Piracy and Spotify Are The Beginning Of New Transition

Last week it emerged that people downloading music illegally spend £33 more than legal file sharers on buying music legitimately. So if you are a pirate, you are usually spending more money on music from legal sources than those people who don't download illegal torrents.

Intuitively that makes sense - when you have an opportunity to try out the product, it's more likely that you will buy it - and it must apply to music as well.

But let's dig it a bit more. 

In the beginning man created a vinyl. And it was good. The quality of soft vinyl brought analogue music to the commercial market. Then there was a tape. It changed the market and it was cheap. While you couldn't copy the vinyl, you were easily able to copy the tape, but at the cost of quality. Walkman made the physical music media mobile. It was a great era of physical media. And it was good.

Then, there was a CD and it was more expensive, but the quality was ultimately much higher than tape. And after some time, people started ripping CD's. Tape and vinyl slowly ceased into oblivion. That's how the digital era began. 

Then the iPod and iTunes made the entire music library mobile and accessible immediately. Many people abandoned physical for digital, because they could have everything here and now, synchronised with their portable players. 

But digital music was almost as expensive as the physical media, and people said that it was not good, so they kept ripping those CD's and downloading music illegally. Torrents became standard. The music market profits sinked down to ever-low levels. The music quality was compromised by portability, ripping algorithms and cheap, but instant hi-fi sets. In a hi-end market, the hard vinyl made an exclusive come back, bringing expensive but high-quality analogue medium back in market. But the mainstream was digital, low-end and pirate.

But another transition was on it's way. Spotify. The idea was simple - lets give people all the music available online for free, but once in a while they will listen to 30 second advert. And if they like it, let them pay £5 per month for the advert-free version, with an option to backup some songs on their hard drive to listen offline. And finally - for £10 per month, they will have all the above plus they will be able to get those track on their smartphone or portable player, and backup much more tracks offline.

And so it worked, and people liked it. 

And thats where we are and the new revolution is emerging in the digital world. Spotify is a first step towards new media model, where you rent or stream the content, but you do not own it. This instant, legal, cheap and ownership-free model is ultimately the way we will consume music, TV shows and movies. While Apple understood it, and pursues such idea with it's new release of Apple TV. BBC's iPlayer, Spotify or Netflix are already taking over the market. It will take some time before big broadcasters will realise that this is the future, but we are getting there. 

Ultimately, the TV model will change entirely to streaming. Retail stores will disappear, as user will be able to stream content for free and immediately buy it online with extras and higher quality, either in digital (Spotify, iTunes) or physical (Amazon) format if their prefer. With the increase in digital sale, more hardware will be offered for free as a part of subscription, like it is with mobile phone contracts, or BT, Sky and Virgin Media in UK. This is the beginning of new digital transition. 

We Are Mobile Phones, But Our Mobiles Phones Are S**t

There are currently 4.023 billion mobile phones connected globally with the world population of 6.75 billion people. That's 0.596 phones per capita (per person). It (roughly) means that more than a half of the world population owns a mobile phone. Let's dig it.

More people have access to mobile phones in India (543 million), than to adequate sanitation (366 million) (UN, 2010). 

China is a leading single country with the highest number of mobile phones connected - 547.3 million (with India being second). But lets put it in the context. Population of China is 1.31 billion people. So the estimate is 0.416 phones for a person.  

Europe has 712.8 million mobiles connected. With population of around 593 million, we have 1.2 phones for a person. Even if you look at fine details, countries like Germany, Italy, France, UK, Poland, Spain or Ukraine have roughly between 1.1 - 1.5 phones per capita. So proportionally, we are leading, side-by-side with Russia (which has also around 1.3 phones per capita).

It's a big number. It means statistically every person in Europe has a mobile phone. Obviously, that's not the case, but number is still extremely high.

Mobile phone is becoming a body organ. You can now browse the net, watch TV, listen to radio (ok thats old school), geotagg the reality around you, direct yourself around any place (with GPS coverage), play complex games, shot photos and videos, book a tickets or restaurant with just few clicks. We are constantly connected. You go to the pub and you see 8 people sitting silently around the table, clicking their phones. They eventually come back to conversation, but every social pause will be an excuse to send a text or check/update Facebook/Twitter.

But with all this attachment and expansion of mobiles there is still not that much innovation coming in a field, just redesign and recycling old solutions.

Sure, iPhone redefined touch interface and globalised common app use, and the trend is now evolving very quickly within mobile application development. But hardware development just froze in time, and mobile phones are becoming increasingly clunky. Phones from HTC, Apple, RIM, Nokia are loosing their key features - battery life, sustainability, simplicity of interface, cheapness, signal strength and toughness. And services are also going down with expensive contacts, confusing insurance policies, expensive roaming and data transfer rates. My iPhone can let me send the e-mail, but it will cost me £3/Mb from outside UK, and the battery dies on me after a day. Ten years ago I had Nokia 3310 which battery least for 5 days easily, with frequent use. 

My point is that someone has to redevelop current concept and services of mobile phone. Software is there, but hardware and mobile networks lacks perspective. It's all iPhone-touch-screen-HTC-another-version-clones now, with competition on 'who get's bigger OLED screen' and whether O2 or Orange screws more users on data plans with "free" phone.

So...

I want good battery life (5-7 days, or 2-3 weeks like ebook readers!). 

I want very simple interface (well, Apple kind of succeeded here). 

I want just a few apps I use on the daily bases. Honestly, how many apps that you download from App Store you actually use regularly? 5? 8? I recon that's my personal estimate. And I have about 100 of them kicking around in my iTunes library - most of them just useless crap (for some of which I paid, looser...). 

I want a quality calls (with faces, yes, they have it in Japan already, Apple) and good network coverage. I want cheap roaming rates and cheap data. Not for downloading YouTube movies, but to turn on simple GPS to find some cool bar when I'm chilling somewhere abroad. 

I want simple and clear contract, that I can easily personalise and adjust according to my calling/traveling/data needs with free access to wi-fi hotspots around Europe (especially airports).

Is it really THAT much? ;-)

[All data in this post has been calculated and sourced using Wolfram Alpha]

[Image: Geek On Acid ©]

Coming Back via Information Overload

We are currently spending around 23% of our online time on social network sites (Nielsen Internet, 2010). It's a 7% increase since last year this time. As such, social networking sites jump to the top of the list of online activities. Second most popular activity is playing online games (10%) and third - checking e-mail (8.3%). People spend more time on Facebook and Twitter and playing FarmVille, than browsing Google or searching videos online. It's a biggest shift of online trends in years. 

We have on average 22 apps on our phones, from which 33% know our location, and 14% access our contacts (App Genome Project, 2010).  

Browsing internet on iPad is better for your cognitive system (here defined as 'level of disorientation' and 'cognitive load') than browsing internet on your desktop computer. Demirbilek found that subject using the tiled-windows (tablet) interface were significantly less disoriented than subjects using an overlapping-windows interface. He also found that participants working with overlapping windows were substantially more likely to experience cognitive overload than those working with tiled windows (Demirbilek et al., 2010).

FDA has approved bionic telescopic eye implant (photo above). In clinical testing from VisionCare Ophthalmic  70% of over 200 patients "had their vision improve from severe or profound impairment to moderate impairment" (VisionCare, 2010).

Apple released their worst iPhone ever (see also Antenna-gate), and Amazon released their best Kindle so far. Both companies sold out within day or two.

Nintendo will release 3D version of their handheld console that won't require any special glasses, potentially starting a new revolution in 3D entertainment. Or bringing it down.

Violent dreams may indicate developing brain disease (Boeve et al., 2010).

Medical use of marihuana is having it's momentum, with research wide-spreading from multiple sklerosis and cancer to inflammation and anxiety (Seppa et al., 2010).

And the information chaos just keeps flowing through my mind... 

[photo credit: VisionCare]

Retro [geek] Corner - F**k iPad - here is $4110 Powerbook!

Today in Retro [geek] Corner, I will present you an ultimate machine that was kicking ass in 1992 - Apple Macintosh Powerbook 180 Laptop (!), which has been recently discovered by Marc in the dungeons and kindly made available to me (thanks Marc!).

When you watched the most recent Keynote from iPad launch, Steve Jobs presented a slide in one moment, showing the first laptop that was ever released (see Photo below). Then it all went down, but lets wait with the full judgment for iPad until I put my hand on this device.


So today we back in time to 1992, with one of the first series of laptops ever released - Powerbook 180. It was worth $4110 (£2635) at the time of release. $4110!!! It had Motorola MC processor running with stunning 33 Mhz, 4MB of RAM, 80 MB of hard drive, and 1.4 Floppy Drive. This 3.1 kilogram gray beauty (Photo) had amazing 10" grayscale LCD screen with maximum 4-bit resolution of 640x400. It had speaker, microphone (all mono), SCSI port, and some other esoteric ports (1 x ADI, 2 x mini DIN-8), and was running Mac OS 7.1, with games like puzzle and... other stuff like Word. It was 5.5 cm thick comparing to 2.5 cm of my 5 years old Macbook Pro (Photo). It was a $4110 gray beast with trackball (Photo) and up to 1 hour of battery life (yeah right;-) with the Apple Rainbow logo (Photo). A nice touch was adjustable stand on the back, allowing to adjust the position of Powerbook (Photo). It was indeed a beautiful machine...

Now, 18 years later, what's different? Well, for around $1000 (£700) (that is quarter of the 1992 Powerbook 180 price) you get white Macbook with 2.26 GHz, 2GB of RAM, 250GB of hard drive, and Superdrive. It weights 2.1 kilos and has 13" LED screen with 1280 x 800 resolution. It also has bluetooth, airport, Ethernet, multitouch track-pad, camera, and 7 hours of battery life.

So for the quarter of the Powerbook 180 price you get a machine that is basically around 300-400 times faster, has 3200 times more storage space, and is basically a portable multimedia studio. Which makes you reflect on how 18 years changed the scope of portable computers. And I am excited about what tomorrow will bring.

Finally, I was thinking - what I could use such machine for? Uh, it wasn't easy to come up with practical application (recycle?), but it could potentially be used as a book-stand or a bookshelf holder (Photo).

Any other suggestions?[photo by Geek On Acid]