Like you, I have found myself inundated with cool gear-related products to spend my money on this holiday season. One such product actually looks like a useful addition for those who have an iMac or an Apple Cinema Display. The BackPack from twelve south is a little shelf that attaches to the back of an iMac or a Cinema Display where it adds a spot to store things. It’s the perfect size for an external disk drive or other peripheral, and it’s perforated metal so it should provide good ventilation for whatever you put there.
You can have more than one BackPack on your monitor, although at $30 you might stick with just one.
The company also has a very cool MacBook stand that is the most elegant product of its type I have ever seen. I can’t see dishing out $50 for it, though.
It’s such an obvious idea it’s amazing it didn’t happen sooner. Wired reports that Apple has teamed up with promoter Live Nation to bring Live music to its iTunes Store.
The reason for the delay is the tremendous difficulty getting all the required signatures on all the dotted lines. For each live performance to be made available to consumers, the performers, their management companies, record labels, venue management, promoters and countless others must have forged some sort of agreement deemed of value to them all. That’s far from easy, but it helps if you happen to own the venues; Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk says that Apple and Live Nation are the owners of the more than 80 venues featured in the collection of live shows.
While Apple has made live performances available in the iTunes Store in the past, they was never marshaled together into one single place and made so easily searchable. As you’d expect, it’s possible to search the Live music by genre and artist, but it’s also possible to search by venue. Flagship Apple Stores are often the venues for intimate live shows and they’re now just a click away; Montreal, Sydney, London and New York’s SOHO stores are just a few of the locations in the list. (The mind boggles at the legal wrangling that must have taken place to clear the worldwide rights for those performances…)
A section is also reserved for highlighting iPhone apps that also deliver, or are connected with, Live music.
The content isn’t just reserved for music, either. Videos of Live performances are also available, and as you probably guessed already, do cost a bit more than music alone. Concert videos start at $8 and go as high as $13 while straight audio shows are usually in the $8 range.
I’d have thought this universally good news for music fans, though John Paczkowski, in his Digital Daily column for The Wall Street Journal, writes (somewhat sarcastically);
This year, Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, will put on some 22,000 live shows – each one attended by carping about the asinine “convenience” and “courtesy” charges the company likes to tack on to ticket purchases. Funny, isn’t it, how quickly a $28 show can become a $50 one?
So, in light of the news of Live Nation’s content partnership with Apple, and with tongue firmly in cheek, Paczkowski asks, “Does this mean we can expect a Live Nation ‘iTunes Convenience Fee’?”
I haven’t had a lot of luck with “Live” recordings of my favorite artists. The occasional missed note, a bit of microphone feedback or occasional volume dropouts are to be expected in a live setting and if I’m standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other fans, y’know, there in person, I’ll forgive every imperfection.
Having those imperfections reproduced on my iPod or desktop speakers, though…it just doesn’t seem right. I barely listen to the few live albums I own. I can’t imagine wanting to spend real money on any more.
What do you think? Am I in a minority? Should I just shut up and go back to my gramophone? Is iTunes Live Music gonna be claiming your hard-earned green?
If you’re looking to save a little time this holiday season by shopping on the mobile web, you’d do well to spend some time on Amazon’s mobile site, according to figures released this week from Compuware’s Gomez division. The online retailer’s destination fared the best in a study of 14 mobile sites studied by the developer of web optimization software, placing first in both response time (averaging 2.85 seconds) and availability (99.86 percent). Mobile sites from QVC and Newegg also performed well, Gomez said, while sites from Sears, Buy.com and Target each had an average response time of more than six seconds.
Those sites and plenty of others are likely to see a surge in traffic this holiday season. Deloitte found that 19 percent of U.S. consumers plan to use their phone as a shopping tool to find store locations, research prices and access discounts. One-fourth of those polled said they actually planned to make a purchase on their handsets. Of all the mobile sites and apps designed to help users spend their money starting on Black Friday, here are a few of the more notable ones:
There are, of course, countless other sites and services that will happily help separate you from your money this holiday season. And the next few weeks should serve as kind of barometer for mobile shopping offerings, providing yet another glimpse of just how much consumers are using their phones to do more than just talk and text. If retailers and developers truly see a substantial surge in usage — and if their offerings are up to the task — it may bode well for the mobile data market as the economy recovers.
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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM | Permalink | 4 Comments
Tags: mobile apps, mobile developers, Mobile Internet, Mobile Web
Have you ever been tapping keys on your iPhone’s screen and wished there was some tactile feedback? Me neither, but if I had, this unique clear cover for the iPhone screen might have fit the bill. The 4iThumbs is basically a clear plastic cover for the screen of the iPhone that has indentations where the keys are situated when the onscreen keyboard is in use.
That’s it. Of course, the landscape keyboard is vastly different than the portrait model so you’ll have to get the right 4iThumbs to fit the way you work. I guess you could just get one of each but at $19.95 for the pair you may just want to go with one. That will only save you $3 or $4, though.
In the wake of Google’s big announcement last week on Chrome OS, its netbook-focused operating system due to launch in late 2010, speculation is building as to what sort of response it may draw from the competition, especially Microsoft. Given that Google’s idea is to put a browser-centric look and architecture at the heart of its cloud-focused operating system, PC World thinks Redmond could respond with a so-called “Internet Explorer OS.” Meanwhile, InfoWorld imagines a scenario in which Microsoft conducts a full-frontal attack that starts with classifying Chrome OS as “desktop Linux” (Canonical, which makes the Linux distribution Ubuntu, has been helping Chrome OS take shape). In fact, Microsoft is unlikely to go on the attack at all.
First of all, Chrome OS is aimed solely at the netbook market, and it won’t arrive until late 2010, at which point Windows 7’s hold on the netbook market will have been building for a year. Google’s operating system, remember, is not targeting the desktop and server systems that represent the lion’s share part of Windows’ installed base.
Second, Microsoft is much less inclined to blast Linux and all things Linux-based than it used to be. Sure it has done so in the past, with Steve Ballmer even going so far as calling Linux “a cancer.” There are even those who produce alleged evidence that Microsoft trains Best Buy employees to trash Linux. But Linux doesn’t have enough market share for Microsoft to launch continuing, broad-based attacks on it, nor is it in the company’s best interest to do so. After all, if Microsoft can’t point to competitors to its operating systems, it risks getting back in trouble with the Department of Justice. In fact, Microsoft recently donated significant amounts of driver code to the Linux community — something it would never have done years ago.
Finally, as I wrote recently, Google is taking a number of large gambles with Chrome OS. It will work only with data in the cloud, for example, which may not be flexible enough for many users. Before we envision Microsoft fearing Google’s narrowcasted and possibly quite inflexible OS, Google has to prove that it can get an operating system aimed at computers (and not mobile phones) right — and support it well. Those are tall orders, as Microsoft (and Apple) would be the first to point out.
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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM | Permalink | 17 Comments
Tags: chrome os, google, Linux, Microsoft
Google this week expanded its coupon service to mobile just in time for Black Friday, enabling U.S. consumers to access and redeem the discounts via their phones. It’s an effort that could give the space a much-needed shove into the mainstream.
Retailers can now create and upload mobile coupon offers to Google’s Local Business Center; the offers are presented with business listings to users searching Google.com on a handset. The move expands on a 2-year-old service that enables users to access coupons on the Internet and print them out.
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Mobile coupons have been around for several years but have failed to gain much traction with consumers. Startups such as Cellfire and txtwire have launched promotions with nationally known retailers, but no campaign has enjoyed the marketing support necessary for large-scale success, and consumer awareness remains limited.
Google’s new offering could change that if enough retailers buy in and present their offers to consumers. While existing startups in the space must ink deals with individual retail partners, Google’s massive list of businesses could boost consumer awareness as users increasingly use their phones to find local retailers. While Google’s effort is unlikely to provide the overnight breakthrough many in the space have long hoped for, it could go a long way toward bringing mobile coupons to the mass market.
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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM | Permalink | 0 Comments
Tags: google, Mobile Advertising, mobile coupons, mobile marketing
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