Want to share my iPod?

Walking around New York city, I constantly see teenagers who share an iPod and a single pair of earbuds. They each put one earbud in one ear and in that way they can both listen to the same music while still being able to talk to each other.

Why is there no better solution? I think that a great innovation would be a pair of headphones that connect to an MP3 player wirelessly (most likely Bluetooth since WiFi is such an energy hog) and both pump out the same music for that single player. But the key innovation would be the communication part. Who wants to walk around the mall with their BFF while both listening to the same music if they can’t exchange the day’s gossip?

 So, give the wireless headphones a small mic (like the one used in wireless headsets for cellphones) and allow the conversation between the two headphone users to happen in a shared (and private) frequency.

Now, if the digital music player doesn’t have Bluetooth embedded in it (like the iPod), create a separate transceiver that will attach to the player and communicate with the wireless headphones.

I personally love walking the streets of New York listeing to my iPod. The music becomes the soundtrack of my day and many times it even determines my mood, depending on what iPod’s shuffle will bring my way. The idea of sharing that soundtrack with someone else as we both walk around and still able to talk to each other sounds really exciting to me.

Steve Jobs, are you listening?

Radical transparency and the death of spin.

I often talk to my students about the power of today’s networked information environment in shaping reputation. Keeping secrets has become extremely difficult, for businesses, politicians, and even 15-year-olds. All you need is one person (often yourself) to put the information in digital format and post it somewhere where others can read it. The network effect can be frightening. In a matter of minutes, it can become world-wide news. And even if you take the information down, it will always exist, cached on servers everywhere just waiting to be found. The result can be tremendous pressure on companies and politicians to clean up their act and be accountable. And I’ve always told my students, some of whom are budding CEOs and CIOs themselves, that the way to control your reputation is not by controlling information that is made public, but by making more information public yourself.

Well, enter Wiredmagazine, which has done a fantastic job in reporting on this idea and giving it a cool name: radical transparency. It has several articles on the subject but this one in particular tells the story beautifully. In fact, the whole article was written in the author’s blog inviting reader feedback, some of which is featured in the printed article. As the article’s author, Clive Thompson, says:

The Internet has inverted the social physics of information. Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. If you were cagey about your plans, you had the upper hand; if you kept your next big idea to yourself, people couldn’t steal it. Now, billion- dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away; corporations that publicize their failings grow stronger. Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you – and everyone trembles before search engine rankings.

Some of you may be thinking: What about industrial secrets? The secret recipe of Coke? As Clive points out:

[Some of my blog readers] enjoyed ripping apart my new theories. Several pointed out that secrecy can be necessary – CEOs are often required by law to keep mum, and many creative endeavors benefit from being closed: Steve Jobs came up with a terrific iPhone precisely because he acts like an artist and doesn’t consult everyone. In fact, secrecy is sometimes part of the fun. Who wants to know how this season of 24 is going to end? It’s not secrets that are dying, as one reader named gjudd noted, but lies.

Secrets can be useful tools for competitive advantage. Even though there are many cases when even those secrets are better left in the open. Just look at the success of all the open-source software out there.

So it’s not secrets that are dying. It’s spin control that’s dying. This spells trouble for PR firms.

What’s making me even more excited is the impact this is already starting to have on politics, where transparency is a dirty word and spin control is god. Remember George Allen’s “macaca” comment that got posted on YouTube and cost him a Senate seat?

Politics is going to be fun again.

EMI / Apple announcement: The beginning of the end for DRM

I never really thought I’d see this day, but today, EMI (one of the four large music labels) has announced that it will offer its music catalog DRM-free through iTunes (see also coverage in the NY Times). This means that users can buy any EMI song as an unrestricted MP3 file which they can then freely copy or use on any device, not just iPods.

Despite the groundbreaking nature of this announcement, it makes a lot of sense. Record labels have realized that DRM technology has done very little to prevent users from illegal copying and sharing of music. According to Steve Jobs, less than 3% of the music on iPods consists of DRM-protected files bought on iTunes. The rest are DRM-free files ripped from CDs. So, is EMI throwing in the towel? In a way yes, but that’s not the whole story. What they’ve finally realized is that they need to change the way they make money off of their recording artists. Instead of trying to force the market to consumer their product (music) their way (bundled in CDs or with restricted usage rights), they will let the market decide how to use the product (unbundled and flexible to use). And now they can concentrate on creating value-added services that go beyond the song itself (starting with the fact that they are charging more – $1.29 – for DRM-free songs). I wouldn’t be surprised if the recording labels started encroaching on areas that have traditionally been the bread and butter of musicians, like concerts.

How about Apple? Have they also thrown in the towel after the legal attacks on their highly restricted integration between iPods and iTunes? Call this a truce. Now nobody can accuse Apple of hijacking the market by forcing iTunes buyers to use iPods, since the DRM-free songs can be played on any device. Besides, why should Apple worry? For years people have speculated on what would be the “iPod killer.” Many have tried (including Microsoft – has anyone ever actually seen a Zune?) and all have failed. Not because iPods are necessary to play the music bought on iTunes (though I’m sure it’s helped), but because iPods are a marvel of design and functionality and because Apple is brilliant on building a brand. So, why should Steve Jobs care if iTunes songs will be played on non-iPod devices? Since the EMI catalog will be available DRM-free only at iTunes for now, Apple will actually gain more customers. It will be the owners of other digital devices that will come to iTunes to buy music. I don’t think it’s that far fetched to imagine Apple turning iTunes into a music store for all devices, with agreements to provide syncing for them as well. iTunes itself was never the strong point of the competitive strategy. That was the iPod. So, why not open iTunes to all and let iPod compete on its own merit, which is a formidable proposition anyway?

And there’s another huge benefit to Apple (and Steve Jobs) that comes from this announcement. They will be credited (again) with changing the digital media landscape and for managing to rid the world of the much hated DRM plague. Don’t you think that this alone will get them some more customers buying songs at iTunes? Not to mention it will make Steve Jobs feel even warmer and fuzzier inside than he already does?