Maybe Sony bought Gracenote so that Apples iPhone 2.0 will not be able to listen
April 30th, 2008 Ralf Scharnetzki[Post edited last 1st of May 2008 to insert comment below the article about Shazam as an alternative to Gracenote]
Our hypothesis:
Maybe Sony bought Gracenote at the 22nd of April 2008 for $260M so that Apples iPhone 2.0 announced for June 2008 will not be able to listen to music and identify what song is played.
Our line-of-reasoning behind that:
1) January 7th 2008:
Listen.app for hacked iPhones is released http://ericasadun.com/?p=126.
The developer Erica Sadun released beginning of January 2008 the Phone application “Listen” that makes use of the Gracenote sound recognition service to identify title, artist and album for any music that the application would “hear” (nice overview here). Users could click on a link to go to iTunes to buy the song directly online (not fully functional in the beta). User feedback to Listen.app is extremely positive:
“Listen. Motivated two of them to go buy iPhones, a smart move since 1.3 has hit. But the BEST sign that Listen is powerful came when I showed it t my wife. She could care less about gadgets and basically has pretended to be interested in whatever I show her on my iPhone. But when I showed her Listen, she suddenly became VERY interested. If it caught HER attention, that means there’s a huge market for Listen.”
Source: http://ericasadun.com/?p=143
The expected release of the iPhone 2.0 SDK in June 2008 would allow every iPhone owner to run Listen.app as an application on his phone.
2) January 14th 2008:
Listen.app has to be stopped because Gracenote wants to get it license fees for the usage of its service http://ericasadun.com/?p=143. A person that claims to be Stephen White, the VP of Product and Content Management at Gracenote, commented Erica’s post:
“Our Partner Sony Ericsson has been at the forefront of integrating this type of functionality and has integrated the results into their store, and into recommendations. Their implementation provides many of the functions you have asked for in your comments here and I urge you all to check out their handsets.
Apple is also a Gracenote partner and has the opportunity to integrate this feature into their iPhone platform. We cannot comment on their plans but we urge you to let them know that you would like this feature.”
3) April 22nd 2008:
Sony bought Gracenote for $260M: News on Forbes
Closing comments:
While there are alternatives to Gracenote services (example: http://musicbrainz.org/ ) there is the possibility that Gracenotes acoustic recognition service (originally invented by Philips: details here- http://ismir2002.ismir.net/proceedings/02-FP04-2.pdf ) especially in situations with background noise (the typical scenario for an application on a mobile device that is trying to identify a song that is played maybe in the radio of the taxi driver) is better than what Apple could get from another service.
It looks to us like Sony is with the acquisition of Gracenote in the position to either:
- prevent or delay a Listen.app like solution on the iPhone and get for Sony Ericsson mobile phones a competitive advantage or
- charge a premium for using Gracenote acoustic recognition on iPhone 2.0 or
- participate on every iTunes sale generated through a Listen.app like solution on the iPhone 2.0 platform
Disclaimer:
This is a theoretical line-of-reasoning, we put it together because all of us are enjoying good rumors around Apple. We have no further insights than the information provided here.
Update (edited last 1st May 2008):
Shazam has been mentioned as a viable alternative to Gracenote. There is from an Apple/iTunes perspective a potential issue with Shazam’s business model : Shazam is with its new music/video download service directly competing with Apple/iTunes. This is in our view likely to be a show-stopper for Apple to use Shazam’s meta data service for audio recognition. On the other side you can obviously argue that the competition between Apple and Gracenote/Sony is even hotter.
“Vodafone, Shazam launch mobile music video downloads
By Nick Wood , Total Telecom, in Barcelona 13 February 2008
Mobile music software company Shazam announced this week it has signed an agreement with Vodafone UK to allow consumers to download full-length music videos and songs to their handsets.… once customers have identified the song they’re hearing, they now have the option to download the full-length audio track for £1.50, or the music video for £1.99.”
Source: http://www.totaltele.com/View.aspx?ID=98390&t=2
The number of songs in the recognition database is one of the important factors that will drive the user experience of applications like Listen.app and the user experience is all what iPhone is about. Shazam is mentioning on its website “over 4 million tracks”, Gracenote claims to have “over 7 million audio waveform fingerprints” (all figures as of 1st of May, 2008).
Posted in Interesting Links | 12 Comments »IBM Global Innovation Outlook: If you want to see what business leadership may look like, look at what is happening in online games
April 3rd, 2008 Ralf Scharnetzki
"Online games put the future of business leadership on display.
Online gaming environments facilitate leadership through:
1. Project-oriented organization
2. Multiple real-time sources of information upon which to make decisions
3. Transparent skills and competencies among co-players
4. Transparent incentive systems
5. Multiple and purpose-specific communications mediums"
Source: http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/www_innovate.nsf/pages/world.gio.gaming.html
Posted in Interesting Links | No Comments »Where to buy and how to play also on Apple OSX the fantastic shoot them up Arcade game ROM "Rayforce"
März 30th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiWe as the team behind our “line-of-reasoning” are passionate about highlighting challenges and opportunities in everybody’s life in the information age. Currently we are researching a specific sub-niche of the software market for games. We will share with you in the following article some interesting parallels of the digital marketplaces for Arcade / Retro games on the one hand side and the Music market on the other. We will express our hope that Apple will step into the Arcade / Retro market place and make it as easy for consumers to buy and enjoy these digital games as they have done with the itunes / ipod combo for digital music.
From your reactions, we know that you like our articles and you enjoy even more our concrete and practical tutorials (examples: Task management with Microsft´s Onenote; Practicing Google document security issues). In the article below we are going to explain how you can already today play Arcade / Retro games on your Apple Macintosh OSX right away, without having to wait for Apple to also solve the issues of the digital market for Arcade / Retro games.
Because the best is just good enough for our readers we picked the famous Arcade game “Rayforce” - one of the greatest shoot them ups of all times (read this review, or this to see what we mean) - as the example for our little “how to” Arcade / Retro gaming guide on Apples Macintosh OSX. But to be clear: there is no such thing as a free lunch here, we will show you where to buy Rayforce (so it will cost you some $) and how to make it run in Apple´s OSX (so it will cost in addition also your time).
More fun after the click!
Posted in Identified Issues, Recommended Products | 1 Comment »Touching on the central dualism of the information age: What information is available to you versus what information are you making available (or is available about you) to others?
Februar 29th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiIn sometimes heated discussions around Facebook, Twitter, P2P, Social Networks, Meshups the Internet community has recently touched from different angles on the same underlying generic question:
What information is available to you versus what information are you making available (or is available about you) to others?
Lots of concepts that in the past have been considered only by theoretical philosophers/scientists as “information” are now experienced from everyone on a daily basis as exactly that: information that is immediately available (examples: music=mp3 files, with itunes being now the 2nd largest music retailer in the US ; movies=avi files; social networks: facebook).
The evolution of technology is responsible for bringing up questions like this:
- Is it already illegal to click on a link found by Google search (currently the legal situation in the UK for this is unclear, details here)?
- How much should information should I make publicly available about myself (interesting example: http://www.realtea.net/too_much_info )?
But because new technologies/services like Facebook, Twitter, P2P, Social Networks, Meshups are stimulating intensive discussions of Privacy, Copyright and Ownership of Data these services are also providing the opportunity for the society to make decisions (through parliament/congress or courts) about the rules that organizations and individuals will follow in the future. There is a relationship between the rules (that constraint what information you can legally access and distribute) and the economy, as Friedman’s remark regarding Copyright is showing:
Freedom of speech is the opposite of copyright, which means that you can’t get copyright right. And, intellectual property is different from physical property: in both cases, you have a monopoly but the monopoly on intellectual property is wholly different because duplicating the property comes generally at a very low or zero marginal cost. You are enforcing a monopoly pricing, as it were, that limits output to lower than the optimum social level. You cannot be in favor of infinite copyright.
http://www.cato.org/special/friedman/friedman/friedman4.html
In the context of globalization and global competition it remains to be seen what impact any country/region specific rules for information access and distribution will have.
For now just click below to read about some of the most recent decisions (at the beginning of 2008) and what arguments out of the ongoing discussions we found so far worth listing.
Example of how Data Quality issues can ripple through a service and reduce the quality of the user experience: the Amazon case revisited
Januar 20th, 2008 Ralf ScharnetzkiIn a previous post we discussed Data Quality issues in Amazons product catalog. We showed the details of how those Data Quality issues can make it for Consumers difficult to find the products that they are interested in. As a consequence of the low Data Quality it is “easy” to pay on Amazon for exactly the same product $20 too much. But there is more that can be demonstrated with this concrete case: See below how the identified Data Quality issue ripples through Amazons service and continues to reduce the shopping experience.
Posted in Identified Issues | No Comments »Examples of News that you would miss using only RSS and or Google Reader
Dezember 31st, 2007 Ralf ScharnetzkiGoogle Reader is a highly recommended tool to browse News feeds. But not every bit of information and also not every News on the Web is available as an RSS feed. Now you could argue that in this case you just do not care about those pieces of information because there is anyhow too much information on the Web available. This is certainly true. But are you not interested in:
- great buying opportunities on Apple.com,
- your chance to save money after shopping on Amazon or
- search results that Google found some days after you done a search?
For more details please read on.
Posted in Identified Issues, Recommended Products | 1 Comment »Data Quality issues cost you as a Consumer time and money: Shopping on Amazon as an example
November 1st, 2007 Ralf ScharnetzkiData quality issues? Is this not something only relevant to business analysts, data-warehouse specialists or market researchers? 10 years ago probably most of us would have thought so. And according to Gartner, Inc. ( the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company ) the cost of poor Data Quality is also going to continue in the future to hurt organizations around the world (listen to Gartners Voice interesting podcast here: The Cost of poor Data Quality).
We are going to show in this article that the Internet has also changed that: No longer Data Quality issues are hidden behind corporate (fire)walls. The Internet is “transporting” Data Quality issues directly to the computer of everyone who is shopping online.
To make this article more interesting we are going to demonstrate that Data Quality issues cost you as a Consumer time and money by looking at the largest online retailer as an example: Amazon (probably everyone else has the same issues but because of Amazons size it is easier to spot them on Amazon). Please continue reading if you do not want to spend $20 too much for your next USB Hub just because of some Data Quality issues in Amazons product catalog.
The power of Mashups explained: Another Desktop usage scenario is moving to the Web
Oktober 20th, 2007 Ralf ScharnetzkiIntel, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, SAP and IBM: All of them are investing to take a dominant market share of the booming “Mashup” trend. From a user perspective the concept of Mashups is rather simple to get:
Be aware: You will not be able to delete from Google Docs any image embedded in your Presentations
September 21st, 2007 Ralf ScharnetzkiGoogle launched this week the capability to store in addition to Docs and Spreadsheets also Presentations on Google Docs. This new capability is easy to use and very valuable. But a simple test has shown that there is right now (September 2007) an issue with Presentations on Google Docs that you maybe should know of:
Posted in Identified Issues | 1 Comment »You will currently not be able to delete from Google Docs any image that is embedded in your Presentations.
Google´s Universal Search to search GMail, Google Documents and Social Networks!
August 21st, 2007 Ralf ScharnetzkiOpen Letter to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google
August 2007
Dear Mrs. Mayer,
Your announcement of “Universal Search” in May 2007 got everyone including us excited. We would like to build on your concept of Universal Search and suggest to you the following road map to deliver to the world what we call the “Ultimate Universal Search”:
Read the rest of this entry »
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