iPod Integration with Mobile Phones, Radio

Wade Roush of Technology Review makes some arguments that tend to work against some of the things I argued earlier regarding Apple and mobile service providers working together.

Specifically, he argues that the group of users that will prefer non-integration is greater than the group that prefers digital music player + mobile phone integration. He cites the difficulty of integrating the two into something workable.

As an aside, I've got this idea in my head of an iPod phone. The click wheel would be the numbers from 1 to 9. Top left click is 1, top click is 2, top right click is 3, etc. Obviously you'd need some more buttons to cover #, 0, and *, and something to toggle between number pad and navigational pad. An alternative to that would be to make it a flip phone; the outside would be the music player interface and the inside would be the cellphone interface. These are rough ideas, but I'm sure someone out there can come up with something that will work well.

In any case, I can't help but disagree with Roush's assertions. I think an integrated solution will be immensely more popular than a non-integrated solution for the mere fact that it simplifies the users' life. It makes me think of the integrated stereos that came out in the 1980s and 1990s, ultimately incorporating radio, records, tapes, and CDs. Would users have preferred to have those all as separate devices? I don't think so. And I expect the same for small carryable devices. As a matter of fact, Roush falls with me on that preference, despite citing the facts against him.

In another iPod integration note, Sirius appears to be in talks with Apple to bring their satellite radio service to the iPod. Personally I think iPod needs to incorporate AM and FM radio as well as both satellite providers like Sirius and XM Radio. Why should Apple be partial when it can milk both of them while consumers get the benefit of competition? I suppose there may be some hardware issues in terms of stuffing them both in there, but it can't be something impossible to overcome.

Apple and Mobile Service Providers Should Cooperate

Once again it looks like companies in their rush for profits will be forgetting the most important group: the consumer. Apple and Motorola's move to bring iTunes to mobile phones is facing the entrenchment of mobile service providers (MSPs). Faced with a lack of interoperability and variant pricing schemes, consumers are ripe to be screwed in this equation.

As far as consumers are concerned, there are a few things that would make for the ideal music set-up between their computers, their mobiles, and any other devices like the iPod. First, there should be interoperability. Music bought on the computer should be playable on a mobile phone, and vice versa, via an utterly effortless synchronization between the various devices. Second, pricing should be universal. If it's 99 cents in one place, it should be 99 cents in another.

MSPs, however, think they will be able to reap the greatest profits by screwing consumers and charging premium prices of up to $3 per song for songs which will only be playable on their own mobile phones. Assuming market share can be increased by meeting these consumer demands, this creates a prisoners' dilemma for the MSPs in which the interests of consumers and MSPs are the exact inverse of each other, as illustrated in the table below.

		MSPs Group A
		Team up with computer-based DMS	Create own mobile-based DMS
MSPs Group B	Team up with computer-based DMS	I Less profit for both A and B	II Least profit for A Most profit for B
	Create own mobile-based DMS	III Most profit for A Least profit for B	IV More profit for both A and B

MSPs are best served if they all use their own DMSs. They will all be able to charge monopolistic premiums to music because there is a demand for music on mobile phones and they would be the only provider for the music on their own phones. (I think their justification of the premium per song in the $2 or $3 pricing schemes as a convenience premium is a load of crap. It's clearly just a company abusing their position as the monopolistic supplier to a market.)

MSPs will be least served if they all team up with existing DMSs as this will mean that at least some of their potential profits will have to be pushed over to these existing DMSs.

However, when starting out in quadrant IV, as seems to be what is about to happen, there is a strong attraction to defect, or begin working with an existing DMS, realistically speaking this means the iTunes Music Store and iTunes. The company that defects will have the advantage of satisfying consumers demands and will thereby draw a greater portion of the market and suck consumers away from quadrant IV. Thus, in quadrant II, group B (the defectors in this case) get the most benefit, while in quadrant III, group A gets the defectors' benefit.

Should this happen, companies at the losing end of the defection will gradually defect themselves, until they've all defected and find themselves in the quadrant I situation.

This looks to be exactly what is beginning to happen.

With Verizon, Sprint and Cingular protesting Apple's distribution model, the remaining US-based major wireless carriers include Nextel and T-Mobile. Of the two, insiders believe the latter is the most likely candidate to adopt the phone and drive its customers to iTunes rather than build its own music store.

Should T-Mobile defect as expected, expect further defections over time.

Apple should do all it can to encourage such defections. One logical way to do this is to offer a generous cut of profits from all downloads that occur over the MPSs' networks. Various other contractual terms could be worked out on a business-to-business basis. The iTunes Music Store's current pricing model could easily remain the same and be spread to the mobile-based downloads. This would hardly seem likely to hurt MSPs, as MSPs "could end up lowering their prices to $1 a song and still make more profit than Apple does."

Apple should definitely stick with it's traditional lack of complication for consumers. From the consumers point of view, they would be indifferent as to where they buy the songs. The prices will be the same regardless of where purchased and songs would be synced.

Safari 1.3 How To: Have Editable Text Directly in the Safari Window

One of the neat things about the newest release of Safari is the ability to edit text right in Safari's browser window in a Rich Text WYSIWYG editor. Without the ability to save this, I'm not sure what good it is, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.

You can use all the basic Edit menu functions such as undo, copy, cut, paste, etc. You can also use rich text keyboard commands such as command-b for bold or command-i for italic. You can even drag images right into the window.

I took a look at All Forces to figure out how to do it. First, you need to be using Safari 1.3 and include the following in your webpage source:

<div contentEditable="true"> . . . </div>

The . . . can be whatever HTML you feel like sticking in there (I assume... in any case, text and images work). This entry was made with that so with Safari 1.3 you are able to edit the contents of this website, although you've got no way to save it.

What I think could be useful is if Safari is set so that the user could edit whatever he wanted in the window, not needing to rely on the webmaster enabling the contentEditable parameter. Then you could print it out as a PDF or whatever.

How To: Synchronize OS X's Address Book and a Motorola v710 Using Bluetooth via onSync ($10)

Apple's iSync devices page contains a foreboding footnote next to Motorola that says "Bluetooth and/or USB syncing except for Motorola v710" and then next to the v710 another footnote that says "USB syncing only." As that seems to be the only phone, or at the very least one of the only phones, that both work on Verizon and sync with your Mac, it's quite a bummer that Bluetooth can't be used.

However, with Antonio Ferraioli's onSync ($10), you can partially overcome this lack of Bluetooth support. onSync will let you sync your OS X Address Book with the v710's address book. While onSync is a little quirky and crashes from time to time, it gets the job done.

However, this still leaves you wanting more. You can't sync Address Book pictures, iCal calendars, or iCal to do items, as other phones are able to do. So I propose the following suggestion...

Fix the syncing deficiencies of iSync
In addition to syncing Address Book pictures, iCal calendars, and iCal to do items, I would like to also see iPhoto integration (being able to choose the phone's background image directly from iPhoto) and iTunes integration (using to pick a ring tone).

I suppose this is a bit much to ask of a program that does one thing (sync contacts) and does it well across a range of cellular phones, but if any program is going to do it besides iSync, this is the one.

How To: Use A Motorola v710 Cellular Phone + Verizon to Connect to the Internet

I just got a Motorola v710 cellphone. I've been digging around the internet to see if anyone had hacked up a way to let it sync via Bluetooth using iSync. Apparently, the only official way to do it is with a USB cord.

In any case, this entry is not about that but about the diversion I came across in midstream (I still haven't reached the other bank yet, and will let you know if I do). If you're on Verizon and you have a Motorola v710 mobile phone, you can use it as a modem to connect to the internet. Rather than providing you all the details of just how to do it, I'll refer you to Steven Fetting's explanation, which is complete with images of all the steps and very easy to follow.

Some other pages I came across while search this possibility included those from Craig thoughts and Bactroid.net. I didn't try either of these but they seem to do the same thing.

How To: Fix a Glitch in Which Mail Won't Open

Today I did the upgrades for iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto and iSight. Later I shut down my computer and when I turned it back on, Mail wouldn't open. When I clicked on the Mail icon in the Dock, it would bounce for a while but then just stop bouncing and nothing more would happen.

I tried to open in it in the subfolder in the Applications folder in which I had put it. It didn't work.

So then I repaired permissions using Disk Utility and moved Mail to the Applications folder. I tried to open it in the Dock and it didn't work. But then I tried to open it in the folder and it did work.

Congress Should Not Mandate a Single DRM, But Rather Compel Access to All Major DRMs

As much as it grates on consumers, it's not likely that the leaders of the music industry are going to supply their product without some sort of protection given the ease of reproducing the product. Even if most of us are not going to download illegally (a big assumption), there will be enough people who will take partake of illegal downloading and thus the copyright owners will demand protection. While this protection will ease the worries of the producers, consumers get stuck with irritating restrictions. In the nascent digital download industry, one of the most irritating problems to emerge is the lack of interoperability between various hardware and software products because of competing digital rights management (DRM) formats.

Congress has taken the preliminary steps in an attempt to resolve this problem. The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held an oversight hearing this week on "Digital Music Interoperability and Availability" focusing on the question of whether to mandate a specific DRM format for for all digital music players.

Congress' power to do this stems from Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the Constitution granting power to regulate interstate commerce and possibly also Clause 5 of the same part granting Congress the power to establish standard measures. So contrary to many of our initial responses that this is something Congress shouldn't be doing, they nonetheless have the power to do so.

Being able to do so, however, is not the same as should. Congress' mandating of a single DRM as the industry standard would have a serious chilling effect on development, just as opponents say. Let's say you're a company who's got a great idea for a new DRM system, one that would offer significantly improved protections for artists but greater flexibility for users. If Congress has already mandated one to rule the market, you're unlikely to develop this idea because to get it used it would have to become the Congressionally approved standard. Or let's say you've come up with a great new music file format that stores more and better data at a lower memory footprint but it wouldn't work with the existing Congressionally-mandated DRM. You'd be unable to provide this innovation to consumers because the Congressionally-mandated DRM would work with it.

Nevertheless, I think Congress has a worthy goal in mind when seeking to make things as easy for consumers, something the industry has thus far failed to do. To this end, I would make an alternative proposal. Instead of mandating a single DRM scheme, Congress should mandate instead that support of popular DRM schemes in software and hardware. They could set some kind of threshold, such as if a given format has 5% or more of all music downloads over a three-month period, then all software and hardware produced thereafter must support that format. In theory, this example would mean that there could be as many as 20 formats to be supported but in practicality right now it would mean that Apple products would need to support WMA and WMA products would need to support Apple's protected AAC. A natural corollary is that DRM format producers would need to cooperatively share their formats with others.

Doing it this way, any format that begins to take on power would need to be supported by all the other players. So obviously this would mean iTMS formats would be supported on non-iPod players and non-iTunes software. Conversely, iTunes and the iPod would need to be compatible with the DRM protection from the MSN Music, Napster, Real Music Store, Sony Connect, and other competitors. This would give consumers the ultimate in power in choosing format, software in hardware rather than being locked in just because of their preference in one of those areas.