Augmented TV

Never mind that we haven't got a reliable way to get internet content onto the home's biggest screen yet (I've been banging on about an Apple TV announcement for ages...is it happening this week?) there's now an AR browser for TV - MetaMirror is effectively an app for smaller screened devices that can view TV content and overlay extra info - like recipe info in the picture, but let's face it, real time odds and click-to-buy ads would be the business model. Or imagine the Tesco API powering a cooking programme - with one click add to basket functions....

It makes sense that augmented TV will go down this route, as using two screens is far easier than using one - ask anyone who has tried to live tweet from their desktop while streaming TV on it - you end up minimising, moving and generally messing around with windows rather that watching. When Google TV launches I'd expect a Goggles-powered Android app that does the same thing running Adsense alongside the augmentations.

(link and photo courtesy of PFSK)

What have people got against Blackberry?

So one of the things when you go on holiday and don't take your blog with you is that you start to notice what random old posts are still directing traffic to it in the absence of any new fresh stuff. I looked at my site analytics at the weekend, and found a lot (well, a lot in the context of visitors here - so like 5 a day) of people had tracked down a post I wrote about 18 months ago called "How to break a Blackberry".

It wasn't really about how to break one, no. It was a pun on 'break' as in break a new band, about the pitfalls of giving a review model of a new mobile phone to Apple geek Stephen Fry, a man who in Dec 08 couldn't tweet about picking his nose without the national press eagerly reporting it. So when he predictably hated the Storm, lots of tech publishers had a ready made story.
Anyway, I wondered how people were tracking this down, and naturally they were all Google referrals, but not ones that had ever cropped up before. So I wondered if there is something specific that Blackberry had done to provoke a mass breaking. But it turns out that this has been a steady growth of traffic
story (current global exact match volume is around 140 queries per month, so not by any means huge. But then that's exact match on one long tail query).

All of this is only mildly interesting in its own right, but puts the recent advertising assault for Blackberry Messenger into context. If the people who have always had Blackberries, the folk who get them free though work, are choosing to buy a smartphone instead because it can do all the work stuff as well as all the smartphone stuff, then Blackberry would need a new market who can't afford smartphones. Hence formerly rock solid email performance becomes rock solid messenger performance.

And why the need to break Blackberries? Well they're a 'gift' from your employer. If you want the latest smartphone then you'd need to make it look like a mistake. A couple of things happened around the time that traffic spiked. Droid was announced, and Microsoft Exchange (ie work email on iPhone) improved (it was around since 08, and I don't know how it improved, as I never worked out how to do it before whatever changed late 09)

Of course, I might be reading a whole lot of stuff into a harmless set of figures and post-rationalising it a little too much, but it all sounds plausible doesn't it?

Mary Meeker Morgan Stanley deck for June 2010

via morganstanley.com

So there is a lot of data in here, and most of it is extremely usable. For example there's quite a lot that is an update of the Oct 09 State of the Internet report that explained how smartphones differed in internet usage. Essentially Apple and Android OS had a share of mobile internet usage disproportionate to their respective marketshares. This data came from April 09, when Android v1 was on two handsets at under 1% global share, so this slide shows exactly the same trend a year on for Apple OS, but an evening-up of Android share (but of course Apple and Android both have a far greater share of the handset market now). This suggests that Android is not competing with Apple at the top of the market, but is providing a broad base of tier 2 smartphones between Apple and the traditional players. On Android devices the mobile internet experience is less good, but the app market is sufficiently well developed to make this an alternative. So share of app usage on Android is far ahead of marketshare. If you are planning mobile internet strategy this is a useful insight.

There's reams of other stuff in here too - anything that you need to explain about how the internet is changing there will be stats to back it up in this deck.

Posted via web from Graeme Wood

Things to watch in 2010

Okay this is a little late, but I wanted to have a think about some trends for this year. I'm deliberately not saying predictions, as this is all stuff that is happening, and in most cases I realised that I'd already written about the stuff I think will be important this year and don't have much more to add (we are only five days in after all). So I'm just going to link to the original posts rather than paraphrase myself.....

Location
Don't want to burst the bubble, as there is so much potential in always-on location-aware map-enabled applications, but I can't see Foursquare or Gowalla going mainstream this year. They are much more like where Twitter was two years ago. Proof?The 'also visited' section of a UK Trends for Websites search on Foursquare. We like it, no-one else cares. I think the overall rise in knowledge of and usefulness of location-enabled applications will mean that unless a killer app is launched before Q3 then this will be a slow burner (if 1/2m Android v2 handsets are sold before June then the satnav application alone might do it. Other than that I'm holding out for Foursquare turning Glastonbury into an actual competition with the whole festival for who saw the most bands, while Orange turn the festival guide into an AR app complete with on screen menus and pricelists for every food stall).

The year of mobile
Of course it will be the year of mobile. Just like last year, and the year before that. But more so. The iPhone has revolutionised not just the mobile market, but overall technology (ie communications, entertainment, everything else we use it for). Hyperbole? Well the sales figures agree: Mary Meeker's slide shows the speed of penetration of the iPhone/ iPod Touch compared to the previous fastest growing tech products (and a couple of other big hits from Apple's own categories). And why is this important? Because everyone else is catching up. Google/HTC, Motorola, Nokia, RIM are finally competing in a market that has changed beyond all recognition from the unwieldy backwards mobile landscape of 2006. And they are doing so by providing products that acknowledge that always connected technology based on ease of use and access to entertainment, friends and, well, pretty much anything that you want finally delivers on the promise of the mobile internet. Another lift from Mary Meeker shows the comparative market share and share of the mobile internet by mobile OS. The key stats are iPhone global market share at 11%, and share of mobile internet traffic at 65% - the opposite skew from traditional handset manufacturers RIM, WIndows and Nokia/Symbian. That is revolutionary. It means that using an iPhone means that you will use the mobile internet in a completely different way to someone who doesn't. Also worth noting that Android relative share back in April 09 (so Android v1) is skewed exactly the same way as Apple's - as Android is groing to grow exponentially on much better handests this year this is just as important. And if Nokia's N900, and the expected new releases from RIM and Microsoft are in any way competitive then they will work in the same way too. So yes, the year of mobile will be as true as it was the last couple of years, but for a lot more people.

While mobile applications will carry on growing at exponential rates across more devices, the Google Voice/Apple AppStore dispute shows where apps will start to develop over the next 18 months. As Apple wouldn't allow a web-based phone service in the store, Google rebuilt the app's functionality as a web app. As mobile processor speeds increase and browser functionality improves, websites will be able to do much of what apps can. The rationale for apps will be based on deep integration with the phone's core functions. Anything else will be a bookmark. I don't think that this will happen to any great degree this year as the handset technology isn't there yet, but brands should be asking of marketing-based applications whether they could be better served by a well made site or web app.

HTML 5
A little bit out of my comfort zone on this, but I'm told it'll be ace. I haven't learnt much more since I wrote this

Real Time Search
I'd defy anyone to have predicted the speed with which Twitter took over the British media in the first few months of last year. By summer 2009 Google's search results were starting to look very antiquated: a search engine that could pull up results from 2 years ago when you were looking for a breaking news story? How quaint. And to be fair it didn't take long (roughly $25m) for both Google and Microsoft to access Twitter's (and in Microsoft's case the increasingly public Facebook's) real time stream and start to include them in search results. As Google roles out Caffeine over the next few weeks this will start to have an interesting effect on brands' attitudes to social marketing.

Brands that aren't regularly discussed in social environments have largely tended to avoid showing too much interest in them. In many categories these are brands for whom the internet plays a vital role all the way along the purchase path from research to transaction: ie those who rely most heavily on search results. Google's search algorithm ranked sites based on reputation (of the site based on links) and relevancy (of the content to the search query). As Google becomes able to analyse sites based on their visitors' social graph, this adds a new level of reputation to build into results. The ROI of social marketing? How about the ROI of SEO?

Obviously it is very early days for how Caffeine will affect search results, and the main real time pipe feeding Google results at the moment is Twitter's. For all the hype, actual regular Twitter users are still in the minority. However if Facebook succeeds in convincing even a fraction of its 32m monthly UK users not to change the revised privacy settings it imposed on them last month then this could rapidly start to have a significant impact on how search engines view brand websites (NB. Not Google, as Facebook won't share with them)

Online Identity
The first question that agencies and marketers should ask to gauge how good an idea or a proposal is this year is this: Does it properly integrate Facebook Connect? If it doesn't, you could probably do better. If it doesn't use it at all, you probably aren't doing it right.

Charging for online news
Murdoch's plans for charging for content haven't gone away, but then they haven't got any firmer. I've written a couple of posts on why i don't think it is a good idea, and on how it might work out, and there isn't really anything new to say other than it is definitely happening, and definitely happening this year.

The internet on TV
Considering how far the internet has come in the last year in getting TV onto our computer screens I'm amazed at how utterly difficult it is to do the opposite and far more rewarding job of getting internet TV onto the TV screen. I wrote about this exactly a year ago and thought we'd be a lot further down the line. So Windows 7 came out, Windows Media Center worked great, no-one really used it to run a home entertainment system as they didn't trust a Windows machine to do that; Apple didn't care about Apple TV, LG and Panasonic are still working on release dates for internet enabled TVs, Kangaroo died, Canvas is still a year away. I'm currently trying to build a new TV system so this is partly borne of frustration (and the subject of another post....) but my view is exactly what it was this time last year: the market is backwards looking and stifling innovation. Sound familiar? Music in 2003, Mobile in 2007, TV in 2010. I think Apple are all over this.

Companies to watch -
Polar Rose
Currently makers of facial recognition apps that tag your Facebook photos for you, Polar Rose have just recruited a new CEO from the mobile industry. His job will be to make the video below, real time facial recognition technology, come to life on mobiles, and more generally to make computers see. The internet of things is all very well based on data, but these guys are thinking about genuine visual processing.

Boxee
I've spent a fair amount of time tweeting about TV programmes over the last year, and I'm not the only one. While the main benefits of Boxee are around getting internet content onto the TV screen (their software already does a great job of this for the laptop screen, and the set top box to connect to the TV screen is on sale in the next few months), it also pulls a viewer's social profiles into the TV experience to create integrated social TV. While C4 will get more press when they integrate Facebook Connect across their site in the next couple of months, Boxee is a genuinely new product based on convergent technology that integrates social graphs into the viewing experience.

Microsoft
.... in a way that XBox users will be very familiar with, as Boxee software is based on Microsoft's open source XBMC (X Box Media Center) OS. Which has been integrating social graphs into XBox Live for months. So why a one to watch in 2010? Because Windows 7 was a return to form, and the music and mobile strategies are rumoured to be receiving similar overhauls imminently? No, becuase that is simply keeping up to date with what Apple and Google are up to. Xbox is the big revolutionary play, as from the looks of Project Natal it will do for consoles, in home entertainment and communications what the iPhone did for mobile and computing. Rumoured to be live before the end of the year, this is one to look out for.

Google Goggles Visual Search video intro

I've got very little info on this other than the video below and Google's post about it, but from the looks of the video this has the potential to cut out the need for QR codes or barcode scanners - simply take a photo and visual search will do the rest. (or for businesses don't even take a photo: hold your camera up and GPS/compasses will do the rest. So may be Google are going to cut the middleman out of the AR hype surrounding mobile in 2010 too)

UK Retailers plugging into Foursquare

In one of those rare moments that I actually remembered to log in to Foursquare I spotted this Major offerSpecial offers for regular customers is not exactly a big idea, but this is not just a loyalty card, it's a loyalty ad. That advertises the business AND contributes to the overall game of Foursquare.

This is pretty well established in New York where Foursquare has been live for a while, but there is a lot of potential for smart small businesses to join in. According to the Businesses section of the Foursquare site, so far the list in the UK looks like this:

+ Bea's of Bloomsbury (London, UK)
+ Dose Espresso (London, UK)
+ Hummus Bros - Holborn (Camden Town, Greater London)
+ Hummus Bros. (London, UK)
+ Kaffeine (London, UK)
+ Paul A Young Fine Chocolates - Bank (London, UK)
+ Paul A Young Fine Chocolates - Islington (London, UK)
+ Pumphreys Coffee (Blaydon on Tyne, Tyne and Wear)

But I think it will grow rapidly over the next couple of months

Augmented ID and new viewing screens

Awesome or Scary?
The basic AR tools are already available - Bionic Eye does simple things really well, while Layar has the potential to do a whole lot more if mobile handsets had more memory. Face Recognition is already available on social photo editors (and on iPhoto) as long as you give it something to work from: ie tag some faces and it will recognise them in future. As William Gibson said

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed"

But platforms like Android and iPhone are increasingly becoming evenly distributed in the UK and US, and they offer the infrastructure and revenue potential for developers to bring the future to those handsets quickly at low cost. The Augmented ID application in this video doesn't exist yet, but it is being developed by Polar Rose, developers of one of the leading facial recognition phone applications.

I'm not sure whether this is scary or exciting. The prospect of publicly sharing your data as you walk down the street might be one privacy setting too far for some. Initially you'd be suspicious of anyone looking into a handset....

But the handset bit is also looking like it might get left behind soon. I saw Ian Pearson talk about the idea of augmented reality contact lenses about this time last year, and dismissed it as something that may happen in my lifetime but not something to get excited about. Even a professional futurologist like Ian only included them in the 2015-2020 section of his presentation.

A year on and these are in development: according to Gajitz.com,

(Image from Gajitz.com)
Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnology expert at the University of Washington in Seattle, has released a report detailing just where the bionic eye (or at least the augmented vision contact lens) technology is at right now, and it’s pretty amazing. Not only is augmented vision possible – prototypes are being tested right now

How long till Augmented ID happens on a head-up display in front of your eyes?

More from Gajitz here and from the BioMedical section of Spectrum IEEE Magazine here
(HT to Katy Lindemann for pointing out the AR contact lens news)

UPDATE: According to Jeremiah Owyang, LinkedIn are planning to integrate facial recognition technology into their apps by 2011.

Using mobile devices, users can quickly hold a device up a cell phone in front of a peer to see their LinkedIn data –without even having a conversation.

Bionic Eye Augmented Reality

Post up someone's great explanation of how social, mobile and AR are going to combine to make people's lives easier, and 5 minutes later someone shows you an example of it actually working. This is a screengrab from the Bionic Eye app, which locates the nearest Wifi, public transport, coffee shop and fast food (you can select how much of this you actually see...) and directions and distances. Currently looks a little bit like magic.

Two years from now this will probably look like Windows 95 looks to us now. For the moment I can't wait till Foursquare can overlay their recommendations onto this sort of AR, to show what people want to find rather than what retailers want to push.
(HT, as ever, to John for pointing it out)

The Mobile Social Computing Explosion

Mike Arauz's ability to cut through the hype surrounding technology and highlight the strategic implications for brands means that his decks are always worth reading. I thought this explanation of the combined impact of social and mobile nails the challenges that marketers and agencies need to get to grips with before next year

Social Network In Your Pocket

View more documents from Mike Arauz.

Finding and using your net promoter score

I was buying mobile phones again last week. Not to feed my tech habit this time, just cos my son threw one in the paddling pool. All very straightforward, courtesy of the Carphone Warehouse, but I wasn't expecting a text an hour later asking me One Question about my experience in buying the phone: on a scale of one to ten, how likely would I be to recommend Carphone Warehouse to a friend?
Now I've had a pretty good grip of net promoter scores for most of the brands I've worked with in the last couple of years, so I've commissioned people to ask this question a few times, but I've never been on the other end of it. It does make you think about your experiences of the brand (all pretty favourable in this case). And that led my cynical side to wonder whether brands that have an automated NPS tracking system in place for every transaction make more effort to deliver recommendable experience, or if it is more likely that it is only those that understand the importance of creating advocacy amongst their customers that bother to monitor NPS. Either way, it really impressed me. I meant to post about it last week, but to be honest forgot about it until I saw this ad on the tube today (you'd think with a new phone I could learn to take photos with it......)
Another Telecoms company, Plusnet, proudly letting me know that 8 out of 10 of their customers would recommend them to their friends.... which sounds like distilling the output of an NPS study down into an easily digestible headline as well. This category, traditionally one of the worst culprits for abominable customer service, seems to be paying more attention to brand experience....which can only be a good thing for people who keep having to replace their phones....

Another Orange summer

It's June, festivals are on their way, the Glasto countdown has started, so it must be time to revisit two of the best brand ideas that have been around for a few years. Orange's Spot The Bull broke lots of online/offline boundaries last year, and this year looks like it's after the banner/microsite divide, using 3D (ish) expanding ads to create a very playable version of the game in-banner.
(that's the Flashtalking demo page - I wouldn't normally go to AOL Music, honest)
But some top UX design and Glasto tickets prizes pales compared to Orange's other work this week, which sees the launch of year two of RockCorps. Contagious claim it as a cliche for being too good

"Orange RockCorps represents a tidy fusion of as many new media clichés as you’d care to name. Branded Entertainment? Check. Social networking? Check. Corporate Social responsibility? Check. Essentially a programme encouraging youngsters to put in a couple of hours of community service in exchange for tickets to massive gigs, the real strength of the campaign/platform/whatever is in some phenomenal CRM (check, check, check). Regular yet unobtrusive missives from the RockCorps team promote line-ups and suggest projects with which one might want to get involved....User-generated content as WELL?"

To me though this is more about connecting - how to put a brand in the centre of a network. RockCorps connects people with good causes, it connects music fans with live music, it connects exclusive experiences with charitable donation...it CONNECTS. To quote Henry Jenkins (about the future of marketing generally, rather than specifically about RockCorps)

"it pulls people together and gives them something to do"

And as Contagious mentions, it looks like there is going to be a role for last year's participants to share their experiences to encourage this year's. And given Orange's track record for lighting lots of fires and sticking with the ones that burn, there will probably be more marketing support, more scale, and higher profile bands involved in this one.

Spotify Mobile app - the first view

This has been coming for a while, but the first view of a Spotify mobile app was unveiled today at Google's I/O developer conference. And the venue should give us a strong clue that this ain't no iPhone kit. Oh no. Given the huge potential conflict with iTunes, that has yet to happen, and this is an Android development.

To be honest, I believe that Spotify has too much potential for Apple to ignore, and it may well be that the iPhone app is in development (actually it is strongly rumoured to be: the question is more about whether Apple will approve it). Given Apple's previous preference for exclusive deals of the O2/AT&T variety, I had a suspicion that Spotify would only be allowed onto the iPhone as an exclusive (and no doubt premium subscription/buy-through-iTunes revenue share deal) handset partner.

The Android version has clearly blown this out of the water, and if this app can stream and cache to a handheld with the stability and zero latency that the Spotify desktop app offers, then Apple will soon be playing catch-up. I know I am a confirmed lover of Spotify as much as I am an iTunes-sceptic, but I reckon this could be the relaunch that Android needs.

Murdoch's still way ahead of the game - WSJ iPhone app

To be fair I don't know if Rupert himself is to be congratulated for the Wall St Journal's iPhone application, but as well as being a great execution of the mobile news genre, it also shows that value of paid content online for the future of a newspaper. As I've mentioned before, it is unrealistic to think that popular news sites are ever going to be able to build a subscription model. That horse has long since bolted. There is a possibility that they can generate revenue through mobile access to news, as mobile is still an area where we are used to incremental payments for better services and functionality (as in the iPhone itself). The problem is that few phones make reading content (particularly content that includes pictures, links, flash video, etc) particularly pleasant. So you would be paying for the convenience of consuming the content anywhere, although it is actually relatively inconvenient to do so.

Much better if you are looking at offering the same content on a mix of free and paid media to have the always-on but difficult to use in depth medium available for free, and charge for the one that people will want to spend more time with. As the WSJ has maintained its subscription model (more because it could, having unique and high quality content rather than having any particular insight into the future of newspapers) it has been able to do that.

Although thinking about it that the same could have been said about print and online versions 8 years ago....

Digital Maxim and Murdoch's mobile future

The first big name print casualty of the year was announced yesterday, when Maxim magazine moved to online only. Not entirely surprising given that it had dropped 41% of its sales over the last 6 months, but Maxim is still apparently the biggest selling men's mag in the world so its UK decline suggests something larger than simply ad revenue drying up in 2009. Of course, the brand itself will continue in digital format, where it already looks healthier (250k email subscribers compared to 41k print sales). I have a sneaky suspicion that the online format will look something like Dennis's Monkey - one of those curious 'web-magazines' where you have to drag the pages to turn them. Although the 1m monthly unique users of this magsite (smag? webezine?) obviously like that format, it seems to be the result of a conversation that goes something like this:

Well we're good at making magazines. But people don't want to buy magazines as much now because they're using this "web" . So how do we put "magazines" onto this "web", because then everything will all be ok again?

So rather than thinking what might of how to get things back to the way they were, how about thinking about getting them forward to the way things will be?

Magazines are portable and easy to access. Webezines are far less portable and difficult to navigate. Let's face it, websites are starting to feel a bit unwieldy to anyone getting well-acquainted with applications. And this isn't something that can be blamed on ad revenue in the way that TV and online publishers can: they know that 2009 is tough because no-one's paying them, but both media are growing their audiences (not as difficult when your product is free). Maxim's problem was that no-one wanted to buy the thing. Moving online effectively means 'cut out the fixed print and distribution costs and make the content free'.... which means that it survives simply by being interesting.

What puts this dilemma into a sharp perspective is Rupert Murdoch's speech this week at a cable industry show announcing that he is investing heavily in the next generation of Kindle-type devices. *graeme points smugly at this post*. Handheld mobile devices are the obvious evolutionary step for print brands, but are currently hindered by useablilty issues (ie reading articles on a 3 inch screen is no match for a physical product in your hand). Mobile as a medium however offers the holy grail for cash-strapped print brands: a lot of people who are very used to paying for content on mobiles (whether through monthly data tariffs, one-off application purchases, whatever - the point is there is a monthly bill attached). The monthly payment isn't as much as the cost of a printed product, but then we weren't ever paying just for content when we bought magazines (or newspapers) - most of that money went on glossy paper, printing, distribution of heavy pallets of magazines, etc.

So News International apparently see this as a possible future medium for some of their brands, and as the most powerful publisher in the world it makes sense that if we ('the consumers') aren't buying into genuinely readable handhelds quick enough then Rupert will give the tech industry the kick/cash injection that it needs to give him the required distribution platform. But there are a few other ways of looking at it:

1. There's a lot of devices already that do a pretty good job of being readable. It might be difficult to for example charge monthly for Zoo on an iPhone, but how about a subscription for all Bauer titles on Vodafone? The Kindle (sorry I hate the phrase 'e-reader' it reminds me of a very long time ago) is an extra chunk of device to stick in your pocket every day, so these sort of predictions will only really start to work when the mobile/netbook battle resolves itself and we're left with really usable useful devices.

2. The brands that survive will be those that deserve to: Maxim's girls/comedy/laddishness content is available in a thousand other places on the internet, and so it won't survive long there either. Print brands that do will be those that either have unique content (usually the very big brands) or unique communities (usually the niche brands)

3. People like magazines (ok not enough to make them profitable). If you are using a site every day to check a few favourite feeds, then surely it should be able to learn enough from what you, other people like you, your friends, etc read to be able to put a pretty decent package of content together that you haven't read. And then your subscription could offer you a couple of printed copies per year (printed specifically for you, content specific to you that it knows you haven't read). (Perhaps when you book a train ticket you could be reminded to order it for delivery the day of travel) - the printed version becomes the personalised collecters edition.

And ideally of course these various new revenue streams all add up to enough to keep the magazine in actual print, as people aren't going to stop buying the printed version of the thousands of mags with a valid reason to exist, unlike Maxim

Since I'm on the subject, I'm still not sure whether i think Wired UK is a good thing - see Ramzi Yakob and Neil Perkin for more. All I can say is that I bought it to read on the way home today, but ended up noticing that Wired US had started publishing full articles over RSS, so read them on Viigo all the way home instead

The Geek Gene

My son said his first word today. It was 'mobile' (sounded more like 'ro-ri', but he said it while trying to nick my Blackberry out of my pocket...). So, nature or nuture? Is there a geek gene, or is this behaviour learnt from someone who spends far too much time on a Blackberry?

Spotify: Not losing a battle but winning the war

For all the love that Spotify has had from the tech and music community in its 4 months of beta, this has seemed a pretty tricky week. Basically some bands have been pulled from the service, mainly due to geographic issues with rights in different countries. From what I can see there isn't one particular label that has thrown toys out of the pram: user comments from the Spotify blog suggest that this mainly at individual bands' requests (in the same way that bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones are particularly anti C21st music distribution) - Led Zeppelin are one of the quoted parts of the archive that has been removed. However most of the unsupportive comments appear to be from fans of niche genres - Spotify is a Swedish company, and there are a number of references to Scandinavian synth music and metal being removed. As no-one could have predicted the rate at which Spotify has grown in the UK (200k subscribers) since December, you can understand that international rights will have become an issue that bands may not have considered. If these bands find that after consideration that they would prefer not to reach an audience growing at quarter of a million music lovers a month, then that's fair enough. It's clear from the blog comments that people will go back to Piratebay rather than Amazon if Spotify is taken away from them though.

None of this should detract from the fact that this application is adding tunes at a rate of 10,000 per day, and is on the verge of mass appeal in the UK with hugely positive Guardian and NME features this week. The most important news for Spotify is not in its content though - it is a distribution platform, and has taken a huge step this week in becoming a viable competitor to iTunes by employing a Head of Mobile, Gustav Soderstrom from Yahoo. Mobile is the ultimate destination for music content, and the speed that which the application spreading makes an ad-funded business model viable. Could a tech startup really save both the music and the mobile industry from Apple?
(thanks to Zia George at Spotify for audience data)

Written whilst listening to Airborne Toxic Event, MGMT, Killers and Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, who are all still available on Spotify)

PSP - live football streaming

(from Engadget)
I get to live football that rarely now that I'm used to just looking for the replay after every contentious incident, so it's great to hear the the first close-circuit live streams are being introduced at Arsenal. Only available on a PSP at the moment, but if there's enough take up you can see this being widened out across devices - particularly phones. I'd guess that most clubs will just see this as something to charge even more for (and also that we won't be seeing it at Pride Park any time soon). Still, with the amount of mobile networks sponsoring live events, there's a huge value ad opportunity here. And yes, Orange at Glasto, and 02 everywhere else, I'm thinking of you.

2009 - the year of Spotify

Not sure if I missed some hype about Spotify in 2008, but one of the benefits of having 2 weeks off doing anything is the chance to catch up. What I really wanted to do was catch up on lots of music I'd not got round to downloading over the year, but what I found was basically all the music you could want (well, nearly) completely free. I'd intended to check out loads of bands I'd only heard on the radio to see if there was more to them than singles (and whatever the iTunes lovers say, a quick blast isn't enough). Turns out I just need to log in to Spotify and put a playlist together.

Looks like this is ad-funded (although there are hardly any ads currently - I've heard two in two weeks - expect that it would need more ad inventory once it moves public to avoid a purely subscription model), and currently in private beta (only took me a few days to get an invite though - I've got a few more, so email/DM me if you want a go). There are subscriptions available, but I'd need a lot more annoying advertising to make me think about paying. Buffering is quick and smooth, and the app is very low impact, even on my most underpowered netbook. This suggests that it will be easy to port to mobile: should see an iPhone version imminently. The software itself has an iTunes feel to it, only without the clunkiness and latency that you get running iTunes on a Windows machine.

The real beauty of this system is that the major labels are already signed up - EMI, Warners, SonyBMG & Universal already buy into the business model. I reckon the mobile version could be this year's killer app - question is whether it will be a partnership with a mobile brand or network (in a ComesWithMusic sort of way), or whether they will release applications for the huge range of devices that are going to be open to 3rd party software this year. The quick win (if ad-funding starts to fail) would be the first option. The killer app would be the second.

Why isn't everyone using Viigo?

RSS on the Underground
Ok this IS in danger of becoming a mobile blog. To be fair I've been souping up a Blackberry Curve and playing with an iPhone and drooling over N97 videos this week, but the main reason is that TechCrunch and Mashable have been in mobile overload recently, and they are my commute to work reading. So then I can't resist looking up the shiny new toys whenever I get chance. I mentioned this the other day in a presentation as a reason why I never saw things like Metro and the Londonpaper anymore, and was amazed to find that there is STILL hardly anyone I know using Viigo. I've been getting blank looks for the last few months when I talk about Viigo (both as a user of it and as a potential commercial partner), and so I thought I'd write the basic explanation down rather than explaining over and over (yes, slightly pretentious i know, but then you can't link to the supplier and download the app from me explaining it in person....)
Basically Viigo is a Blackberry app that aggregates RSS feeds (tech, news, sports, entertainments, etc) and downloads regular updates. You can customise it to, for instance, make sure that you are only downloading from sites that publish full-text feeds, and even better you can sync your GoogleReader to update your Blackberry. For anyone in London, commuting 50m below ground, this is genius - it means I can read all my regular news and industry feeds when i'm out of range of a mobile signal. It even has a one-click 'add to Delicious' function that stores up all your bookmarks and adds them when you reach the surface. Takes roughly 10 minutes to install and customise, and means you'll never have to rely on the ten words of one syllable that London Lite seems to think pass for journalism these days....

So if you have a Blackberry and you use RSS, especially in London, why aren't you on Viigo?

Nokia N97 - the start of local social?

Amid all the hype about the unveiling of the N97, which mostly runs along the lines of 'is it a phone that does computing or a laptop that makes calls?' there's one question that I'm a bit unsure of. I obviously want one - full QWERTY keyboard, 32GB, N-GAGE functionality, 5mb camera and all, but the A-GPS integration is being promoted as a social networking tool. It's a great concept - the phone keeps track of your GPS location, and that of all your friends, and lets you know where they are etc. Remember (if you're over 25) how much planning used to go into meeting friends in the days before mobiles - you'd have to specifiy a time and place and all that. And stick to it! Then SMS took over the planning for you. And A-GPS enabled social networking has the potential to take this to a new level - to keep everyone in the loop about where you are. It becomes even more interesting as people move beyond 'real life friends' through networks like Twitter, and will mean that genuinely location-based apps like BrightKite will come of age. It is also potentially the start of a future I've written about before (okay, badly organised post, so look at theory 18!) where devices communicate amongst themselves and only warn you of people or places that might interest you.

We will move towards this, but I'd question the impact that the N97 will have itself.... the power of a network is in the number of connections in it, and A-GPS tracking and social network integration will only be useful when enough people have enabled phones. Which will eventually happen, but proprietry technology surely can't be way to go. In the past, developers needed to protect their early mover R&D-funded advantage. Now, they need to scale it as quickly as possible before Google gets there. As Google is already in the mobile market, and as open, networked and scaleable as everything else Google does, surely the bold move would be to base the next N-series on Android, and make sure that it talks to every other Android phone, no matter who makes it or what network it is on?