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| June 18, 2007 GOING WIRELESS Internet Radio Races To Break Free of the PC. By SARAH MCBRIDE Front Page. WSJ | ||||||
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| Pushing Portability In Cars, Music Players; Static Over WiFi | ||||||
| In January, a recreational vehicle in remote West Texas suddenly started blasting the Steve Miller Band's "Space Cowboy." It was a triumphant moment for Slacker Inc., a start-up trying to move Internet radio out of the computer and into the car. Parked on the side of a road near Fort Stockton, Slacker's 36-year-old founder Celite Milbrandt uncorked a 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild to celebrate. A few hours later, he pointed the RV toward Las Vegas. There, Mr. Milbrandt demonstrated the mobile service for potential investors at the annual Consumer Electronics Show and ultimately raked in an additional $40 million in investments for his company. Even so, the nascent industry has yet to capture the biggest prize -- portability. Some halfway solutions exist, such as music devices that allow people to stream Internet radio on speakers, or software that allows technology buffs to access Internet radio from their phones. But results can be glitchy, expensive and technically against the terms of contracts with mobile-phone service providers. Now, start-ups and giants are jockeying for position in mobile Internet radio, in a race that could rearrange the business model of music and broadcasting.
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| Even so, the nascent industry has yet to capture the biggest prize -- portability. Some halfway solutions exist, such as music devices that allow people to stream Internet radio on speakers, or software that allows technology buffs to access Internet radio from their phones. But results can be glitchy, expensive and technically against the terms of contracts with mobile-phone service providers. Now, start-ups and giants are jockeying for position in mobile Internet radio, in a race that could rearrange the business model of music and broadcasting. One promising entrant is SanDisk Corp.'s new Sansa Connect digital music player. Released earlier this year, it allows users in wireless Internet zones to listen to online radio stations from Yahoo Inc. When users wander out of WiFi range, the $249.99 Sansa can play songs from its music library, which holds up to 1,000 songs. Last month, Oakland, Calif.-based Pandora Media Inc., one of the biggest players with seven million registered users, announced it is working with Sprint Nextel Corp. to make its service available on mobile phones. Pandora says it is also working on its own player as well. One of the field's newest aspirants, Slacker says its hand-held will be out by summer's end. Slacker is also pushing hard into automobiles. The company says it is close to introducing a car kit that will play Slacker-selected tunes in any vehicle. Chief Operating Officer Jim Cady says he is in early talks with unidentified auto makers about building Slacker technology into car dashboards. Traditional broadcasters have taken a number of steps to keep pace with the burgeoning world of online radio. CBS Corp., owner of a big traditional radio operation, agreed last month to pay $280 million to acquire London-based Internet radio provider Last.fm Ltd. Most major radio companies are moving aggressively onto the Web and other platforms such as mobile phones. Web sites from radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc. now account for some 20% of all online radio listening, according to J.P. Morgan.
The broadcasters say listeners want to connect with the hosts and formats they know, whether it be online or over the airwaves. "That's a big distinction that we have, marquee value and brand name," says Dan Mason, head of CBS Radio. But portability could make Internet radio operators a greater threat. Internet radio "will sweep into the car, and the traditional station is going to have to think about how they reprogram to compete," says Jonathan Jacoby, an analyst at Bank of America Securities. Unlike satellite radio, Internet radio offers the potential for greater personalization without the cost of monthly subscriptions or satellite receivers. Gary Parsons, chairman of XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., concedes Slacker has the edge in certain areas, like lower capital costs. But he adds it has "significant technical limitations" because it relies so heavily on stored programming. XM sends out an uninterrupted stream of material. Indeed, the upstarts still face many hurdles. It's unknown how many Internet radio fans will be sufficiently enthused to install Slacker's kit, which includes a 4-inch antenna that must be mounted on car roofs. Earlier this year, regulators announced a dramatic increase on the royalty rates Internet radio operators must pay recording artists, a move some companies complain will severely undercut their businesses. Internet radio companies pay royalties to performers, songwriters and other rights' holders to avoid copyright lawsuits. And the reach of WiFi, the technology widely used to transmit Internet outdoors, remains patchy. Companies like Sprint Nextel are vowing to improve WiFi's reach down the road. Until they are closer to that goal, however, many Internet radio providers are skipping the car for now, focusing instead on other portable devices. That's Pandora's strategy. The company, known for a technology that tries to learn the musical qualities a listener likes and serve up songs accordingly, is working with Sprint Nextel to deliver its service to users of high-speed data phones for $2.99 a month. Tim Westergren, the company's co-founder and chief strategy officer, notes the phone will already play Pandora through a car stereo using an adaptor, and adds he also envisions a future where Pandora is integrated alongside the car radio tuner. "We've had conversations with a huge number of car companies [and] car audio manufacturers that are all very eager to start making this more a part of the dashboard," says Mr. Westergren. The company is also working on portable Pandora-branded players that will rely on WiFi or its emerging cousin, WiMax, which promises greater reach. But Mr. Westergren isn't sure when the company will roll them out. Mr. Westergren is aware of Slacker, but dismisses many of its forthcoming products as "vaporware," the term for the technology industry's notorious practice of announcing products that aren't ready. Slacker says its devices are on track and will soon hit the market.
Founded in 2004 by Mr. Milbrandt, a former networking executive, Slacker has 100,000 registered users since its launch in March. The company has raised about $50 million from backers like Sevin Rosen, the Dallas-based venture capital fund that helped spawn Compaq and Lotus, and Austin Ventures. Its planned car kit reflects a technical advantage. While most other Internet radio providers are reliant on WiFi, Slacker's portable devices will use both WiFi and satellite technology. That's because Mr. Milbrandt never intended to start an Internet radio company at all. Instead, the Led Zeppelin fan was searching for a lower-cost alternative to satellite-radio providers XM Satellite and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., which sell their services for $12.99 a month. While XM and Sirius spent billions building and launching satellites, Mr. Milbrandt planned to lease a fraction of the satellite space from TV companies and other entities. Rather than beaming programming live to radios, as XM and Sirius do, Mr. Milbrandt planned to transmit programming that would then be stored on devices -- a much cheaper approach that involves far less satellite capacity. With seed money from investors who had backed a broadband networking company he founded in 2001, Mr. Milbrandt spent months holed up in a laboratory to see if he could successfully beam songs up to a satellite and then back down again to a device. Once he thought he was close to succeeding, Mr. Milbrandt leased blocks of satellite time at a cost of $1,000 an hour. "We didn't have a lot of money," says the shy engineer, who says his unusual first name "Celite" generated much ribbing in high school. "It was always very stressful." After months of trial and error, Mr. Milbrandt hit a breakthrough in late-2005 when the sound of a jangling cash register from Pink Floyd's song "Money" came through a radio receiver. Mr. Milbrandt and his team cracked open some Bud Lites to celebrate. After that, Slacker recruited 46-year-old Dennis Mudd. A former chief executive of Musicmatch Inc., a jukebox-style music service that was sold to Yahoo for $160 million in 2004, Mr. Mudd had recently been spending his time painting and biking in Tanzania, Vietnam and other far-flung places.
After a few weeks of brainstorming with family and friends, Mr. Mudd pitched a business plan with two key planks. First, Slacker needed to sell its own portable devices. To do that, it brought in executives with experience with music players. Jim Cady, formerly chief executive of D&M Holdings Inc.'s Rio, the digital music-player company, signed on as Slacker's president, and Jonathan Sasse, formerly chief executive of iriver America Inc., another digital music-player company, joined as Slacker's marketing chief. Jim Smith, a former partner in Musicmatch, became vice president of engineering. Mr. Mudd also suggested setting the company up as an Internet radio operator. Web services have the potential to provide a richer experience than either broadcast or satellite radio, he noted, because of the Internet's ability to personalize playlists, skip songs, display cover art and deliver artist biographies. "It's not so much that [radio] got worse," Mr. Mudd says. "I think expectations got set higher by what you could do with Internet radio in particular." The executives dubbed the service Slacker because listeners don't have to do anything to bring in a steady stream of new music. It calls for users to provide the site with a few examples of artists or songs they like. The site then creates customized stations that play what it thinks will appeal based on musical genre and overall analysis. Like Pandora, Slacker is free. But down the road the company will offer a choice of a free ad-supported service or a paid ad-free service at $7.50 monthly, with other perks such as the ability to save songs. Slacker says the first hand-held devices, which will start at $149, will refresh automatically when they're in WiFi zones, pulling in more music for listeners' radio stations and socking it away. That way, the stations can keep drawing on the stored music even when the device is nowhere near a wireless hot spot. The car devices, which Slacker says will be introduced later in the year, will use Mr. Milbrandt's satellite efforts. Subscribers will be able to drive around with a docked Slacker and receive a stream of songs beamed down from a satellite and stored on the hard drive. Once the antenna picks up the satellite signals, Slacker says it will transmit the songs to the device, which will save appropriate songs and reject those that don't match a listener's taste. Because it isn't streaming in real-time, Slacker's devices for now won't offer newscasts, traffic or sports scores. Slacker says it has another advantage. Most Internet radio operators are currently facing a major increase in the royalty rate they owe to artists whose songs they play, an increase so dramatic that royalty rates in some cases eclipse the company's total revenues. Most operators, including Pandora, are complaining that the higher costs may put them out of business. They're busy lobbying Congress to change the recent rate increase, imposed by the Copyright Royalty Board, a Washington, D.C.-based panel of judges. But Slacker says it already has a higher royalty rate built into its business model. Rather than paying statutory license fees, Slacker cut deals directly with record labels. Like satellite-radio broadcasters, Slacker will turn over an undisclosed percentage of revenue in royalties, rather than paying per song and per play. | ||||||
Write to Sarah McBride at sarah.mcbride@wsj.com | ||||||
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martes, junio 19, 2007
Internet Radio Races To Break Free of the PC.
lunes, junio 18, 2007
Cifras de oportunidades para publicidad dirigida en Web
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Compitiendo con el software en Internet. NYT
 TECHNOLOGY |
| Competing as Software Goes to Web By JOHN MARKOFF Published: June 5, 2007 Correction Appended Spanish translation |
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| SAN FRANCISCO, June 4 — Can two bitter rivals save the desktop operating system? In the battle between Apple and Microsoft, Bertrand Serlet and Steven Sinofsky are the field generals in charge of competing efforts to ensure that the PC's basic software stays relevant in an increasingly Web-centered world. The two men are marshaling their software engineers for the next encounter, sometime in 2009, when a new generation of Macintosh and Windows operating systems is due. Their challenge will be to avoid refighting the last war — and to prevent finding themselves outflanked by new competitors. Many technologists contend that the increasingly ponderous PC-bound operating systems that currently power 750 million computers, products like Microsoft's Windows Vista and Apple's soon-to-be-released Mac OS X Leopard, will fade in importance. In this view, software will be a modular collection of Web-based services — accessible by an array of hand-held consumer devices and computers — and will be designed by companies like Google and Yahoo and quick-moving start-ups. "The center of gravity and the center of innovation has moved to the Web, where it used to be the PC desktop," said Nova Spivack, chief executive and founder of Radar Networks, which is developing a Web service for storing and organizing information. Faced with that changing dynamic, Apple and Microsoft are expected to develop operating systems that will increasingly reflect the influence of the Web. And if their valuable turf can be preserved, it will largely reflect the work of Mr. Serlet and Mr. Sinofsky, veteran software engineers with similar challenges but contrasting management styles. Their rivalry took a personal tone last summer when Mr. Serlet publicly poked fun at Windows Vista by highlighting features that seemed derivative of Apple's OS X. "We hung in the hallways of the conference a big banner that said, 'Redmond, start your photocopiers,' " he said, recalling an event the year before. "It was all a joke, but they actually took us seriously." One software developer who has worked at both companies — and asked not to be identified because he still consults for Microsoft — compared the two men's approaches to the difference between martial marching band music and jazz. Mr. Sinofsky's approach, he said, is meticulously planned out from the beginning, with a tight focus on meeting deadlines — a crucial objective after the delay-plagued Vista project — but with little room for flexibility. In contrast, the atmosphere inside Apple's software engineering ranks has been much more improvisational. Mr. Serlet, a French computer scientist who was drawn to Silicon Valley two decades ago, has developed a loyal following among Apple's rank-and-file programmers. He has a quirky personality, according to several members of his team, and takes a certain amount of teasing inside the company. "Bertrand Serlet likes the process to be a little chaotic," said one Apple programmer, who insisted he not be identified because of company restrictions on public statements by employees. "There's a strong dependence on people making the right judgment calls the first time." Mr. Serlet and Mr. Sinofsky said they were too busy to give interviews. |
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| Mr. Sinofsky, 41, who joined Microsoft in 1989, is the senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live engineering group, a position he assumed a year ago after running the company's Office team of programmers. Mr. Serlet, 46, Apple's senior vice president for software engineering, left Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center to join Steven P. Jobs at Next Software in the late 1980s and has headed software development at Apple since 2003. Both men are the best of a technical elite. "Bertrand is wicked smart," said Dan'l Lewin, a Microsoft corporate vice president who worked with Mr. Serlet at Next. "He was one of the bright lights." Mr. Lewin now works with Mr. Sinofsky, who he said had brought needed discipline to the company's largest development project. "His ability is in understanding the end-to-end process and architecture and knowing every nook — it's amazing," Mr. Lewin said. People who know both men say that their contrasting management styles play out in the organization of the armies of software developers that are necessary to design complex operating systems. "Under Sinofsky, the culture is, you plan and stick to the plan," said Steven Capps, a former Apple and Microsoft programmer who has designed operating systems at both companies. "At Apple you see what you've got." The potential risk in the Microsoft approach, he said, is that "they're like the test pilots who won't pull up when they see the tarmac." As a technical assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, in 1994, Mr. Sinofsky was one of the Microsoft employees who alerted Mr. Gates to the Internet challenge, after seeing students using the Web at his alma mater, Cornell University. Now in charge of the company's most important development project, Mr. Sinofsky has proved to be far more secretive than his predecessor, Jim Allchin, who retired from Microsoft this year. Shortly after the consumer release of Vista in January, the company took the unusual step of issuing a statement saying that it had nothing to say about its plans for future operating systems. After struggling for more than half a decade with Vista, its most ambitious development project ever, Microsoft has begun work on a reportedly less ambitious successor under Mr. Sinofsky's leadership. The new operating system effort has in the past been referred to alternately as Vienna and Windows 7. Microsoft is trying again to reconcile the PC operating system with the Internet. It calls the new strategy Windows Live, an effort to leverage its desktop monopoly onto the Web. That effort can be seen in Mr. Sinofsky's dual role. He is in charge of development for both the next version of the Windows operating system and the new Internet services. The company has hinted recently that Mr. Sinofsky's team may be trying to keep the PC operating system relevant by redesigning it to take full advantage of next-generation processing chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices that will have dozens of internal processors. The company's chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, refers to the new approach as "integrated innovation." But it is less clear yet whether Mr. Sinofsky will have the agility to respond to what is being called an era of "loosely coupled innovation" — an agility that has been the hallmark of nimble Web services developers. Small groups of programmers have been using the Internet to introduce services far quicker than the slow-moving operating systems projects have been able to respond. "The challenge for Steve is to get Windows in that mode," said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor of management at the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the future, he added, Windows will most likely be broken into "smaller pieces released more frequently or put up as a Web service." That will mean that the era of big software releases may have come to an end. "I think that you won't think about big new releases in the future," said John Seely Brown, the former director of the Palo Alto Research Center. "You really want to be able to make lots of incremental improvements in ways that things just get better and better." The rise of the Web presents similar challenges for Apple. While the company has been extremely successful with iTunes, its online audio and video service, efforts like .Mac, a suite of Web-based applications that was intended to be an integrated part of the Mac OS X operating system, have lain fallow for several years. Now Mr. Serlet's programmers are planning to integrate Apple's consumer products and its personal computers more closely with the Internet, according to several people briefed on the company's plans. Indeed last week, at an industry conference, Mr. Jobs said that an infusion of Web services for Macintosh users was imminent. Apple is expected to add a networking capability to its next-generation iPod music players. In addition, the software for its next big product, the iPhone, is based on the core of OS X, the operating system for the Macintosh. The approach further blurs the line between the computer and other devices — as well the distinction between the device and the Internet as the place where programs and data reside. That shift is likely to be the distinctive feature of both companies' operating- system efforts. "It's a very important, longer-term trend of incremental innovation," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. Software will be "increasingly componentized and offered over the Web." Still, there are those in the industry who believe that the very nature of software will assure both Mr. Sinofsky and Mr. Serlet comfortable careers for the foreseeable future. "Software is like the tax code," said Jean-Louis Gassée, a venture capitalist and a former Apple executive, who in the 1990s developed an operating system called Be. "You add lines, but you never take anything away." Daniel D. Turner contributed reporting. Correction: June 6, 2007 An article in Business Day yesterday about efforts by Microsoft and Apple to develop their next operating systems misspelled the surname of a technology executive who commented on the migration of computer functions to the Web. He is Nova Spivack, not Spivak. |
domingo, junio 17, 2007
Aplicaciones Web 2.0. están siendo desperdiciadas por los profesionales de los departamentos de sistemas en las empresas tradicionales. IDC IT Forum & Expo Boston,
 SMB Connection: A SearchSMB.com blog A blog for professionals at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Abrir blog en el Browser. |
| Posted: June 7th, 2007 under Web 2.0. Time to wake up to Web 2.0 By Jeff Kelly, Associate Editor |
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When he started his first job, Dennis Moore was, as he put it, a task worker. Aside from a 10- or 15-minute briefing at the start of his shift on the Proctor & Gamble factory floor making soap, Moore had access to little, if any, information once he was on the clock. But times have changed. Speaking today at the IDC IT Forum & Expo in Boston, Moore, now general manager of emerging solutions at SAP, spoke of the rise of the information worker, one who not only expects but also needs constant access to company information to successfully do his or her job. Even in manufacturing environments, information workers are quickly replacing task workers. Moore said he recently visited a GE plant where employees sport wrist-mounted computers to keep up to speed on company developments. So how do you foster a work environment that stresses access to real-time information, knowledge sharing and employee collaboration? You guessed it: Web 2.0. Blogs, RSS and wikis are the equivalent today of the PC and voicemail 20 years ago, Moore said, and are the tools that will enable information workers to do their jobs more efficiently than ever before. Surprising then, or is it, that of the 50 to 60 attendees listening to Moore's presentation, exactly zero raised a hand when Moore asked how many currently worked at a company that uses any Web 2.0 technologies. Even more flabbergasting, only half said they even had a reasonable grasp of what Web 2.0 means! And this is a room full of IT pros! Moore even had to explain what RSS was, and by the looks on some of the faces in the crowd, it was clear that it was news to them. During the same presentation, though, Moore cited an IDC survey that found that 45% of companies are at least experimenting with blogs, 43% with RSS and 35% with wikis. How can this be? How can the percentage of Web 2.0 users in a room full of IT pros be 0%, and the percentage of companies as a whole using Web 2.0 technologies hover somewhere near the 40% mark? The answer: More and more employees are bringing Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise without the involvement of IT. Even within IT departments, Moore said, rouge workers are experimenting with blogs and wikis for work purposes without IT managers even being aware of it. The problem, of course, is that when employees introduce unauthorized technologies to the workplace, the risk of a security breach or accidental noncompliance goes up enormously. And who's ultimately held responsible? The IT department, in general; CIOs and IT managers, specifically. Blogs and wikis aren't going away, on that everyone can agree. And while I've written before and still believe that it'll be some time before Web 2.0 technologies penetrate the enterprise mainstream, it seems clear to me that it's high time IT pros wake up to the coming Web 2.0 wave before it topples them and their careers. |
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