Category — Analysis

It’s been a bit of a battle over the last few years but DRM-free music is finally here. Let’s recap:

~2006 and prior – Music industry can’t fathom the possability of DRM-Free music… it will be the end of the Industry.

Feb 2007 – Steve Jobs writes ‘Thoughts on Music‘.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.

May 2007 – EMI (one of the ‘Big 4′) provides it’s entire music catalog to iTunes DRM-Free. Songs are available at a higher 256kbps quality and previously purchased tracks can be upgraded for the price difference (~$0.29/track) automatically.

June 2007 – iTunes surpasses Amazon and moves into the #3 spot for US music sales.

Sep 2007 – Amazon launches DRM-Free MP3 store with 2 million tracks including those from EMI and Universal . They later add Warner in Dec and Sony BMG in Jan 2008, thus becoming the first online store to offer DRM-Free music from the ‘Big 4′. Analysts believe this will loosen the grip of iTunes over the music industry.

Jan 2008 – iTunes becomes the #1 music retailer in the US, surpassing brick and mortar giants Best Buy and Walmart. Amazon remains in fourth with 6% market share.

Dec 2008 – Amazon is growing while physical CD sales slump, but still no rival to iTunes.

But Piper Jaffray financial analyst Gene Munster estimates that Amazon will sell 130 million tracks this year — a paltry sum compared with the 2.4 billion songs iTunes is expected to sell in 2008.

Yesterday – The Industry realizes, digital is where it’s at. Apple announces full iTunes catalog is going to iTunes Plus format. (DRM-Free, 256kbps, fully compatible with Mac/PC/iPod/Zune/Squeezecenter/etc). 8 million DRM-Free tracks available now. Remaining 2+ million coming by end of Q1.

Digital music is here to stay. Next up digital video.

Let’s cut to the chase… the iPhone has been huge.

Plenty of smart people predicted it would be a flop either because they simply missed the mark, or perhaps more cynically, because they just didn’t want to believe it.

Well, in only 18 months it’s become clear that Apple is having a field day with the iPhone. They’ve smashed their 10M mark prediciton for CY08, the iPhone ranks highest in customer satisfaction according to J.D. Power and Associates, it is now outselling all Windows mobile phones combined and nipping at RIM’s heels, and Apple’s just getting started. So much for:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” -Palm CEO Ed Colligan

Many have also noticed that Apple is making a BIG push on games as well, but I’m not sure the potential here has been fully understood. The iPhone isn’t simply transforming the mobile phone market, it’s expanding it to a mobile computing, mobile gaming, mobile web surfing, mobile just-about-anything-you-can-think-of market, and it’s going to be big.

Take the recent figures from NPD on gaming console sales. As usual, Arstechinca has a nice write up about the shear dominance of Nintendo in the market.

But what about the iPhone? Let’s take a look at how iPhone/iPod touch sales compare to the market dominating Nintendo DS. Conveniently, the sales figures for the DS were also much easier to come by.

We can take away a few key points from this:

• Last quarter iPhone sales were on par with the DS.
• iPhone sales are expected to continue to grow rapidly, far faster than the DS.
• Add in sales of iPod touches as well and Nintendo suddenly has a force to reckon with. We can’t know the exact number for sure because Apple doesn’t breakdown iPod sales by model. However, assuming a conservative 10-15% of iPods sold are touches accounts for an additional 5 to 8 million gaming devices in peoples’ hands.

We’ll see what happens in the coming months but at this point Apple appears to have struck another chord, this time in gaming. The seamless integration of the App Store, iTunes, and device, coupled with the processing power, motion/touch control, over the air downloads, and location based services seems to have hit the mark.

As Arstechnica concluded “We’ve seen the future of gaming, and it is casual.” Quite frankly, this fits perfectly with gaming on the go with the iPhone & iPod touch.

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For more reading, John Gruber has an excellent analysis and summary of Apple’s new “third leg” for the company.

Source data: iPod Sales – DS Sales

I’ve now been a happy paying customer for 37signals’ Backpack for well over 2 years. Over that time the app has become far more convenient and polished to use and I’ve personally found better and better ways to get value out of it.

Case in point, planning a trip. Now I’m certainly not the only one to use Backpack for this purpose but I’d like to share the ways I find it most valuable.

Glimpse of What’s Coming
The first thing you’ll find is that when travel is in the works, I create a page with a consistent naming convention and add it to my sidebar such that the upcoming trips sort chronologically. This isn’t a direct replacement for my calendar, just a quick look at where we’re pretty busy and when we have some down time. Plus it’s a great unobtrusive reminder that something is getting closer and needs to be looked at more closely.

Capture the Basics Early On
With Backpack, I can create a page far in advance to capture the basics of the trip. I was recently at a conference in Copenhagen for example where I had registered about 6 months in advance. I created the page, forwarded my registration confirmation to it, and the info was there waiting for me to polish off the details later on when the event was closer.

Flush Out the Details with Rich Content
With the ability to forward emails directly to Backpack, create links, add images, and more, Backpack is incredibly robust in capturing a range of information. You can even embed live Google Maps which is absolutely brilliant for travel. For my parents’ trip coming up we started with some basic ideas and gradually filled in the blanks.

Sharing
Speaking of my parents’ trip, thanks to the newish sharing features (also brilliant), I can securely share the page with my folks so they can access and contribute to all the information without even having to sign up for an account.

All in One Place Ready to Go
Finally, and one of my favorite parts. When it’s time to head out, I open the page, embedded email attachments, and maps, and print them out to take with me. They’re all in one place so it only takes a few minutes and it saves having to hunt through old emails for reservations and flight confirmations. Easy peasy!

Even better still, as with all 37signals apps, you can sign up for a limited account for free for as long as you like and then upgrade later if you need the extra space or features.

Full disclosure: 37signals does have an affiliate program so if you click some of the links and end up signing up, I will receive a small credit. Not to worry however, I’ve been singing the praises of Backpack long before this more recent development!

At first glance adding Coverflow and Quicklook to OS X Leopard appeared to be largely for the aesthetics.

Over the last 6 weeks I’ve come to use Quicklook almost daily but it wasn’t until today at work (PCs only) that I’m missing it dreadfully. I’m trying to clear through the files on my PC and network shares to see what I need to bring for the big move and what is outdated and can be trashed (err… recycled). Moving is a great chance to clean out the crap.

Unfortunately opening every PDF, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint doc to see what’s in there is a drag, and it doesn’t help that this Dell box is on it’s last legs (mind you it’s only 2 years old).

Quicklook, I miss you.

For those of us who can’t get enough of our 2 GB no 3 GB no wait, now 4+ Gigs of free Ad-supported Gmail goodness, Google upped the ante on Wednesday by enabling FREE IMAP access (finally) for all accounts to the delight of many. A fair amount has already been covered on this topic (Gmail Blog, ArsTechnica, Engadget, 5ThirtyOne) (the web works fast), but I hope to offer some additional insight.

What’s the big deal?

A few months ago I started using Mail.app again as my primary email client. For the longest time I had stuck with the web based Gmail interface but for various reasons (spotlight search in the OS, Quicksilver integration, picking up a shiny new iPhone, etc.) I moved to using a client most of the time and accessing mail via POP. My setup was simple… access mail at home on my iMac, out and about on my iPhone, and when traveling on my Powerbook all via the native Mail.app application.
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