Trumblog

As expected Apple jumped into the cloud-based music game yesterday when Steve Jobs announced iCloud. While I download iTunes and update my iPad to try out some of the features that are available now, here are a few thoughts on the announcements.

It’s about time that there will be iPad synching via wifi.

The mere ability to sync to the cloud is worth the cost of admission, saving space, memory and time, especially for those apps.

If you think about it the iCloud feature allowing you to access songs you bought previously is about the same as what we currently have for iOS apps, which you can delete and re-download.

All that synching addresses and email with the Cloud stuff didn’t seem revolutionary to a Gmail and Android user, though it sure excited the Apple fan boy in the office next to me. Ditto with the Twitter integration with Contacts and enhanced notifications.

iMessages the next BBM? Maybe, but a dagger in SMS, I doubt it. Sure for close friends who you know have iPhones, but if you don’t know what phone they have? There are reasons why here in the States we prefer SMS over mobile IM and email and I suspect they are the same ones that will limit the popularity of iMessages.

There sure was a lot of Twitter integration with iOS 5, but none with iTunes. Kind of a shame.

Apple’s thorough Twitter integration seems like a big middle finger to Facebook, will it appease our social media desires or just make us hungry for Facebook features throughout iOS?

I can’t find any mention of streaming in all of the iCloud and iTunes in the Cloud descriptions, just downloading to multiple devices. So just because I have uploaded 20,000 songs to iTunes in the Cloud doesn’t mean I can access them at a moment’s notice unlike Google Music. I need to download a track first before I play it. Seems like we’re still playing off the hard drive and dealing with hard drive space with this option.

TechCrunch is calling iTunes Match (where for $24.99 a year iTunes will scan your music library, identify the existing tracks that match tracks available on iTunes and give you access to them through iTunes in the Cloud) as paying “$25 a year to legalize all your content” and CNNMoney calls it “music pirates permanent amnesty.”. But before you go matching all those songs you laboriously ripped from your CD library think about the quality you ripped those songs at. I know that mine are all better than 256 kpbs so the matched tracks are actually a step down in quality.

I’ll post a deeper dive into the new iTunes features once I’ve had a chance to try them out.

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Last month Google announced their cloud-based music service Music Beta by Google, why it isn’t Google Music or GMusic I don’t know, because no one is going to be calling it by a name that is meaningless when shortened to 2 words and what happens when some day it is out of beta? Music by Google? Yeah right. Anyway, 2 weeks ago I got my invite and I’ve been using it exclusively since then. It’s not the cloud-based music service of my dreams, but it has promise.

To get started you need to download the Music Manager program that scans your hard drive for music files and then upload them. This is music only mind you, so you won’t upload photos, movies, etc unlike the Amazon Cloud drive and rumblings out of Cupertino about what they have up their sleeve. But then why would Google include photos and video when they have Picasa and YouTube? Uploading music is click and go, straightforward, though you can tweak the upload rate and frequency for checking for new files as well as which music files are uploaded, I picked the iTunes option, which has worked well and included my playlists, which I can’t guarantee the other options will.

I have well over the 20,000 track limit so it took several days for them all to upload, but the good news is that you can play tracks as soon as they have uploaded. There is grumbling online about it taking days to upload a full music collection, and while scanning my library and then giving me automatic access to my tracks would be great, uploading takes place in the background and it’s sure faster than when I ripped many of those albums from my CD collection into iTunes and I didn’t hear any grumbling about that at the time. Whether it was luck or a feature, my favorited tracks from iTunes seemed to be the first to upload filling a Favorites playlist right away which was much nicer than doing it alphabetically and being stuck with Abba to test with. And actually if you have over 20,000 songs in your library the the Music Manager will “will prioritize [the uploading of] songs based on a combination of your listening preferences and ratings.”. Cool huh?

The Google Music online player itself is pretty basic. You can view your music in 5 ways; New And Recent, Songs, Albums, Artists and Genres. Clicking on any of those displays your music grouped based on your selection and displaying album artwork, except for the Songs display, which gives you an alphabetical list of every song in your library. Clicking on an individual artist or genre then gives you detail of the albums with track listings.

Selecting a Song or Album reveals an icon like a dog eared page that opens options for playing it, adding it to a playlist, editing the metadata, deleting it or shopping for the artist. There all do exactly what you expect. The meta data editing is limited. I found that some of the album artwork was wrong after importing and needed to be updated, a task that requires uploading a jpg or gif rather than the easier cut and paste like with iTunes. There are also less fields for editing, no BPM, composer, comments or lyrics and sadly just a single genre, no tagging. The “shop this artist” just opens a Google Shopping search for the artist, there is no music store per se.

A few other areas where the Google Music Beta disappoints are the lack of social media integration, the lack of auto playlists beyond Thumbs Up, Recently Added and Free Songs (my auto playlist of music just from 2011 is the go to soundtrack for my commute), no sorting by year and no instant mixes by artist, just song or album. Perhaps the biggest omission of functionality is Podcasts and audiobooks. Podcast mp3s will upload from your collection to Google Music, but you can’t subscribe to or manage podcasts from Google Music. The same goes for audio books, which upload, but aren’t handled well for easy playback.

While the Google Music online player merely satisfies, its mobile integration truly impresses. With the Music app on an Android phone Google Music puts your entire music library in your pocket. You can access every track and almost every playlist from your phone whether online or off. Just like the online player, the mobile app groups your music by Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres and then gives you a extra tab for Playlists. Click on any track and, assuming that you have cell service, it plays after a few seconds for buffering. Think about that, 20,000 songs from your library accessible any time from your smart phone.

Now sometimes, on the subway, on vacation in Rural Maine and certain parts of San Francisco, you don’t have cell phone service, no problem. First of all you can “pin” albums and playlists to make them available offline and they will be downloaded to your device. The Music app also pre-buffers music for you based on what you are listening to so if I’m listening to my collection of songs on random it pre-buffers the next few songs so that on my subway ride from Boston to Cambridge my music keeps playing without missing a beat.

Music syncs automatically so new music is available from your device as soon as it’s added to the player, meta data changes show up quickly and all of your playlists from the browser-based player are on your device, with one exception, your Thumbs Up dynamic playlist. Why this is missing I have no idea. Instant mixes are synced from the browser to mobile and vice versa, but for some reason the playlist of tracks you are most likely to have at your finger tips is missing. Also missing is the ability to thumb up or down a track from your phone when you find a forgotten gem you’d like to hear again or trash you want to delete. Hopefully those features will be added soon.

Music Beta by Google feels like a beta. There is a lot of promise here, you can feel the potential, but there are still missing features. Comparing it to my dream music service it certainly gives me easy access, with the only hold ups being lack of download capability and my issue with iPad playback. It’s a little lacking in the data area and then there is no social component, but the browser and mobile integration is superb and they have a great foundation to build from.

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These are exciting days for cloud-based music services. Amazon launched their Cloud Drive in March. Then Google rolled out the Google Music Beta at their I/O Developer Conference. And of course all signs point to Apple announcing iCloud or some similarly named cloud-based music service soon, perhaps in a couple weeks at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference. So, with this glorious opportunity ahead of us here’s what I would like in the music service of my dreams:

Easy Access

I want all of the music files that I have collected in one place and have no hear of losing them to a hard drive crash, natural accident, vindictive co-worker, etc. At some point I may also need them back, because of one of those aforementioned issues with my backup, so I want an easy download option too.

And when I say my entire music collection, I mean my entire music collection, not just the album cuts from the major labels, but rare indy singles, alt takes that never were supposed to see the light of day, unauthorized remixes, live versions, mashups, etc. I worked hard to collect it all and I want access to it all.

Then I want to access those tracks any time and anywhere that I want on any device. PC, Mac, iPod, iPad, Android. Online and offline. If it has a browser and a speaker I want to hear my music coming out of it. I can live without an official Roku channel, but provide an API so some enterprising folks can integrate it with Roku, Google TV, Apple TV, and whatever comes next. Also if my device has memory that can be written to I want some of my tracks to be available if the wifi goes out or I’m outside cell range (like on the subway during my commute).

Plenty of Data

I admit that I get a little anal about my music meta data, the correct year, album artist, disk number, artwork, etc. It simultaneously drives me nuts that I have to pick only one genre for a song (is Paper Planes rock, electronic, world, hip-hop, alternative or all of them?) and to have both the genres Electronic and Electronica represented in my library. Give me the control to edit the information about my music the way that I want it and tag it to my heart’s content.

The flip side of that is that I want to pull plenty of data about my collection and listening habits. What albums from the past year did I listen to the most? Which of my albums are on the 4AD label (why is label not included in music meta data I ask you?). Presumably this service will be doing some data mining of my music taste so give me recommendations about artists, albums, tracks, playlists and even blogs that I should check out.

Social

A perfect music service will integrate with social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Blogs so that I can let friends know what music I like, share what’s new, what mood I’m in, and I can find out the same about my friends. Those social features of course promote discovery of new music, which then the service would support through access to music blogs, band websites, music stores, etc so that I can learn about bands, listen to new tracks and find new music.

Finally, the service should be free and has no memory limits. How do you make money? Well, a music store is the obvious economic model. Targeted ads based on my music collection is another. Fully integrated, media rich, band/ label micro sites could be sold at a premium. Then there’s the benefit of keeping consumers within your online ecosystem (think Google keeping you in the GMail, YouTube, Google Voice, Android set of services and away from Apple).

Ok, so that is my wish list. Next I’ll start writing about how some of the existing services that I’ve tried in my quest to find the music service of my dreams stack up.

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In the New York Times yesterday there was some interesting data from Forrester Research on men, women and e-readers.

Generically speaking, the iPad and other tablets are men’s toys, while the Nook Color and other e-readers are more popular with women. According to data from Forrester Research, 56 percent of tablet owners are male, while 55 percent of e-reader owners are female. Women also buy more books than men do — by a ratio of about 3 to 1, according to a survey last year by Bowker, a research firm for publishers — and are therefore more likely to buy devices that are made primarily for reading books.

But publishers also believe the resonance of the Nook Color among women highlights the vast difference in consumer markets. Some women, at least, seem to prefer their electronic reading devices to be simpler, something they can read on. Tablets with Rock Band, GT Racing and high-res cameras? That’s guy stuff.

Anecdotal evidence based on the devices on the bedside tables at my home back up this data, but if it wasn’t for the Kindle I won and then gave my wife for Christmas she’d be gadget-less. Generally she also lives up to the simpler is better mind frame for gadgets, but make an Android e-reader that delivers Bejeweled and Gardens of Time and she’s all yours.

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I’ve been reading David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries, basically a compilation of blog posts ostensibly about his bicycling in cities around the world, but that jumps from his perambulating to thoughts about architecture, art and danger, the impact of city structures on their inhabitants, the Marcos mystique in The Philippines, bike lanes and basically anywhere else his mind rambles off to. In his visit to Palo Alto he sees the garage where the computer company HP was launched..

It’s no accident that the humble garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began their partnership in Palo Alto is an icon here. Like Sun Studio in Memphis, where rock and roll was born, or Menlo Park, New Jersey, where Edison lit up the world, this funky little garage is revered partly because it’s nothing special. Its ordinariness is the point.

The humble origin as icon immediately brought to mind another memorialized shack from which an empire was spawned, the Casa Romuli in Rome, which was supposedly the childhood home of Romulus, the founder of Rome.

The single roomed hut was maintained for centuries, though it was burned or destroyed and had to be rebuilt multiple times. In it ancient Romans would make sacrifices to Romulus and it served as a reminder of Romulus and Remus’ and their humble origins, raised by a she-wolf and found by a shepherd.

While the rags to riches, Horatio Alger story seems so American, the story of poor origins and a rise to greatness capture imaginations around the world. The start up begun in a garage, the baby found in the bullrushes, twins raised by a wolf, the child born in a manger. The image is so engrained in us that even trust fund Presidents dress up as a cowboys and clear brush to take advantage of the power this myth of humble origin has on us.

While Romulus and Remus claimed, or where later endowed with a regal lineage, and Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s palace, the only founder of a major religion that I can think of who was born and raised from royalty is Siddhartha Gautama who rejected the life of a prince and became Buddha. Of course as the exception that proves the rule, the palaces where he lived are lost to time, but a decedent of the simple Bodhi tree where he gained enlightenment is still venerated.

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Blogsy is a fantastic new blogging app that finally brings WYSIWYG formatting to blogging on the iPad and includes some new takes on functionality to make blogging easier.

Blogsy splits their interface in two, Rich and Write, which roughly correspond to the Visual and HTML views in the WordPress interface. The Write side is your HTML view where you write, edit the HTML and can insert embed codes. The Rich side, that you switch to with a swipe of the finger, is for formatting your copy and and inserting images with WYSIWYG simplicity.

Just the WYSIWYG editing would have been enough for me, but Blogsy has added some other cool features for formatting and enhancing your blog posts. Flickr, Picasa and YouTube are all integrated with Blogsy so that a click on any of those icon opens your account on the service so that you can drag your photos and videos directly into your blog post. You can also search within any of the services for imagery too. It’s seriously that easy to drag and position assets into a blog post and once you are there you can resize them, tweak how the text flows around them, assign links, etc.

Can’t find the photo you need in Flickr? No problem you can search for photos with Google image search or drag some photos into your post from the integrated browser. The integrated browser is also helpful for work flow, when you want to quickly look something up or to grab a URL from for a link. Adding links is also super easy with the Link dragging button on the integrated button.

Blogsy is still a work in progress, which in this case bodes well for the future of this app because we can expect regular updates. As a matter of fact the app is budget priced right now because you cannot add photos from the iPad photo gallery to blog posts, which will be addressed in a coming update. It’s not always clear whether you are in the Rich or Write interface and the fact that you can only write on the Write side and not on Rich isn’t intuitive at first and limits the ease of editing. Saving also should be easier, not hidden in sub navigation. Twitter integration is missing and I look forward to when a blue “t” button is added to the right column of buttons.

Blogsy works with both WordPress.com and WordPress installed blogs and Blogger and I looks like there are plans for adding Tumblr, Drupal and other platforms.

Check out the Blogsy demo video below.

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I grew up without cable TV and I was shocked when I went to a friend’s house and realized that the stations they were paying for had commercials in them. Paying and still having to wait through commercials? Crazy.

Eventually I learned that for cable, like newspapers and magazines subscriptions pay for a portion of the media, but advertising pays for the majority. This model has expanded to websites, apps and now technology.

This week amazon announced that they are launching a Kindle with advertising, I mean with “special offers and sponsored screensavers,” that is $25 less than the model without SO & SS. I once suggested to a major metropolitan newspaper that they lock me into a multi-year digital subscription in return for giving me a Kindle. I also rarely pony up the buck of two for an app when there is a free, but add supported version available. Clearly I’m willing to trade my attention and commitment to a subscription for a gadget or app, but to me $25 seems like too little for distracting me with these special offers for as long as I own my Kindle. This is especially true taking into account that I would still be paying over $100 for the device to read books, magazines and newspapers (with ads of their own) that I’m also paying for.

So, is your distraction by these special offers for as long as you own your Kindle worth $25? How about $30? $50?

Where is that line for you?

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Freakonomics was outstanding for it’s use of economic theory to uncover the true cause of the drop in crime in the 90s, why drug dealers live at home and whether Sumo wrestlers throw bouts and why. It was a revelation, entertaining and a success.

SuperFreakonomics follows the same structure as Freakonomics, identifying the risks of drunk walking versus drunk driving (neither is a good idea so don’t drive home after a few too many thinking that you’re safer than walking), the relative benefits of a pimp versus a real estate agent (I’ll have my next home sold by a man in a fur coat and purple hat thank you) and what traits to look for in an emergency room doctor for a better result (experience and two X chromosomes are a good bet). In those sections SuperFreakonomics is just as entertaining as its predecessor.

Where SuperFreakonomics fails is where it deviates from this formula and ventures into profiles of interesting ideas, but ones that are not based in investigative economics. The review of Ian Horsley’s work on the economic indicators for identifying terrorists is a perfect blend of profile and fascinating correlation between motive and economic behavior, but Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner seem to have drank the Intellectual Ventures Kool-Aid and spend way too much time on their ideas for reducing hurricane strength by cooling the oceans where they develop and ending global warming by seeding the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide both as illustrations of the value of ideas that are cheap and simple.

These are fascinating ideas and may work, but they are not the economic mysteries that made Freakonomics a success and fascinating read. The trip into speculative science at IV, as interesting as they are, veer from the thesis of SuperFreakonomics and got me thinking “are these good ideas” and “what would be the unintended consequences of these actions” rather than “wow I never thought of the correlation between this action and another result.” Shining the light of economics on these mysteries is a better route for future editions of the Freakonomics series.

Disclaimer: This review has nothing to do that a photo of mine is included in the illustrated version of SuperFreakonomics. Check out page 105.

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It was about 4 years ago that I was hit by Rishad Tobaccowala’s advice to the crowd at OMMA East. “Mind your API“.  Don’t ask me why that one instruction stuck with me more than everything else that he said that afternoon, but it did.

For those of you who don’t know what an API is, API stands for Application Programming Interface and it is the rules and specifications for a third party to interact with your software.  For example, Google Maps API allows thousands of programs to incorporate Google Maps data into their programs.  Twitter’s open API allows hundreds of alternate ways of posting or reading tweets.

While Tobaccowala’s advice should be taken literally, it was also meant to be metaphoric.  Make sure that you work well with third parties, exchange information easily and make it simple for them to use that data.

What made me think of this?  Well, we just launched an app for an event that one of our clients is hosting this week and I needed screenshots.  The app is available for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, but I just spent the last half hour taking screen shots of the iPhone version only.  Why? Because Apple makes it so easy and the others don’t.

Tap and hold the power button, click the iPad button, done.

But for the BlackBerry and Android you need to connect the device to a computer and download some software and only then can you start the process of taking a screenshot, which still probably isn’t as easy as click, click done.  It’s a little thing, but because Apple makes it easy to take screen shots I will be promoting the iPhone app and not the other platforms.

Usability isn’t always about making things easy to find and sharing isn’t just making sure you have a “Tweet This” button on your site.  How rich is your API?

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Courtesy of @loulouk

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