4 Sale: One Beleaguered State

A friend recently sent me this in an e-mail, apparently from a classified ad in a Florida newspaper:

4 Sale: One Beleaguered State

Lots of waterlogged property, beautiful views of crashing tidal waves. Land already cleared of pesky trees (some cleanup required). Lack of electricity and gasoline makes for fun historic living environment. Increasingly popular “see the stars, feel the rain” roof modifications on housing. Plenty of insurance agents available for consultation, however may experience difficulty getting one to return your call.

Sony’s smart about-face

It seems that Sony is waking up and starting to heed my advice.

Sony confirmed on Wednesday that it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players–a major strategy reversal that could help it compete more effectively with rivals such as Apple Computer.

The company is also considering expanding MP3 support to hard disk devices, sources told ZDNet France, but no decision has yet been made on that front.

It looks like they’re still waffling on MP3 compatibility for their hard disk players, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before they ‘fix’ those devices as well.

Obviously the iPod is dead

This entry is a spinoff of another post I never got around to finishing. That post was about Apple’s current stranglehold on the mobile music market and what they’re going to have to do if they want to continue to dominate. Essentially, my argument was that Apple needed to start offering devices that could do more than just play music. If Steve Jobs thinks he can fight off the rest of the world with just music, he’s sadly mistaken — devices want to converge.

This segues nicely into what I’d like to talk about: the iPod as a mobile phone. At first glance, this might seem a little strange, but turn the logic around (i.e., the mobile phone as a music player) and it might not seem as far off. In fact, it isn’t “off” at all — a lot of the new mobile phones are capable of playing various audio formats, including MP3 (like my new Nokia 7610, and my SE K700i before that, and…). Why wouldn’t one want to consolidate the two devices? I’m obviously the wrong person to pose this question to because I’m that guy who absolutely can’t wait for my mobile phone (or whatever this all-in-one device will finally be called) to “contain” and “control” my life. That said, I can’t imagine a typical end-user who wouldn’t want to, at the very least, merge their portable music player with their mobile phone.

There are a few kinks in this chain to be sure, but nothing that can’t and won’t be resolved. The biggest hangup with moving music to a mobile phone is storage space. Currently the best mobile smartphones ship with 64MB or less of internal memory, though many of them also offer memory expansion in the form of various flash media. While the cost of solid-state media continues to fall, the reality is that it will take nothing less than hard drives to achieve the type of storage required for our music collections (solid-state drives will eventually rule this space, but we’re talking years). It should come as no surprise that this hurdle has already been cleared and mobile phones with HDDs are already upon us. Though there are serious issues related to hard drives in mobile phones, namely shock-resistance and the tradeoff between spinning platters and battery life, these issues are being taken care of and will soon be non-existent (hell, you need look no further than the iPod itself or Sony’s Network Walkman Digital Music Player to get a sense of how long a battery can be made to last and how durable such a device can be). Furthermore, these devices will be rather expensive (the Samsung linked to above will be $800) and I think it goes without saying that they will be treated with care (like most iPods now).

So, here’s the deal Apple, if you’d like to keep your competition down and sales of the iPod up, add a GSM or CDMA antenna to the music player and let it ride. I would be the first in line for such a device (shocking, I know) and I imagine that there would be a lot of people behind me.

As soon as smartphones start adding 1″ and .85″ drive bays, it’s not going to take long for end-users to realize that their two or three devices can be made into one, and there is no turning back when that happens. As good as the iPod interface is, and as pretty as the design can get, it’s not going to be able to compete with mass storage on a mobile phone.

Surely Apple is aware of the power they could wield if they came out with a mobile phone capable of playing music and has probably been contemplating such a device for a while now. There is some evidence available that leads one to believe that Apple is cognizant of what the future is going to require, most notably the recent deal struck between Apple and Motorola that will allow users to play iTunes AAC (FairPlay DRM) files on some Motorola phones. While this approach seems to belie the iTunes Music Store’s end-goal of selling more iPods, it could be working to do just that in the long run if the iPod is no longer just a music player. It’s well known that iTMS barely turns a profit and that the money, in this case, is in the device (and not the content… yet). Given this information, it’s quite possible that Apple is simply going to ‘tease’ the public for a while by allowing its files to be played on certain mobile phones. Then, and after the public is convinced that they need their iTMS music on their mobile phone, Apple will announce the ‘iPhone.’

I realize that this might sound odd, but quite frankly, there is no other option for Apple. You can’t convince me that consumers are going to buy a mobile phone based on whether it can play iTMS files as the Apple-Motorola agreement might have you believe. Nor can you convince me that Apple would be content with simply licensing its DRM technology to every mobile phone manufacturer and banking on iTMS sales. Apple needs to continue selling iPods to stay competitive in the digital music space and to continue selling iPods it is going to have to morph it into a more robust device.

If history is any indication, Microsoft’s format will ultimately be king and Apple will be left to fight for a share of the 10% of people that stay away from Microsoft as a rule. With that knowledge as a backdrop and the realization that Windows Mobile (Microsoft’s smartphone/PDA OS) is on a rapidly increasing number of smartphones, that Microsoft’s music format is competing directly with Apple’s, and that HDDs will soon be in mobile phones, one arrives at the logical conclusion that the iPod, as we have come to know it, is dead.

I’m not saying that Apple needs to create a full-fledged mobile platform to compete with Windows Mobile (oh, just imagine an OS X-based mobile phone though), but I am saying that they need a device capable of more than just playing music. It’s going to be hard to persuade Joe Public that he needs an iPod after Sprint offers him a Windows Mobile device with a 5GB hard drive and tells him that it can play WMA and MP3 files (in addition to being a, for lack of a better term, “pocket pc”).

While most everything I’ve brought up can be done today, Joe Public either doesn’t know about it or can’t afford it, and so Apple has a window, albeit a small one, to produce something before the cat’s out of the bag and service providers start offering these über-devices for $50 with a two-year service contract.

The quick and dirty solution for Apple would be to use the Palm or Symbian operating system to power a phone-capable device and bundle it with an iPod application that would emulate the Pixo interface (to satisfy those who’ve come to know and love the iPod user experience). While it’s anyone’s guess as to what Apple will ultimately come up with, I do hope they come up with something — the opportunity is huge — forget music and think ‘life.’

The incredibly satisfying part about all of this is that it doesn’t really affect me, at least not negatively. As soon as mobile phones with HDDs become affordable, I’ll have one. I couldn’t care less what proprietary audio formats it can decode because I don’t use, nor will I ever if I can help it, any of them. All I’ll require is that it be able to play the open, ubiquitous MP3 format — a very safe bet. Notwithstanding the fact that I’m unaffected either way, I, more than just about anyone, welcome and encourage an Apple mobile phone — let’s hope they realize what’s at stake here and produce accordingly.

Breaking Vegas

This weekend I watched a special on The History Channel called Breaking Vegas. The show walked through, in great detail, the MIT Blackjack Team’s very lucrative run at Las Vegas casinos in the early nineties.

BREAKING VEGAS goes inside the riveting story and shows us how the MIT group was founded and stayed in action for decades, eventually evolving into a full-fledged business–one with only one product, money, which it made by legally beating the casinos at their own game. Interviews with casino heads and former members of the team shed light on the opposite sides of this strange cat-and-mouse game, and we’ll see how their remarkable run finally came to an end.

Some of you might remember Wired’s Hacking Las Vegas, which recounts the same story, and save Bill Joy’s Why the future doesn’t need us, is probably my favorite Wired article ever. I encourage you to both read the article and watch the show — it’s a great (and inspiring) story.

I’m e-mailing like it’s 1993

I’ve eliminated nearly all of my spam, which was approaching 3000 a day. I now route my e-mail through both a pre-server-side filter, Postini, and a client-side filter, Mail.app’s built-in system (which is exceptional, and something I’ve touched on before). Since I’ve implemented the Postini filters only about two spams per day actually make it to my client, and out of those I’ve yet to have a single junk e-mail slip through Mail.app’s filter — I’ve effectively seen zero spam for the last two months. I actually thought about adding one more hurdle, maybe SpamAssassin or something similar, but given the complete success of my current method, anything more would probably be superfluous.

The main impetus behind my wanting server-side filtering was that e-mail on my phone(s) had become next to impossible — I needed to catch the spam before it got to my POP server. This is where the deal my hosting provider has with Postini comes in; all of my e-mail is now routed through Postini’s filters and then to my POP server after the spam has been stripped away. Postini sees 1.3 billion messages a week pass through its servers and claims that it typically blocks 98% of the spam before it reaches end-users (I’d say that’s a fairly decent data set to build effective rules upon).

Another nice thing about using Postini is that I’ve been able to go back to using Mail.appetizer, something that had become completely useless due to the large volume of spam I was receiving (though this was no longer an issue after the program was finally updated).

While Postini obviously works very well (2 << 3000), I do have some complaints (surprising, I know). The first is simply the lack of end-user customizability with respect to the filters. You’re essentially given a sliding scale of what you’ll allow to pass through — this scale has just five positions ranging from “lenient” to “aggressive.” It’s probably just as well that I don’t have a million options to play around with as I would spend hours doing just that, but I would like the ability there regardless.

The second thing that really bugs me is the fact that you can’t add a group of e-mail addresses to the whitelist (addresses that it will always let through and never hold as false-positives). When you see false-positives and tell it to deliver the message, you’re offered the option to add the address to your “approved senders” list, but there is no way to do this in the aggregate — I should be able to upload a file containing all of my contacts and have it add those addresses to the whitelist.

Battle in Beslan

The siege of a school here in southern Russia ended today in panic, violence and death 52 hours after it began. At least [340] people — most of them students, teachers and parents — died, according to official reports and witnesses, after two large explosions sparked pitched battles between the heavily armed hostage-takers and Russian forces.

Does anyone know why we haven’t heard more about this massacre on mainstream TV news? I’ve been following it some online for the past few days but don’t recall ever hearing about it on TV. Now that the seige is over, I see that it is getting quite a bit of coverage, but I didn’t notice any while the standoff was taking place (granted, I’ve been incredibly busy this week and haven’t watched much TV, but still, it seems odd).

“Taking advantage of the panic, hostages began to escape,” Lev Dzugayev, a spokesman for North Ossetia’s president, said in an interview, referring to the initial blasts. “The bandits began shooting them in the back. The special forces on our side had to cover the fleeing hostages. This is unfortunately how it happened.”

Scores of hostages survived, staggering from the school even as intense gunfire sputtered and grenades exploded around them. Many were barely dressed, their faces strained with fear and exhaustion, their bodies bloodied by shrapnel and gunshots. Many others never got out. Their bodies lay in the charred wreckage of Middle School No. 1’s gymnasium, the roof of which had collapsed and burned, a police officer said.

Men and women filed through lifting the sheets that covered the dead, which included children and Russian soldiers or security officers. Recognition brought wrenching, piercing wails. A mother in a red-and-white blouse knelt on the ground, weeping as she kissed her dead daughter’s face.

What a horrible, horrible scene. At least 155 children dead. I don’t know what took over, but when I saw the picture on the front page of this article, where the mother is looking down at her dead child, I just wept.

It reminded me of when I was watching the Colombine incident take place. I was sitting in my room in my first college apartment with my back to the TV. I was working on my computer when I heard the channel switch to someone commentating on the events unfolding at the school. I sat there watching and wondering what the hell these kids could be thinking and how their problems could manifest themselves in such an ugly, final way. This marked the first time that I had actually cried while watching some real event on TV. It just struck me like a brick, the sadness and curiosity of it all. In my personal relationships I empathize with others as naturally as I breathe, but never before had some remote, intangible event caught my attention or my heart in such a way. I don’t know, this incident in Russia worked pretty well to evoke the same reaction from me.