t either.  Their brands are about the mystique of exclusivity and the iPhone for a moment was the same.

Despite their cries over the iPhone going mainstream, the hipsters (aka early adopters) know and want their little prizes to go mainstream.  They need to be the predictors of mainstream trends or otherwise they lose the cred from their friends and families as the purveyors of taste.  But what pisses them off is that their window of coolness instead of a year or two was reduced to three months.  Three months is just not long enough to prance around with your superiority dance and impress all your friends.  It takes a good 6-12 months to do that.

Trust me if the iPhone price cut had occured in January not a word would have been uttered because those hipsters would have been ready to dump their JesusPhones on the masses next year and ready to move onto the next new thing.

scoble’s right about microsoft and apple

Posted by Todd Sawicki on July 10, 2007 View Comments

Scoble’s right in his feedback about the recent adhoc iPhoneDevCamp recently down in the bay area and the lack of support from Apple.  Despite everything we’ve all grown to love to hate about Microsoft, if there is one it does right - it knows how to support independent developers.  They always have going back to the earliest days of the companies history.  They have often done a great job participating in dev communities, recruiting dev’s and evangelists and providing everything they can in terms of support.  Even in the earliest days of the company, if they knew you were an active user group member then you would be get starred for special customer support treatment.  To Scoble’s point it is absolutely one of the key reasons why Microsoft has been successful.

Living in Seattle and having worked at startups that have gotten the partner and ISV treatment and I can tell you first hand that Microsoft is very generous with its support.  And in this day and age where anyone can be a loud and influential evangelist its amazing to see companies like Apple get away with not overtly engaging their key influencers and developers in every possible way.  Maybe this will change, but Apple’s arrogance cost them the desktop war, hopefully they will see the errors of their way and not fail again.  I would hate to see Steve “Jesus” Jobs fail twice with the same company.