Tag Archives: Amazon

Rule the World

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June 23, 2011

We’ve been scouring the web in the last week or so to find out more about the announcements from Mr Jobs on a raft of new Blackberry-baiting features for the new iPhone operating system (iOS5), stuff about clouds and general Apple gossip.

Let’s start with iMessage which is being touted as the Apple equivalent to Blackberry’s BBM service. BBM has successfully attracted a non-business user (yes teens!) to the Blackberry brand, and it seems that with iMessage, Apple could do the same and improve its position in this market.

Notification Center (sic) meanwhile is a great improvement. New emails, text messages, multimedia messages, reminders, Game Center notifications, mail alerts, Twitter notifications and any other sort of items which could normally trigger a push notification will soon find their way into the Notification Center. They’ll be called to your attention on your iOS lock screen, via a regular pop up alert, or with a small non-intrusive banner which briefly flashes across the top of your screen.

On to iCloud now. This really is the biggest thing from Apple since the iPad launch (which incidentally at 25m units sold makes it a far faster seller than the iPhone). iCloud will be integrated with iOS5 and many of the apps like iPhoto, documents, apps, iBooks, contacts, calendar and mail will have built in iCloud functionality after the update. The iOS5 update is free & includes 5GB cloud storage.

Photostream is another great app that will allow photos to be uploaded to iCloud, then synced across multiple devices and tablets.

With competition fierce on all fronts for Apple (Google Music Beta and Amazon Cloud competing for music storage supremacy; a raft of new tablets all touting iPad-killing features and more) this announcement needed to be a big one, and it sure was.

It may be losing out now in the operating system war with Android, but Apple is still the undisputed king of cool gadgets and great functionality. When they pull it out of the bag with announcements like this, others can only look on in envy.
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Posted by the7stars

Thank You For The Music

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May 16, 2011

Cloud based music streaming services are big news this year. Spotify has always delivered music this way and is believed to be launching in the US imminently, Amazon has already launched its Cloud Player whilst Apple is believed to be unveiling its cloud-based streaming version of iTunes later this summer.

The fourth big player, Google, launched its version ‘Music Beta by Google’ on Thursday 12th May. This takes the form of a cloud-based ‘online storage locker’ for users, from where they can stream and download files to internet-connected devices.

Driving the launch is the completion of Google’s new music player Android app, which can play any music stored on Android devices. However, the app can’t access music from the cloud unless users are part of the beta test. The service will initially only be available on a limited, invite-only basis to US users. If you are part of the test, you can upload 20gb of music for free.

There are initial drawbacks – uploading 20GB of music will take a long time at most people’s broadband speed. Additionally, Google has launched without licensing agreements with the major labels, so there’s no purchase functionality. However, domestic broadband speeds are ever-increasing and the legal deals will surely get sorted so these are minor issues. The main point is that this is an instant ‘stepping-up’ of the battle between Google and Apple that began with Android and intensified when YouTube announced its move into the movie rental market on May 10th…but that’s a story for another What’s Hot. For now, the question is what Music Beta means for the music industry.

Once the licensing deals are done, there will be no need for uploading your music – Google Music will just mirror it in the cloud. At the same time, purchase functionality can then be added which means it becomes easier to legally add songs to your Google Music library – with just one click – than to have to find them via P2P, download them to your device and then upload them to Google Music. Anything that makes P2P a less attractive proposition has to appeal to the record companies. The Huffington Post reports that negotiations have only stalled with Universal & Sony so one assumes this will swiftly get resolved.

Let’s assume negotiations are resolved in Google’s favour. Once this is sorted, It’s a straightforward, easy step to add a subscription service which will thereby also include all the music not already in your collection. So, a perfect merger of owned music and everything else via subscription seems just around the corner.

Google’s announcement is not great news for Spotify, given that it has still not managed to launch in the US. Google’s launch is also surely the thinking behind the launch last week of Spotify’s interface that feeds users’ iTunes libraries into their Spotify player.

So, music consumption moving to a subscription based service seems inevitable. All eyes will be on Apple’s response this summer – it will need to raise the bar to keep iTunes in the ascendancy.
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Posted by the7stars