Caples says I jinxed cloud music service, Lala...

Well, maybe I did…In my original post, from almost exactly one year ago, and which is basically a visceral reaction to a phone conversation I had w/Caples’ and his stubborn arrogance about the service’s superiority, I make the following points (I’m paraphrasing myself here):

• The idea of the .10c offer w/an upsell opportunity is flawed, a micro micro payment…lame.
• No iPhone app, and why would I pay to stream a collection I already own? Ah…Pandora anyone?
• As my pal Tim Wilson used to say when we were at Boris, this is about the integration story…which Lala didn’t really have.

So I’m sorry to have jixed the service Caples…But wait!

Lest we not forget that Apple acquired Lala…And at the time of the announced shut down, Wired speculated about the reasoning behind it…

While Apple’s hardware has embraced the cloud since .mac (now Mobile Me), its iTunes software lags far behind. Today’s news, while unfortunate for Lala users, represents good news for iTunes users, because it’s a sign that iTunes too could be headed for the cloud, obviating their need to manage music collections manually between multiple devices.

Yah, I guess…I can already manage music collections locally on my network via Home Sharing…And that feature doesn’t make music in the cloud a killer app.

Lala’s interface was pretty bitchin’…And it was clear they understood the consumption model…Particularly with regard to their relating owned songs to songs or artists of potential interest to their users…So perhaps the purchase was just Jobs following up to a fan-boys comment about owning all the engineering talent in the Valley…

In a follow up email, Caples threw out his reasoning for liking the service, again dissin’ the cloud as not that important:

For me, the cloud stuff on Lala wasn’t that important…I liked the cheaper download prices and the higher bitrates, the social media capability (sharing playable album or song widgets on facebook), and the possibility to buy CDs through them if you were so inclined.

Matt Rosoff over at Digital Noise posted his thoughts, making the point that the music industry hates “digital lockers” and that not letting users stream the stuff is bad mojo:

If you persistently refuse to let customers use your product in the way they want to use it, they’ll stop buying it. Ten years of stiff revenue declines in the recorded music business should have made that lesson clear.

Yah, again, I don’t think this is about streaming for Apple…Or for the consumer…How long as Rhapsody been pushing a subscription model from the cloud? Like 12 years? Ah…still not catching on…No, IMHO, this was about the acquisition of talent by Apple, and using that talent to improve their existing products…And perhaps their existing streaming content line…Certainly work to be done…

Anyway…Sorry Caples…While I only embedded one album into one post…I do kinda miss having the option. C’est la Apple.

This vid has been out there for a while, but it’s still fun…invoking the famous devil printer scene from Mike Judge’s “Office Space”…Certainly the skills of the graphic designer are not lost in the need to now design for the eBook market. Where the web development community has gone from hand-coding websites to Dreamweaver, Flash, Firework or a CMS system and CSS…so it is w/the traditional printed book. BTW, I just saw a listing at Sotheby’s for a 16th century print of some religious scribes kicking the shit out of Johannes Guttenberg…

Blu-ray is good looking (1080p), sounding (THX or Dobly 7.1 surround) and is sometimes chalk-full of extras, sometimes including Internet downloads et al. The format was supposed to be the next long-tail revenue opportunity for the optical consortium, with names like Philips, Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi making up the membership.

Personally I’m watching Netflix on my Wii…And I’m very happy with it…while the image quality isn’t Blu-Ray…it’s surprisingly good and I can watch a whole lot of content…anytime I like, and if I don’t want to sit on the couch…I or my wife can fire up the laptops anywhere. I’m currently racing to catch up on “Lost”…God help me.

Debroah McAdams, over at Television Broadcast is suggesting Google TV will drive Blu-Ray because the manufacturers they partner with will include it:

Neither current cable set-tops nor specialized peripherals like Roku support full access to the Web. An Android-enabled, Intel-powered, Blu-ray playing, HD-recording, CableCard-slotted, sleek-looking set-top box is another matter all together.

- I disagree…see this SAI Chart of the Day from March 4, 2010:

I don’t know anyone buying Blu-ray discs, I don’t see a huge selection at Wal-Mart – they’re still trying to sell the original stockpile of SD-DVDs, and it doesn’t look like that is going too well btw…

Again, I point to the success of digital…yes there will be hounds for strong picture quality…but most folks are still stunned when they see 720p, never mind 1080p…some degree of better than NTSC is enough for 95% of the visual consumer market…and that “enough” is already being delivered…Optical is fragile and is incremental cost…Digital is any time I damn well please…We’ll see about the Android set top box…I’m waiting to the Apple hobbyists to come out of the garage. – J.C.

W/the stock doing as well as it is, it just hit $240, up from $220 only 30 days ago…I wouldn’t want to burn any good will with the Apple community just to show off a dot release, unless it was pretty major…the running of multiple apps simultaneously would be the most sought after feature…

That said, maybe this is more of the dis-information strategy from the team out in Cupertino and knowing 4.0 will be a disappointment to end users and the street…Better to take the hit now while you’re running hot, giving APPL time to recoup from the potential damage…or turn shite into shineola…

I’m sure you’re all following this more closely than I, but depending on which cloak and dagger analyst you’re listening to, target is now $270-$300 for APPL – I’m calling this a HOLD medium term (hee hee, just fun to talk like an analyst) until they ship new a Verizon phone – at which point they very well may hit $300…seems fantastical as I recall the 1996 Wired Magazine cover w/the word “Pray” and a thorny crown around the rainbow Apple logo…moreover I wish I still had the email I sent to friends in 1998 telling them to buy APPL @ $9…*crying* if only I had taken my own advice! My $1,000 sell off from my vested shares of M100 would have been worth like $250K! *Sobbing*…

If for some reason, Verizon doesn’t happen…I would sell @ anything above or equaling $250 short term, …as all bets are off, but APPL will have passed it by then I’m reasonably certain…and if they do the dutch w/Verizon…and continue to drive the surface computing, web standards and mobile markets…who knows where APPL may land…and what is all this talk about APPL challenging GOOG/MSFT on search? I don’t see it…if GOOG were smart, they would stick to their core business…I don’t get a warm feeling when I think of Android OS devices…but truth be told I haven’t used one yet either…

Hum…maybe they’ll announce Verizon today? Would certainly keep the momentum going! Enjoy the show.

Haiti has one hell of a history of getting the short end of the stick from the international community…here’s a good and brief background from Christiane Amanpour:

I’m no foreign policy expert, but if I were Haitian, I’m sure I’d have trouble mustering faith in my country’s ability to pull itself up by its own boot straps. I’d also be busting my hump to provide for my wife and kids…One of the most tangible thoughts running through my head during my week in Port-au-Prince was how amazingly lucky I and my family are…and how distressing it is to realize that w/all we have and our country has that we still have to hear the partisan crap spew out of politician’s mouths day in and day out…blah…

Haiti occupies about 1/3 of the island of Hispaniola:

View Larger Map

Comparing the Haitian population’s per capita income (2008 estimates) to their neighbors, the Dominican Republic (DR), you see the DR doing something right, as a resident of the DR makes about $8,000 USD as the average Haitian who makes about $1300. My family and I spend roughly that amount each year on our Verizon bill…

One person I was speaking with, after I had spouted off about the dire state of the Haitian economy/recovery and how lucky I am/we are and such…(see above) said to me, “Ok, yah…but viscerally, what was the thing that struck you most…” and at the time, I think I pointed to a moment when we were driving through an intersection on the lower end of stretch of Delmas below the airport when the van slowed…and a crowd had formed around a semi w/trailer attached just to our left…turned out it was a food truck…and it was trying hard to pull away…and within about 30 seconds the entire crowd had swarmed the truck…literally climbing up on the back and sides while the driver was trying to move off…it turned out the truck had come to the wrong location to distribute its food.

I certainly remember thinking to myself…”Ok, you’re not in Cape Cod anymore Bouv…” and as the furious crowd pounded our van a bit and we continued on…you realize these people are frustrated by decades of inefficiency, by a huge lack of understanding with regard to their poverty level, by the insanity of western bureaucracy…and without much by way of recourse, on the ground it becomes Darwinian in the most basic sense in a Haitian hurry.

I was reading an article yesterday in this Magazine I’m enthralled with…called Monocle. An aside; I am a periodical/short print format whore…I love magazines/event catalogs/institutional publications…I love the photography, I love the design, I love the paper, I love the writing, I love the formats…IMHO, some of the best work done in print media happens in periodical/short form.

I’ve long since canceled all of my subscriptions, but used to voraciously read Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Details, W, MacWorld and anything else I could get my hands on…now a while back I’ve traded in some miles for subscriptions…which I won’t do again…but I was able to get the long sought after Economist, which was always simply too much cash to justify my infrequent reads…when I do get to read a whole issue, I feel like I’ve had a top flight global policy briefing coupled w/some interesting discussions with a recruiter for aid organizations.

Anyway, this article which is unfortunately available online to subscribers only, was talking about the best teams in the world for disaster recovery…and of course, they all are based in locations where extreme people blow themselves up or where wars are currently raging…the team cited as best in the world is Israeli, permanently based at that country’s main airport…they were on the ground in Haiti inside of 12 hours after the earthquake. Survival rates for those who survive the initial quake are best inside the first 24 hours…so they don’t wait for official sign off, they just find the best aircraft and go…they worry about where the team will sleep later…Made up of elite Israeli forces, there are interdisciplinary members who break out into functions…Medical, logistics, operations, supplies, and they set up in Port-au-Prince what the article referred to as the “Roles Royce of field hospitals.” Apparently they had ER, maternity, radiology, pediatric…they could handle 500 patients at any one time…

You read something like that, and working for a non-profit, you think…”yes, for sure…we could make some improvements…” but in the bigger picture section of the massive pin-up homasote wall that my brain has become, you find that dusty note where all the good human qualities are listed, and photographed and memorialized and say…”Why can’t we get there?”

I’ve had a lot of questions about “scary moments” on the ground in Haiti, and for sure, there were a couple…as I mentioned above…what may be scarier still is the idea that a cherubic caucasian guy like me gets a chance to work in a place like post-disaster Haiti, only to come home, fall back into business as usual consumption and partisan Sarah Palin bashing armchair fluffernutters…oops! I forgot, I have to go to Wal-Mart this afternoon…

1. The Week has a nice time line from 2002 – 2010 covering a good selection of hearsay and third-party conjecture

2. Down in Oz, Garry Barker has some astute thoughts…comes close to discussing analog of music to publishing

and finally:

3. MacWorld’s Jason Snell offering a solid parsing of potential Apple thinking re: digital content delivery on a tablet

Let me offer this to the collective speculation; I believe the splashy color on the Apple event invite is a sort of shot over the Amazon Kindle bow…meant to at the very least poke fun at the device’s limited display. That said, I fear the iTablet may simply be a content consumption device…with a price-point just below Kindle…and a fairly limited hardware/software feature set a la the iPod Touch…could be?

Nah…w/the amount of time and consideration that Apple has put into the device, the content it may serve and the existing market dynamics…I’m going to predict a much more powerful and empowering 10″ monolith. And I wouldn’t be surprised to hear “Thus Spoke Zoroaster” from Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” as SJ has the drape lifted off, both arms tracking horizontally…wait for it…I give you, The “Jesus Tablet”…What? Too much?

Frankly, I haven’t given a lot of thought to the actual hardware and software feature set…I’ve been thinking more about the content…and as I mentioned above, several folks have noted the analog between the music and publishing industries…how engines like Napster and the MP3 removed the optical key, namely the Compact Disc, from “The Man’s” distribution equation…and how the slow the music business has been to realize Pandora has left the box…

And around the same time, 1997 or so, I recall thinking to myself…”Wow, I can read the New York Times for free online? OH and better yet, I can filter the content I want from their stream and have it emailed to myself every day at no additional charge?” Well, why would I bust my chops scouring my collegiate burg to find a copy so I can buy and then read the damn thing? I never liked reading the physical paper anyway…always needing a windless room w/a 6′ round to lay the paper on, never properly folding the rag…and getting filthy with newsprint…I was much happier searching and forwarding articles and links…with an input device like a keyboard…yes, Bouv is a geek…you just noticed?

The now painfully obvious answer to the newspaper industry is that I wouldn’t hunt a copy of the newspaper down to pay for it…and never would again, in fact, I might not even read the free version of the paper handed to me by the concierge…and while yes…there is advertising revenue to be made in the free content model, The Times Companies couldn’t and I guess can’t figure out a way on its own to earn the $300,000,000 + to keep the global news room profitable…so onto the basic lines of the analog for Apple between music and newspapers…which Christopher Breen over at MacWorld has also briefly noted…

The Compact Disc is to the MP3 file as the newspaper is to the free online news website*…yah?

A valuable but ailing commodity (music) is broken into reasonably priced bits (songs or albums)…given a free and reasonably easy to use organizational desktop model and pricing structure (iTunes)…Despite a wide range of competing free piracy solutions available to this day, Apple makes the end user experience more consistent, guilt and persecution free, oh and dare I say fun to integrate with the Apple created ultimate music toy e.g. KEY…We give you the iPod! Cue the music…

Fast forward 8 years…So where does Apple fit in to the newspaper solution? In news, we have a similar revenue from content problem:

A valuable but ailing commodity (books, magazines, news items) can be broken into reasonably priced bits (stories, sections, e-books, e-magazines or a whole paper)…provided it’s given a free and reasonably easy to use organizational desktop model and pricing structure (iTunes – now w/Bookstore)…where Amazon’s Kindle, NYT Online, or any other priced/free solution fall short at providing the complete ecosystem…Apple comes to the rescue by making the end user experience more consistent, easy to organize, and fun to integrate with the Apple created ultimate reading toy e.g. KEY…We give you the iTablet…cue the music…purchased of course from the ITMS…

A stretch? Perhaps…maybe Apple will simply offer us an e-Ink “in color” tablet that only displays books/newspapers and then tries to charge us $999…Barely a mini-woot…More a “ho-hum”. Yah, ah…I don’t think so…SJ isn’t going to come out, waste his (now very valuable) time and throw a color Kindle at us…

The most interesting thing about the potential iTablet to me isn’t the tablet…it’s how content will be culled, created and distributed via the device…to make it a true tool…giving publishers a way to get that content into the stream as fast as any other will be key…

Will it have global wi-fi? Will there be a content development template or SDK for an App store-like bookstore model? What ramifications are there for the iPhone/iPod touch community? Does this device now make all 100,000,000 + owners sigh a collective…”Shit…” when this thing is announced?

I doubt it…more likely, many of the reading tools will hopefully be available for those devices as well…Certainly a nice pitch to content owners/producers eh? “We have a rapidly growing install base of folks with these tools and 100,000,000 live credit card accounts…I think we can help move some of your product…” not to mention potential ad revenues from the Quattro Wireless deal…again, a point made my the good chaps at MacWorld…it’s an interesting time to be a consumer for sure…anyway…looking forward to seeing SJ out there…If the start of 2010 is any indication, my gut tells me he still has at least one more trick up his mock-nerk sleeve… – Bouv.

*Don’t forget the fact that the NYT and the lot, save Murdoch’s WSJ and a few others have been giving the content away for 12+ years…and previous attempts to put Pandora back in her box have failed…anyone remember NY Times Select?

Congratulations, that’s 1000 stolen strategic plans! Their customers may become confused when they accidentally wander into an Apple store looking for support for Microsoft products…oh well…Apple will probably still help them out…

Wait for it.

Hey, there’s a good idea!

Seriously, how long does Palm have? I suppose an indefinite period of time, I wouldn’t buy them…but I suspect, by the time Palm actually delivers a revised Pre that can’t also slice cheese:

…and a functional app store experience…Apple will have released the next beast to sell 30m units in 24 months out from under them, or rather with a foot on their necks…oh well…I don’t miss my Palm devices….despite having used one for nearly 5 years…strange how easy it is to betray technological loyalty. – J.C.

Efficient parsing of the top tips for typing more effectively on the Apple iPhone virtual keyboard…thanks Howcast. Nice NYT article on these guys today…

So I’m using this new service, that MC Caples turned me onto called LaLa…which to my mind, upon initial inspection…is deeply flawed…meaning…while elegant, I don’t see the business model as usurping the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) anytime soon. Here’s why.

I can stream any of their 7 million songs once. Then I can choose to pay .10¢to “add” this song to my permanent online collection…but I can’t download it…so it’s a “cloud” collection of songs…” and then there’s the MP3 download option…compatible w/the iPod or Zunes of the world…for more or less the same pricing as the ITMS. So apart from my ability to listen wherever I am should I have forgotten my iPhone or MacBook Pro (not likely)…I’m still going to need to download the tracks and manually add them to my ITMS library. Strike one.

No iPhone app as best as I can tell…now if they had one…I’d be a lot more inclined to use this regularly…but still, am I going to eat up battery life to stream a collection I would prefer to own? Maybe to check out new music…oh but wait…I’m already using Pandora…which to date, is a far superior intelligent agent when it comes to suggesting music. And yes, you guessed it…they have an iPhone app for streaming. Strike two.

Ok, the silver bullet I’m sure for some people (Hellweg I’m talking to you…) is the price. Here’s the thing here…If I’m willing to pay .10¢ to “add” this song to my permanent online collection, I’m probably willing to ante up the remaining .69¢…and I’m sure that’s the idea…however by confusing the pricing structure w/this option…they loose momentum…I know Arrington and co over at TechCrunch are excited by the technology…and again as elegant at as the LaLa player is…beating the iTunes store purchase integration, preview functionality, music management, encoding and playback will be LaLa’s biggest difficulty…and one I think many others have tried w/similar models only to find themselves wandering in the digital music forest. Strike three.

Anyway, the coolest thing about the tool, and don’t get me wrong…it is cool…may be the ability to embed a preview of an album into your blog or Facebook profile. Will certainly help drive interest in new music…and I’m sure membership for LaLa, whether it results in increased revenue for LaLa remains to be seen…hopefull it will benefit artists…

UPDATE: Ok, I stand corrected…LaLa does have an iPhone App…but it’s not out yet…once it ships…I’ll try it and get back to you.