antonybrydon

Pandora is out of control...

At EMusic in 1999, we often felt like our future was in the hands of the major record labels, who steadfastly refused to license their catalogs without draconian DRM and unaffordable licensing fees.

Ten years later, it's difficult to see Pandora in a similar situation, threatening to shut-down due to exorbitant royalty fees that are costing them $17m of their $25m in annual revenues:

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting." (from the Washington Post)

It's painful, because Pandora has built the best Walkman we've ever seen and delighted consumers worldwide.

Best-of-breed vs mobile application suites

Many companies developing mobile applications are currently deliberating whether it is better to deliver one or more best-of-breed point applications vs. a suite of integrated applications.

The iPhone AppStore is dominated by best-of-breed applications, where each icon on the iPhone desktop is a gateway to a focused, single-purpose application. Pandora is a great example, where a simple icon opens a killer web-radio application that is receiving rave reviews.

Examples of integrated suites include Lightpole and Where for the Blackberry Curve. Focus on location-based services, each of these applications acts as a portal into a suite of related, location based applications. Lightpole features 'channels' that offer me location aware versions of Wikipedia, Yelp and Yahoo! Local, while Where offers me a suite of location aware applications like StubHub, Zipcar, Flickr and Yelp and a set of location aware widgets like BuddyBeacon, GasFinder, etc. Unfotunately, it seems like much more time was invested in the portal and the suite, rather then the individual applications, and most of the applications and widgets in both these service are disappointing;

I'm firmly in favor of the best of breed approach, for a couple of reasons:

Android, open networks and location

A few interesting snippets are emerging in the 'friendly' back and forth battle between Sprint and Google about Android phones Sprint hopes to ship shortly. Jake Orion, an Android product manager at Sprint Nextel, heavily critiqued Android in general and complained that the OS: "needs a more proactive and direct linkage to the carrier’s network and service requirements."

My translation? "We need the control we are used to."

Two issues are at stake: one strategic, one tactical:

A funny thing happened at last week's social networking conference...

A mobile conference broke out (punchline). OK, seriously, I participated in a wrap-up panel (after my panel) that included folks from across the social networking spectrum. The agenda was to simply follow the conversation where the audience took it, and after one mobile social networking question served as the bridge, the conversation moved squarely to mobile and stayed there for the next hour, only peripherally touching on social networks.

Granted, last Friday coincided with the launch of the 3G iPhone and the debut of the iPhone app store, and the technology cycles in the audience's mind was fully utilized by Apple, but there was a broader trend. Location, open networks, 3G bandwidth, mobile devices were the things people wanted to talk about, the topics that captured the imagination. Two things hit home for me:

News thrives, print dies (The Internet is a meteor)

Print is dead. It's delightfully early to say it definitively, but I agree with the harsh prediction Steve Ballmer of Microsoft told editors at the Washington Post earlier this month:

There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

The defenses, like Bill Virgil's defense in the local Seattle newspaper, have been particularly underwhelming:

The American newspaper, after all, has been around longer than the country has, beginning with the appearance of Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick in Boston in 1690... [Over] three centuries the American newspaper has grown with the country, survived wars, economic panics and depressions, adapted to and adopted technology ranging from photography to the telegraph to high-speed presses and survived the emergence of competing information technologies, including radio and TV.