Wednesday, November 22, 2006

iPhone

Cnet is reporting that Taiwanese ODM, HonHai, has received an order for 12 million iPhones from Apple. They further speculate that the phone will be an unlocked GSM phone that would work out-of-the-box with a T-Mobile or Cingular GSM card. Only downside to that approach.... no contract means no hardware subsidy. So be prepared to pay full price for the iPhone (expected in Q107).

Real should buy MusicGremlin


Someone asked me the other day what I thought of MusicGremlin. Fact is, I think they've got a pretty killer little wifi media player grafted on to a fairly standard MusicNet-powered service. The devices does everything that Zune wants to do - but doesn't yet. A little company like MusicGremlin is never going to be able to compete on the same marketing scale as Apple, Microsoft or even Napster. Which is sad because I hate to see good products and services wither on the vine.



So, Real should take the cash from $700million dollar settlement from Microsoft and acquire the little company with the Zune-killer. Wouldn't that be sweet revenge for Real? Use Microsoft's money and MSN's ad placements (part of the settlement) to buy the device that does well the one thing Zune gets most hammered for.... direct-to-device dowloads and device-to-device sharing. They could also totally abandon Windows Media DRM (Plays For Sure) in favor of their own (like they have done with SanDisk).



Real could then subsidize the hardware when users commits to a year or more of Rhapsody-to-Go. I'm sure I'm not saying anything that others haven't said (or may be considering for all I know). But as a consumer, I'd buy it.





Tuesday, November 21, 2006

A VC: Yottamusic - Rhapsody The Way I've Always Wanted It

A VC: Yottamusic - Rhapsody The Way I've Always Wanted It: "A service called Yottamusic launched. Yottamusic is basically a new front end on top of Rhapsody which has opened its web service."

I'm guessing that this can't be monetized beyond the affiliate dollars? Once/if advertising starts getting added, then the wrath of the labels will be felt as they demand their pound of flesh. I would actually think this would make Rhapsody nervous and potentially curb their openness in the future.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Project Playlist

This comes from a Webjay competitor called Project Playlist. Looks to essentially search for hosted MP3s, then lets the user create a playlist out of them, and then embed the player into your site of choice.

Here's a random one:

The site is an absolute mess - there are ads everywhere and you search is less than useful. But...


UPDATE: I got rid of it, it didn't seem to have a way to turn Autoplay off and it was really starting to get annoying.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

MyStrands : M-Chart Generator

Everyone is doing scrobbling and embeddable widgets now, and MyStrands is no exception.








M-Chart by MyStrands