trendwatching: solar apps, return of the zune, cell phone wars
In this trendwatching podcast, Cathi Bond connects to her inner James Bond with this amphibian car-boat. She also talks about a great new solar application: Konarka makes this flexible surface that you can put on your windows. It seals in heat/coolness and generates power.
Meanwhile, Nora picks up on a comment Cathi made about the Zune. Is its redesigned model ready to hit the big time? WIRED’s gadget lab says the new Zune is the “gift of this season“. This leads Cathi and Nora to talk about Google’s plans for the cell phone market. Cathi refers to this Vanity Fair article and the future of gadgets. Should Apple be worried? Nora also talks about the Open Handset Alliance (well, she would have if she could have remembered the name of it!) and Google’s plans. Is it “rule by anarchy” as VF thinks?
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:33 am
Great episode.
During vacations to Hot Springs, Arkansas, during my childhood, we’d ride the “ducks”, military amphibious trucks converted into tourist conveyances on a local lake.
Zune seems to have hit a nice point–a nice bit of technology with the price point constantly improving. However, I think that for many of us, with Apple, the resistance to the iPod has not been the need to be “cool” so much as a disapproval of its rights management and intentional negation of interoperability in the way iTunes was constructed. As time goes on, and the prospects for inter-platform compatibility seem to improve, this objection is diminishing.
I begin to believe, though, that the “buy last year’s technology” rule may apply in this context, as a 2 GB simple audio player is now running 20 to 30 us dollars in the post-xmas sales, and it becomes clearer that in the long run mp3 players will not be like games consoles with large-ish prices, but like transistor radios and pocket calculators, uibiquitous, cheap and wonderful (so much so as to be taken for granted).
January 5th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Interesting…As far as the masses go, I think that we’ll have to wait until there is a music site that can truly compete with iTunes. It’s just so darned easy to use. Heck I”m always in there spending money. I’ve used Limewire and Bit Torrent and was on Napster at the beginning, but had so many problems with my computer (sludgy) as a result, so I’m an iTunes ho.
Believe me, I’d love for that to change. I *hate* how proprietary they are.