Results tagged “ipod”

My friend Nick is good at answering the questions I didn't even know I wanted to ask. For example, how many electrons per song on an iPod?

At approximately 4 minutes per song (Apple's average), we can play through 150 songs in 10 hours (far less than the 1000 song storage capacity), giving us approximately 1.09•10²⁰ electrons used per song.

That's downright efficient compared to the piggish 160 gig iPod Classic, which weighs in at 850mA•h, 40h: 1.27•10²¹ e / song.

When launching the new version of Amazon's book device the Kindle, Jeff Bezos offered up the vision that the company has for the device: "Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds." It's a message that Amazon has been consistently advocating since the device's initial rollout, and meshes nicely with the early Amazon vision of being the world's biggest bookstore.

Others have noted the audacity of the Kindle's vision. That kind of vision obviously evokes Google's early mission statement of striving to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". In truth, Google doesn't talk much about that mission these days, which might explain why a lot of their recent efforts do pretty well with the organizing the world's information part, but can be downright abysmal at making it useful. Virginia Heffernan articulated this quite well in the New York Times recently in regard to Google's image archive of old Life photos:

Google has failed to recognize that it can’t publish content under its imprint without also creating content of some kind: smart, reported captions; new and good-looking slide-show software; interstitial material that connects disparate photos; robust thematic and topical organization. All this stuff is content, and it requires writers, reporters, designers and curators. Instead, the company’s curatorial imperative, as usual, is merely “make it available.”

But at least Google's trying. That does count for something. And articulating that vision in cultural terms, phrased in language that explains the benefit to society, not just to stockholders, is important. Now, I think Google has a gap between their intention and their reality because the organization lacks theory of mind, but perhaps that's a problem that can be fixed.

And hell, I still even have a soft spot for Microsoft's old vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home", not just because in retrospect it seems so modest. It's also because it was a more ambitious vision that, if realized, would mean benefits even for people who never gave a single dollar to Microsoft. (As turned out to be the case.)

And these statements of vision are particularly resonant to me because we seldom hear any sort of similar vision from Apple. When the iTunes store was launched, the vision wasn't to "make every song in the world easily available". Instead, the clear goal was purely commercial, to make people buy music from Apple instead of Walmart.

And the truth is, Amazon, Google and Apple all make billions of dollars — that doesn't happen by accident. They should have clear goals about how to make money as part of their efforts. But since all of these companies also traffic in commerce derived from the artistic and expressive works that shape our culture, it makes sense for us to evaluate their efforts based on how well they articulate a desire to give back to our culture. They should make something meaningful for the world while making their money, at least as a happy byproduct if not as an intentional output. It's a lot easier for me to believe that employees at Amazon are doing something that's meaningful to the world at large than to feel that way about Apple's similar efforts.

I point this out not to be harshly critical of any of these companies; Indeed, I regularly give my time and money to all of them. But we often rush to describe Steve Jobs as a "visionary" for being the best showman in an industry where most people have the stage presence of a bowl of oatmeal.

The truth is, Apple has a chance to redefine what it considers vision while Steve Jobs is on leave. He could return and say that every copy of Garage Band will have the ability to instantly upload a user's songs to iTunes, unleashing an immense market of independent music to the world, and using their enormous market presence to let individuals help create culture, not just consume it. Or Apple could use its leverage with the record labels to impress upon them the importance of getting all of their back catalog of recordings online and available for people to consume — most of the music that's ever been released on any record label isn't available for purchase today, at any price, by anyone.

And just as importantly, we can use this criteria of vision, of responsibility for culture, as a way of analyzing announcements and releases in the technology world. So, last night, Amazon released their Kindle software for Apple's iPhone. Most of the reviews understandably focused on the readability of the text, or how well the synchronization features work. But I'm hoping that at least one or two lines of future reviews will spare a moment to think "is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off?" My sense is that we're more likely to get positive answers to that question if the teams that are making these products are led by an appropriately ambitious vision.

A few brief thoughts upon the announcement of Amazon's Kindle ebook reader:

• Given that even my most skeptical friends have literally been desperate for ebooks for years now, there's definitely demand for such a device -- the question is whether all the pieces are in place, and whether regular people agree with us geeks.
• The choice of EVDO over wifi is very telling. I travel a lot, so I'm keenly aware of exactly how far wifi has to go to become really ubiquitous. And even the many places that wifi is available are tangled up an a complicated set of different payment and access schemes. Bundling access through an EVDO network that "feels" free is one of the most interesting parts of the announcement. Odd that they branded the network as "Whispernet", unless of course they plan to use it for other things in the future.
• I don't think they should be charging for blogs that are distributed to Kindle users. Obviously, I have a dog in this fight, since I've wanted a dedicated blog reading-device for years, but I don't even think it's got the potential to be a great business for blog publishers. Having blog content be free would be the perfect gateway drug to Kindle usage.
• I was really unsettled by the specificity of Robert Scoble's April Fool's joke about such a device, since it ended up being very accurate. On the other hand, I know that there are bloggers who've known about the Kindle, in one form or another, for a year or so.
• The 10-minute video extolling the Kindle featuring Jeff Bezos and a dozen best-selling authors is perhaps the most visible evidence of just how much Amazon dominates the book distribution industry.
• The videos promoting Kindle also show that, though he might not have Steve Jobs' showmanship, Bezos seems to be perhaps the most articulate CEO of any of the big technology companies when it comes to explaining the benefits of his own products.
• They should kick-start the market by giving these out as free Wikipedia devices to schools. One per classroom.
• Distributing books through Whispernet and controlling their sale dodges a lot of the more obvious blowback that they'd get about DRM and monopolistic sales channels if they'd have chosen to use a desktop app like the iTunes store does. Smart, or lucky?
• Does the fact that books or other content have to be converted to MOBI format mean that they're eliminating the potential for Long Tail revenues from Kindle users? They say they've got 100 out of 112 best-sellers supported already, but isn't the killer app the books that aren't NY Times best-sellers?
• A five-thousand word cover story in Newsweek entitled "The Future of Reading"? That's perhaps the most impressive PR coup for a hardware device that I've ever seen. The story is pretty good, but even the iPhone wasn't greeted with that kind of reception. ("The Future of Talking"?)
• I love reading on my iPod Touch, and indeed, it's a better reading device than it is an iPod. It's a little too small to really curl up with, as one does with a book, but when I showed it to an acquaintance in the book publishing industry a few weeks ago, she understood how I could say it was a lot closer to the "right" ebook experience than anything that's been foisted on us in the past. It'll be interesting to see if Kindle continues that trend.

Update: D'oh! I forgot two of the main points I wanted to make:

• I should be able to get a Kindle client for my laptop, and then if I buy a book every other week, I get free EVDO access. Maybe I'd have to pay for a card, but Whispernet is a great service.
• Amazon Prime members should get a Kindle for free. Make that program actually offer some tangible benefits to members. And again, free Whispernet for Prime members would be killer.

When we were unpacking the delightful Nintendo Wii a few weeks ago, I was marvelling at how well-thought-out the process was. Beautiful, pleasant, and of course full of anticipation at the great machine we were about to be enjoying.

But the we had to open our extra controllers. They were entombed in those awful plastic clamshells, and I had to go find a utility knife, knowing there was roughly a fifty-fifty chance I was going to lose some blood in the process. If it's not the knife itself, it's the sharp plastic edges that are left.

Though there's no evidence anybody's died from that kind of packaging, a Wired story a few months ago did reveal how large the problem is:

But it's not just a matter of customer frustration. These packages pose real danger. Data on the topic is irregularly collected and vague; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's most recent accounting, in 2001, listed "unintentional cut/pierce" as the fifth most common cause of nonfatal unintentional injury, but that also includes the much more common assortments of knife accidents owing to normal kitchen work.

Anecdotally, though, emergency room doctors say they're slammed the week after Christmas with such injuries and see them regularly all year. Dr. Christian Arbelaez, a Boston-area ER physician, sees about a case a week, some as serious as tendon and nerve damage that require orthopedic surgeons to repair.

There aren't yet detailed statistics on wrap rage; The closest thing to research on the topic is Consumer Reports' Oyster Awards, where they give out awards to the packages that are most difficult to open.

And this got me thinking about the much-praised packaging for the Apple iPod. There's no shortage of (deserved) raves for the box that the iPod comes in, even though more recent ones have been less lavishly packaged as Apple tries to save money and lessen the environmental impact of their product.

The mere lack of a clamshell package for the iPod, though, probably has a measurable impact. Having sold tens of millions of the devices, its likely that just using the annoying packaging didn't just make people like the Wii and the iPod better. I'm guessing that not requiring people to struggle with a knife on Christmas morning the past few years has probably saved ten thousand fingers. Pretty freaking cool.

Microsoft has just launched the Zune, which will be one of the most popular digital music players ever made, and could have been considered a wild success as a result. Instead, the device has been inevitably and irrevocably compared to Apple's iPod, and thus anything less than becoming a cultural icon will be considered failure. There are a couple of reasons why, and a number of lessons to be learned.

Back in January, I described a list of Dos and Don't for Beating the iPod and iTunes. You can refer back to it if you want the whole list, but here's some key points:

• Do: Be Rock and Roll.
• Don't: Try to teach kids about DRM.
• Do: Make something that breaks in, instead of breaking down.
• Don't: Forget about the rest of the world.
• Do: Let people make their own music.
• Don't: Try to fit in.
• Do: Make friends with Radio and TV.
• Don't: Forget about the geeks.
• Do: Invest in the experience.

Microsoft has done a good job of achieving many of these goals, while still making an overall experience that's strangely unsatifying. To me, this is epitomized by one fact: There's a brown Zune.

In person, the device has a rich, warm color. The green tinge is innovative; I've never seen a consumer electronics device that tries for such a complicated, organic palette, and it's pulled off wonderfully. But instead of calling the color chocolate, or something else compelling and attractive, they named it brown, a color that has few positive associations except (possibly) UPS. Chocolate is desirable, and fuels passions. It's even a little bit sinful. Hell, you could play on the brown and green theme and call the color "tree".

But no, the color name is prosaic. And worse, it's a color combination that looks terrible on the web. There should be some kind of Photoshop Gizmodo filter where you can take a photo of a device and see how it'll look in a spy photo on a gadget blog -- that's where first impressions by early adopters and the press are going to be formed.

The failure of Brown represents a more profound problem with the Zune: A lack of vision. There's unquestionably a lot of talent and ambition evidenced in launching a product of this scope and breadth with a small team on a short timeframe. And the Zune team should be commended for pulling it off with such high quality. But the overriding feeling of the Zune is an almost pathological me-too-ism, as if the team weren't watching consumers or potential customers, but was too busy saying Hello From Seattle to those who were Made In Cupertino. Instead of aiming at the competition, the team should have been aiming for the lead.

There are lots of great things about the Zune, and I hope it does well. But my skepticism and frustration over the fact that they settled for being compared unfavorably to the iPod is best summarized by this commercial I've mocked up. It shows what I think Christmas morning will look like if you leave a Zune under the tree for the kids.

Brown Zune from http://anil.vox.com/

Sometimes I just can't resist amusing myself when talking in a public forum. My wife recently got a MacBook, which marks the first time I've ever had a Mac in the house. I actually like Macs, but I find the idiocy of platform wars so heart-warming that I like to troll play the part of a Windows afficionado sometimes.

This leads to unexpected consequences. Today, this story about the iPod's influence on the perception of Apple, especially by non-Mac-users, is linked on the homepage of Macworld.com. It features some quotes that make me look like a drooling Bill Gates fanboy, but unfortunately has not yet inspired any real frothing at the mouth by commenters yet.

Here's the best/worst of what I said:

To Dash, the iPod has helped transform his view of Apple “from a company that makes me roll my eyes because of all my zealot friends, to [one] that I buy things from regularly. Albeit begrudgingly.

The truth is, I’ve been around creative people or digital artists my whole life, exactly the people that have always been Mac diehards," Dash said. "And the fact that they acted like zealots was completely off-putting to me. I don’t want a lifestyle change, I just want to use computers!

"The iPod acted as a great gateway drug to Apple usage. It doesn’t require a wholesale change of my daily digital habits, and I don’t have to throw away my experience as a Windows expert—yes, those exist," Dash continued. "The best part is that the iPod can stand on its own merits; I don't have to drink the Steve Jobs Kool Aid to recognize it’s worth having."

Of course, the key here was working in the words "zealots", "Steve Jobs Kool Aid" and worst of all, "Windows expert". If I could have said "Windows just works for me", it would have been a Mac-trolling perfect storm. I should mention, this is all in good spirits. If I can get into PC Magazine on a similar story, I'll be sure to point out how Apple invented all of this 20 years ago. Just to keep everyone happy.

This is the first post in a series where I'm pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today's is the Nike Plus site.

Nike Plus is the product of Apple's partnership with Nike to produce an accessory aimed at those who listen to music on an iPod while they run. With that kind of pedigree, you'd expect nothing less than an excellent, aesthetically exceptional experience, and Nike+Apple definitely deliver.

The physical hardware is reasonably attractive, given its focus on pure functionality. You get a little fob that sits in a custom slot in the Nike shoes, and it can be attached to any brand of shoe if you're creative enough. There's a dongle for your iPod Nano, and then the rest of the magic happens when you sync up your iPod to your computer. It's not perfect, of course; The whole system locks in your running data in a way that's not entirely surprising given Apple's history of DRM advocacy. It's inexplicable why they won't let you export your own info.

On balance, the product is pretty good. But what's remarkable in the execution of the Nike Plus (or "Nike+"; the site and product are referred to both ways) is that it's not just pretty, it's practical for people who are actually runners. My wife and many of my closest friends are all runners, and several of them are in marathon training right now. And all of the runners I've talked to have described the tracking, reporting, and community functionality of the Nike Plus site as top notch. There's also a smart integration of music features, letting you pick a "Power Song" in case you need a boost while running. For someone like me, though, I'd need a way to keep motivated and to reward my competitive nature.

That's where the 100 Perfect Pixels of the Nike Plus site come in. You'll see highlighted here the My Records link, which offers access to a all your running records. You can set goals, challenges, milestones, and events, all designed to help you compete against the most difficult competitor: yourself. That kind of design touch shows some smart thinking and beautiful execution, so it's a shoe-in (pun!) for being the first example of 100 Perfect Pixels.

Some Resources:

• You'll need an iPod nano to play with the system. Nike would also prefer you buy some Nike Plus shoes to go with it, though that's actually optional. It works with any sneaker, as Alaina has documented.

• Once you've got the first $400 worth of gear together, you've only got one more item to buy: Nike + iPod Sport Kit is the actual doohickey that makes your shoe talk to the fob that talks to the dongle that talks to the nano that talks to your computer that talks to the website that makes all the charts and graphs light up.

• In the iTunes Music Store, Athlete Inspirations is a bunch of playlists and podcasts for runners by athletes. I had figured everyone was just listening to Eminem's "Lose Yourself" as their Power Song, but apparently not.

• And finally, yeah, I know that 100×100 pixels is actually 10,000 Perfect Pixels. That name kinda sucks, so this post and all the future ones are going to be called 100 Perfect Pixels and tagged with "100px". Deal with it.

Lots of people in both the music/media and technology businesses are obsessed with beating Apple's work on the iPod and iTunes. With the CES show being this week, that obsession will reach its annual peak, so I figured I'd take the time to post a list I'd made some time ago. Herewith, a list of the key dos and don'ts for beating Apple's iPod and iTunes, in no particular order.

• Do: Be Rock and Roll. Have an attitude, be All About The Music, and express yourself. Now, that doesn't mean you have to have faux-edgy marketing copy for your service or device, but just that you should make decisions for your products based on what a music fan would want.

• Don't: Try to teach kids about DRM. Now, if and when iTunes eventually loses in the market, it will be because of DRM. And you can get significant advantages by just embracing unprotected MP3s, since that's what most people want and they work with everything. But the thing is, DRM is boring. Teaching consumers about DRM is like giving your cat a bath: You're only going to piss her off, and she'd do a better job of it on her own anyway. Explain your lack of DRM in terms of user benefits instead of technology, and you'll avoid disgruntled customer testimonials.

• Do: Make something that breaks in, instead of breaking down. The iPod's greatest flaw is that it's designed to inspire reverence and requires being coddled. Remember being rock and roll? Rock is about leather and denim, which wear with time and get more personality as they're used. Kind of like a good guitar. And being able to drop an MP3 player in a crowded high school cafeteria without everyone laughing that your expensive device is destroyed is a killer app.

One of the recurrent ideas that surfaces in science fiction and in the predictions of futurists is an always-on record of a person's life. Typically, it's presented as the stuff of a dystopian nightmare future, where the record is falsified and you end up in jail for a crime that your wayward clone committed. But what if such a record could be created and it were useful?

The technology is damn close to being practical. Simply carry slightly fewer MP3s on your iPod and you've got more than enough recording space for your entire day to be recorded in voice-quality mono audio.

Why would you want such a thing? That's always the first question that arises. My own desire for this device dates back to my late teens, when I used to make really bad music with my friends. My constant frustration was that I didn't have audio records of all the found-sound elements that I stumbled across in the course of a day. Snippets of conversation, ambient sounds, messages left on voice mail, obscenities shouted at me by strangers: these were all elements that I was determined to appropriate.

Later, as I realized the boundaries of my talents, (somewhere between a lump of coal and Ja Rule, which is to say, nonexistent) I started to realize that perhaps this audio record would be valuable on its own.

Having a complete audio record of my day, indexed by time, would allow me to refer back to a moment in conversation when quoting it later, or when I needed clarification on a specific point brought up while talking to someone. The timestamps alone, with perhaps quarter-hour index markers annotating a day's recording, would offer chronological indexing of the audio diary in a way that parallels permalinks in a weblog. Links to specific points in time turn out to be a very powerful way to manage microcontent.

The next level up would be an awareness of presence being linked into that audio stream. I suppose the super-futuristic version would be some FOAF-enabled scanning device that recognizes each of my friends' odors. It'd be worth it just for having alleviated that particular burden on my scarred olfactory memory.

More realistically, though, the immediate implementation could be made presence-aware by assigning stamps in your audio stream referencing the people invited to meetings on your calendar application, or by simply allowing you to pick people off of your contact list and associating them with the current point in the audio stream.

I've already recorded snippets of audio onto the PocketPC that plays my MP3s for me today, and that device carries a fully-synched, updated copy of my contacts on it. I've also recorded audio notes on my laptop using OneNote, and I could assign those notes to a contact's information in Outlook. But I'd much prefer an iPod-type device that I could just tap on while it was recording, scrolling to any given name in my address book and just clicking on it to select my companions at any given moment.

Now we've got an audio record that's searchable by time or by person. And it's aware of who those people are, and what level of trust that I've assigned to them either via relationships defined in FOAF or by using categories I've assigned in my contact management application.

This is where the audio record starts to get valuable. I can set my playback preferences so that this tagged audio is automatically available to the people who were marked as present at any given time. When those people access the audio stream, permission would be granted to listen to the dialogue without any significant barriers to their access.

From there, the software could identify simple, useful relationships in order to control access permissions for other people. An audio range tagged as taking place during a business meeting that's in my calendar would be accessible without passwords to anyone who's marked as a coworker of mine, but I'd receive a notification that they had done so when they clicked on the audio file. Move down one level of trust, and employees of the company I was meeting with would be able to access the audio, but only after submitting a request for me to authorize them. All the way down at the lowest trust level, complete strangers, the entire clip would be off limits to them, including obscuring of the fact that an audio record exists at all.

How do all these people get to this data, though? I'm not going to pass around my super-iPod to everybody I meet. Well, these individually-tagged clips of audio constitute some very valuable microcontent, and we've finally got a set of decently usable tools for publicly (or semi-publicly) publishing microcontent. Those tools are what we use right now to publish weblogs.

The necessary evolution is for personal publishing tools to start to allow far more granular control over permissions for reading the content that they generate. This doesn't just apply to the audio we've recorded with our always-on iPods, but to the text we're publishing to our weblogs as well. It should also encompass the new text that we'll feel comfortable adding to our weblogs once we know that we can control access to our sites with at least the level of control that LiveJournal users take for granted right now.

Weblog publishing tools will grow to allow us each to create a personal panopticon, at least to the degree that we're comfortable doing so. We've already seen that security through obscurity is untenable, and I've discussed how privacy through obscurity is going to be just as impossible to maintain in the future. So given that the key to maintaining privacy is going to be by choosing which parts of one's identity to expose, it's time that our personal publishing tools start to allow us to manage all of our information, using simple logic to determine which people are permitted to access which subsets of that data. Now that even Microsoft has embraced reasonable default settings in its software, it might even be possible that we won't see too many people accidentally making their darkest secrets world-readable through their weblog. We may still see the people who choose to do so on purpose.

Where does all this go, then? I'm hoping to eventually have a video camera with audio in roughly the form factor of today's Exilim. Another evolution will be the integration of personal publishing APIs into devices themselves. Instead of worrying about storage capacity on an audio or video recording device, manufacturers should be treating the memory cards in a camera or audio player as a local cache, emptying the cache to the central publishing repository for that user every time the device comes in range of a network connection, preferably a wireless one.

My PDA or tablet would let me take notes, and those notes would be upstreamed to my blog, marked as private by default, and then flushed from the immediate local storage as soon as it got full. A digital camera that performed those same functions would solve many of the issues with synchronizing and downloading individual pictures right now. There has been talk of individuals having data storage that lives "in the cloud" for years now, but the focus has historically been on security and implementation. The more important issue is that this storage cloud have an easy enough interface that publishing to it is almost invisible and nearly effortless. That simplicity of publishing is what blogs are all about, and the tools will allow new types of integration.

Today, we've already got bloggerazzi that appear at every gathering of web geeks. It seems that we've already accepted a future where we're all celebrities. If we're going to accept the negative implications of that reality, then we'd better get working on creating some positive implications to go along with it. The personal panopticon is one of the positives.