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Everyone pretty much agrees that mobile music is an interesting experience for the discerning consumer. Its been covered pretty well in the blogosphere, and if there’s any doubt, just look at the 42 million iPods sold to date. However, there a couple of aspects of mobile music that I feel doesn’t get enough focus.

Device Convergence
I can’t believe there’re still pundits advocating that for a truly great mobile music device, it needs to be dedicated solely to music. I have an mp3 player (and a digital camera, for that matter), but I loathe carrying them around. It seems like a no brainer to build a device which offers adequate functionality around the holy grail of audio, video and communication. Even Apple, with their fanatic loyalty to the user experience, has finally realized this simply isn’t the case - the iPod Video has made its debut and the iPhone is imminent.

Unfortunately, a decent convergence device is still years away in my opinion. Yes, even the much vaunted iPhone sounds like it will fail to deliver. Kevin Rose leaked that in order to solve the battery problem, the iPhone will contain two batteries - one for the phone and the other dedicated to the mp3 player. This just smacks of one of my early science fair projects. In an attempt to invent something new, I taped together a spoon and a fork, pointing in opposite directions, and called it a spork (I hadn’t discovered Taco Bell yet). C’mon Jobs, any elementary school kid could tape together a cell phone and an iPod and call it a day. Where’s the true innovation here?

Passive Consumption
For some inexplicable reason, it seems like mobile operators are all jumping on the video bandwagon. First there was VCast, followed quickly by Cingular Video. Everywhere you look, there are startups like MobiTV and GoTV, looking for a slice of the action. When did mobile music start to take a back seat to video?

In my mind, listening to music is simply a better fit for a mobile scenario. Video is great for when you’re sitting down for an extended periods of time and can spare the focus. But how often do you really find yourself in this kind of situation? Consider you’re daily commute. You either drive, which should take up your attention if you’re even remotely responsible, or you take the public transit. The latter does provide some time to consume video while sitting at the stop or on the subway/train/bus, but I’d argue that you’re probably also required to do some walking from stop to stop, which again requires your attention.

In every case outlined above, you could be listening to music without losing focus. The commute was just one example. What about when you’re working, studying, shopping or exercising? Music is equally applicable to all of those scenarios, whereas video would be appropriate for none.

The point is, the wireless industry needs to stop buying into the YouTube hype/hysteria and concentrate on building services that consumers would actually uinse.

Next post: The Case against Mobile Music

Most weekday evenings, you can find me playing pick up soccer at Cal Anderson Field. There’s a great group of guys that play there on a regular basis. In general, its rare that there won’t be at least half a dozen other guys to scrimmage with.

The exception to this rule is when the weather gets shitty. Unfortunately, this winter, the weather in Seattle has been very shitty. Wind storms, torrential rains and even the occasional hail have all conspired to ruin my evening pick up matches. The tricky challenge that I find myself facing is, when is the weather bad enough that nobody (or not enough people) will show up?

My tolerance for inclement weather has increased significantly in the past few years, so I’m perfectly comfortable playing through anything less than thunder and lightning. However, there have been far too many times when I’ve shown up to the soccer field and waited out in the rain for half an hour before realizing nobody else was coming.

So, I’m proposing a feature idea for those sites that facilitate pick up soccer.

Socster does an adequate job. While I was down in Berkeley visiting a friend, I was able to find a game near his house easily enough. However, there’s one killer feature that is blatantly missing - mobile integration. By the time I start worrying about whether guys are going to show up, I’m standing on the field and definitely don’t have PC access.

Based on the demographic that tends to show up to these games - high school athletes on an allowance, college students up to their ears in debt and internationals on an immigrant’s budget - its unlikely the majority will have a data plan, so a WAP site is out of the question.. This leaves us with an SMS approach.

Each major playfield in a given region should be assigned a short code. You can then send a text message indicating which field you’re playing on. I would expect this feature to be used most often when players are actually at the field already, so there’s no need to specify a time. However, if you want to notify people in advance, there should be an option to input a time.

The other critical text message which should be supported is the query. I’d love to be able to send a text message with the field short code, followed by a question mark, and receive a message back outlining the number of guys who will be showing up to that field at what times during that day.

If you think this proposal has merit, feel free to make some noise about it.

Let me preface this post by stating that I have nothing but respect for the Zune team. J Allard has performed miracles with the Xbox, and I’ve worked with half of the music store dev team. Juster, Lau, Jubez - all smart guys.

However, the more I learn about Zune, the more disappointed I am. The WiFi radio held so much potential, yet the final product fell so short. Here’re a couple critical components that Redmond needs to be thinking long and hard about.

Asynchronous Buddy Recommendations

Its interesting that you can send a preview of one of your purchased songs to a friend of yours. However, for me personally, most of the friends that I hear about new music from are not in the same time zones as me. Not to mention we’ve all got our own busy schedules, and rarely have time to chat about music. Its simply unrealistic to require your friends to be in the same place and time to share music.

The Zune client ought to support storing of buddy recommendations. Once you enter a WiFi zone, the client uploads your recommendations to a server that holds your buddy’s “recommendations inbox.” The next time your friend comes online, he automatically downloads the preview.

Wireless Push Service

Why, oh why did Microsoft not snap up Last.fm? The WiFi radio makes the device a perfect match. For the less geeky, Last.fm offers plug-ins to your favorite music apps (iTunes, WMP, Winamp, etc) and tracks how often you play different songs. The play counts are used to create a music profile, and your profile is matched up with other profiles that have similar patterns. The service then recommends songs that you haven’t discovered yet, but other people with similar tastes listen to.

The Zune ought to have a Last.fm plug-in for their player, which would upload your play counts automatically any time you entered a WiFi network. As a bonus, if you have an all-you-can-eat subscription, you’ll simultaneously have the latest Last.fm recommended songs uploaded to your player for you to sample.