15 giugno 2006

Music Gremlin: l'iPod con il Wi-Fi.

Phil Leigh di Inside Digital Media segnala Music Gremlin: questo simpatico gadget è un lettore MP3 da 8GB che potrebbe insidiare il regno di iPod.
Perché?
Perché è connesso. Connesso in Wi-Fi. E permette di acquistare musica da qualunque hotspot Wi-Fi (previa sottoscrizione di servizio per relativo billing) oppure inviare musica punto-punto ad altri Gremlin. Oppure può essere gestito con cavetto USB da Windows Media Player 10 (suppongo con DRM Microsoft).
Il gingillo costa per 299,99$.
Sul sito Music Gremlin (e presumibilmente dal menu del lettore MP3 appena trova una rete) si può scegliere e acquistare musica, con prezzi allineati ad iTunes. Due piani previsit: a la carte e all you can eat.
Riuscirà a spodestare il re iPod? E' difficile dirlo. Però un guru come Tomi Ahonen è solito ripetere che in un mondo connesso un device non connesso non ha futuro. E l'iPod - senza cavetto - è isolato come i protagonosti di Lost. Music Gremlin insiste proprio su questo: join a community.
Qualche dettaglio. MusicGremlin è un'azienda ovviamente americana, con base a New York e piuttosto giovane (fondata nel 2003 da una vecchia conoscenza, Jonathan Axelrod, già fondatore e presidente di Music123, l'e-shop di strumenti musicali, e da Robert Kedhouri). Il servizio direct to device music con relativo dispositivo è stato annunciato alla stampa a dicembre 2005. Qui l'intervista al co-founder Robert Kedhouri.

6 commenti:

Anonimo ha detto...

hai un fratello che porta i capelli lunghi lunghi?

Giuseppe ha detto...

non che io sappia. e mi parrebbe strano: io ne ho perduti molti :-)

Anonimo ha detto...

sarebbe una bella ingiustizia :)
allora vuol dire che da quanto ho appurato nelle tue foto apparse su questo blog, a ge c'è un tuo sosia versione capellone

Anonimo ha detto...

Grazie per le parole gentili. Non parlo italiano, io dovrò scrivere in inglese. Spero che la maggior parte dei vostri lettori capiscano l'inglese.

The iPod is a wonderful device, and I greatly admire Apple for releasing the iPod and for launching the iTunes music service. I write about the iPod in very positive way in my fourth book, Communities Dominate Brands.

But yes, the power of connectivity is missing from the iPod. It is an excellent stand-alone device. But for all it wants to do, the mobile phone, with only an acceptable music player - will dominate totally the music player market, and very soon also the full track music downloads market.

In very short way - there already are 5 times as many musicphones (in three years) as there are total iPods sold in 5 years. Last year Nokia alone sold more musicphones than Apple had sold iPods since they were launched.

Secondly phones are replaced on average every 18 months. If you don't like the current musicphones by Motorola, SonyEricsson, Nokia, Samsung, etc., ever better phones are coming.

Thirdly in many markets (but not Italy or Finland, ha-ha) mobile phones are "subsidised" like here in England. We get phones for free (with a one-year contract). So if the choice is full price of about 200 Euros for an iPod, or a musicphone from Nokia or Samsung or Motorola for free, this becomes an "unfair" game in favour of the phone.

There is much more around this topic at my blogsite at www.communities-dominate.blogs.com

Grazie Mille for mentioning me, and my best regards to this blogsite and its readers.

Ciao

Tomi Ahonen :-)
4-time bestselling author and consultant
www.tomiahonen.com

Giuseppe ha detto...

Hi Tomi
your comment is a great pleasure for me and my blog, and I regret my english is not as good as your italian!
I appreciate and share your punctual analysis about ipod. It's a great time for CE industry: if Apple has set the standard for portable music with its ipod, mobile handset manufacturers are becoming more and more aggressive in order to get the ipod market. Today's mobile phones feature good audio quality and a lot of memory for music, videos and pictures. Addiotionally, they're all-in-one personal device. Radio interface enables music services everywhere, too.
I think that many people are waiting for Apple's next step: what are they gonna do to mantain their success? Are they going to add communication features? Or will ipod remain an unplugged device?
Thanks for coming here, and hope see you soon.
All the best,
p.

Anonimo ha detto...

Ciao Pippo!

Thank you. I was on vacation during August so only now am back.

Yes, I totally agree with you, and me too personally, cannot wait to see what Apple does both in the iPod saga and their next true innovation into another brand new market space.

Apple is one of my absolute fave companies and I think they have done wonders with re-inventing the portable music player industry (most analysts said it was dead when Sony couldn't revive dead walkmans into portable minidisk player sales) and the music retail industry (at the time when Napster was killing the industry remember)

Yes, cannot wait to see what comes next. But I was seriously hoping for Apple to notice the phone threat and react to it.

Tomi :-)