This post is not about the iPhone…

…DAMN!

Will Sony be bringing their A-game to a crowded field?

Interesting bits from Sony (here).  The comment I find interesting is:

Sony brass did acknowledge that iPod compatibility was an important part of A/V strategy these days.

You can see it… they are all succumbing, one by one.  Why fight it any longer?  Right, Creative?

Sony’s recent splash into iPod accessory hell, the CPF-IP001, didn’t get rave reviews for performance when it came out… the $250 price-tag didn’t gain lots of friends either.  One wonders if Sony has committed to this “important part of A/V strategy,” and if so, let’s hope they gets serious and bring their A-game to the show — and maybe draw on their roots and teach the incumbents — who are, let’s face it, audio-brand-wannabes — how to make performance audio products.  I recently took umbrage with Gizmodo’s comparo, criticizing their seeding methodology, but to their credit, they’ve finally put the focus where it needs to be, finding iPod speakers that actually sound good.

I don’t care about donut shaped, velcro-leatherine-flip-covered, rotating alarm clock, water proof, C-minus-in-industrial-design-101 products.

Let’s make some speakers that flat out rock!

Don’t you think this is getting ridiculous?   I do.  More on this in months ahead, stay tuned…

Apple Insider: “Where is Apple making up for low profits on Apple TV?”

Let me add my thoughts on where Apple believes it will be making money.

AppleInsider notes that profits are low on the Apple TV (based on iSuppli’s latest teardown results) and therefore it must be a market-share/customer-acquisition, game. While I do agree they had to price the hardware faintly (if only not to offend would-be customers), there surely is more to it than to say it’s short-term strategy is only about gaining market penetration. I would be willing to bet a Apple TV that Apple in fact has a business plan that is a shiny-happy, positive NPV. I can all but guarantee it. Whether it is realistic, I don’t know. Time will tell.

One must presume that Apple’s marketing folks factored in some incremental sales of iTunes content that is part of the unit contribution for each Apple TV sold. Afterall, iTunes is more or less a fixed cost at this point, and the Apple TV adds another point-of-sale. Whaddya think? Afterall, unless you are a dedicated iTunes user, the Apple TV is basically hamstrung, and quite undifferentiated against other DMAs.

Microsoft has similar tactics… if not with more lofty goals. Their Xbox is not a money maker on hardware sales alone, in fact rumor is it is quite the opposite. But they make up for it on the games/software/accessories sales. Which have very healthy gross margins baked in.

These are all networked business models. Not as simple as classical consumer electronics economics anymore.

Engadget should read Alive Matters

Why wait for Dvorak to say something?

Engadget: “Will the iPhone be undone by its keyboard?”

Alive Matters: “Didn’t I already suggest as much?”

Before I get too cocky… of course we’ll have to wait and see… I doubt early fan-boys are going to say one negative thing about their long awaited devices… but give it 6 months or so.  It’ll happen.

Photosynth: Mindblowing

Check out Photosynth.  The MSR team just blew my mind in this video I saw.

One day, nowhere in the world will be un-explorable.  The convergence of digital photography, global cartography, social networking, and webservices is previewed here.

Battlemodo: Gizmodo is running a tournament of iPod speaker-docks

Apple has got to be loving themselves a little something extra today. Their accessory ecosystem is finally mature enough to warrant a March-madness-themed comparison test. Isn’t that like some kinds of holy grail or something?

Claiming they are judging primarily audio quality, Gizmodo kicked off a battle royale with participants from all corners of the iPod speakerdock playing field. With brands whose reputations for audio do not precede them, such as Griffin, XtremeMac, and Kensington, competing against middle-of-the-road audio brands like Altec Lansing, Logitech, iHome, and the likes of audio brand-heavies like JBL and Bose… it should be interesting to see if Gizmodo’s gizolden ears pick us a winner, or a wiener.

I can already see how their bracketing is flawed. They didn’t seed the players properly. They should have done this by price. Instead they’ve set us up for a really weird semi-final between an XtremeMac Tango ($199) and Apple HiFi ($349). Whereas, anyone who knows anything about these products would tell you the smart money should be on a finals between the Logitech AudioStation and the Apple HiFi.

I call bull-shit on the whole thing already. Give me my money back, nerd-boys.

But I could be wrong… so I too will track the results here.

Rocketfish RF-WHTIB for Zone B applications – affordable party mode audio!

Sorry for the cheesy graphic (click on it if you want a cleaner view). But as I’ve been writing about the Rocketfish RF-WHTIB (here, here, external-review-1, external-review-2) for weeks now, I thought it would be useful to illustrate how I use mine.

Some can call it a poor man’s whole home audio, or party mode speakers, or Zone B, or Zone 2 speakers. Whatever you call it… you want it.

This picture included here is basically what I am doing. I have my secondary R and L speaker-outs connected to my Rocketfish sender. The sender transmits the full rang, uncompressed CD-quality audio about 60 feet away, through 2 walls, and in an apartment building with plenty of WiFi around. It sounds awesome. I can finally listen to my tunes loud and clear while I get ready in my bedroom in the mornings. It rocks.

Many receivers, dating back 10 years or more, have Zone B outs. How many of yours are being used? Well, now you can.

Get creative. The RF-WHTIB has more uses than simply rear surround speakers. It has audio capabilities that make it one of the consumer electronics industry’s most over-achieving $99 device.

Good stuff: At D5, Gates and Jobs geek out, then snuggle, in front of Live audience.

Jobs was spot on…

…Most things you carry with you are communications devices. You want to do some entertainment with them as well, but they’re primarily communications devices and that’s what they’re going to be.

Then he made me feel confident in the work our company is doing, because, indeed…

…It’s really great when you show somebody something and you don’t have to convince them they have a problem this solves. They know they have a problem, you can show them something, they go, oh, my God, I need this.

At Walt Mossberg’s D5 conference, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat down together and gave an hour and half long interview with Q&A from the live audience of well-healed techtreprenuers.

Highlight reel here, gotta love geek humor (and Walt’s laugh, yikes):

I don’t always agree with Mossberg, mainly because I don’t think I am who he is speaking to when he writes about technology, but as a critic of tech world, he does generally get it right. Creating great experiences for the mass consumer is where the money is.

No other two guys in the last 30 years of business have had as profound an effect on the technology the masses use in our daily lives than Jobs and Gates. Gates by brute force ecosystem development, and Jobs through unrelenting obsession with a few great consumer experiences. The full length video of the interview is located here, transcript here. Definitely interesting to see them sit down cordially and take subtle digs at one another. But like two guys who have more in common through some shared past successes, but also just as freakish human beings, you can see there is quite a camaraderie as well.

One particular exchange that I geeked out on was about the partitioning of R&D along the hardware/software interface via standards and partner-based ecosystems versus vertical integration. It is on both sides of this strategic fence where Microsoft and Apple have had their real success respectively. Hearing Gates and Jobs stick up for their tendencies as innovation leaders, and in direct conversational back-and-forth, was telling.

Gates:

The question is, are there markets where the innovation and variety you get is a net positive? The negative is that in the early stage, you really want to do the two together so you want to do prototyping and things like that, you know, really as one thing.

And then take the phone market. We think we’re on 140 different kinds of hardware. We think it’s beneficial to us that even if we did a few ourselves, it wouldn’t give us what we have through those partnerships.

Likewise, if you take the robotics market, very undeveloped. We have over 140 tiny-volume robots using Microsoft software. And the creativity, building toys, security things, medical things, we love the innovation and the ecosystem that’s going to grow up–who knows when, but we’re patient–around that and we’ll have a great asset with this robotic software platform.

So there are things like PC, phone, and robot where the Microsoft choice is to go for the variety.

Apple, it’s great. For them, they do what works super well for them. And there’s a few markets like Xbox 360, Zune, and this year we have two new ones, the Surface thing and this RoundTable, which is the meeting-room thing, where we’ll actually, through subcontractors, but the P&L on the risk and all that for the hardware, the design is completely a Microsoft thing.

Jobs:

Let me make a comment on Bill’s answer there, which is, it’s very interesting, in the consumer market and the enterprise market, they’re very different spaces. And in the consumer market, at least, I think one can make a pretty strong case that outside of Windows on PCs, it’s hard to see other examples of the software and hardware being decoupled working super well yet. It might in the phone space over time. It might. But it’s not clear. It’s not clear. You can see a lot more examples of the hardware/software coupling working well.

So I think this is one of the reasons we all, you know, come to work every day is because nobody knows the answers to some of these questions. And we’ll find out over the coming years and maybe both will work fine and maybe they won’t.

There is no one answer of course. It depends on the state a technology is in, and how mature an experience you are delivering product for. Gates’ trade-off recognition sums it up completely. I can only imagine the spastic, forgetful, nerd-looking Microsoft robots of the year 2100, versus the sexy, vivacious iBots from Apple with the snappy sense of humor and slick fashion sense.

These billionaire guys are such icons, with such caricatures painted of them, that it’s easy to forget that they are still full of brilliantly marketable ideas. It’d be a shame if people don’t take a listen, read between the lines, and figure out where they’ll be taking us, for better or worse.

On an aside: I came off critical of the iPhone a few months back, and I generally standby my predictions still. However, I am thinking… easily my favorite new web service to come around in the last 5 years has been Google Maps, and if it turns out the iPhone’s client for Google maps is as good as Jobs is saying, I may not be able to resist.