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Dec 7

Is iTunes the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

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This was a question asked by a Hi-fi supplier in Manchester City Centre yesterday.

Think about he said.

“You buy your iPhone or iPod. You buy an expensive laptop or iMac to manage your music library, you synchronise your music library, and dock your portable music player into the latest Bose, Bowers or JLB music speaker system.

And somehow it is all a little flat. It just sounds a bit rubbish.”

In my case, it often kicks out. Try transmitting your iTunes over wireless and your musical moment comes crashing down when you switch on the microwave to defrost the chicken.

2K’s worth of hard earned cash invested in the latest and greatest music technology known to man and it doesn’t even work.

But is this the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

We are all led to believe that Apple is the trailblazer for music. Buy Apple and you are at the forefront of music innovation, but it is all a big lie.

Apple has only offered us convenience. It is convenient that our music is now portable and we can carry 1000′s of album in the palm of our hand, but have we made a mistake in assuming that convenience equates to quality?

And the swindle continues. Because we have invested so much in the iTunes revolution we continue to invest and download our music from the iTunes store. But do we ever own that music? Can a parent pass on their music collection to their son or daughter? What happens to all that content once they die? It dies with them. You never truly own the music. You are just borrowing it from the cloud. You are in fact buying air.

And the air quality is thin. The files significantly compressed to save space. They are a long way from the full studio quality output often described as FLAC – lossless audio compression and decompression.

iTunes does not have a hold on this space. There are online music stores where you can purchase FLAC. You can also burn FLAC files direct from your CD.

The man in the Manchester store sat me down, he downloaded a FLAC file and networked this with losless cables to a high-fidelity sound system.

“I won’t use a CD he said, because even the turn of the CD and the laser will lower the quality of the overall result”.

And what a result. The sound filled the room. The orchestra was right there. The vocalist sat across from me. Music like nothing you had heard before. And all for significantly less than 2K!

My advice to us all. Love iTunes for the convenience – listen on the commute, listen at work, but don’t stop buying CD’s. You own them and have a tangible product in your hand. You can also share them without a complicated password and home share system.

Convenience has been a revolution, but quality should always prevail.

Demand the best media experience available.

Oct 6

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

…

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

…

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Excerpt from Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005.

Image from martincahill | photography.

Apr 16

Great Adventures in Apple iPad

Once every year, and during the Summer, I was taken by train to Yorkshire to stay with my Great Aunt Joyce. I did not know at the time just how important those visits were. At the age of nine I was stepping into a world beyond the school gate and the comfort of my family home. It was a great adventure.

Aunt Joyce also introduced me to a world of new experiences, from vikings to cream cakes, and from theme parks to cricket. She also introduced me to new types of media. Her TV was a relic and was rarely on; I remember trying to watch a football match in black and white and quickly gave up. Instead her home was filled with paintings, books and letters from distance worlds – India, the Caribbean, and Australia.

Joyce would continually ask what I was reading and was always keen to see me read more. During my early visits she would often have a gift for us –  a pop-up book. I loved those things. It was more than just reading, although that was part of it too, but there was colour, things-to-do, levers to pull and things to press. It was yet another adventure into a whole new world of Dragons (Sword in the Stone), wayward Rabbits (Peter Rabbit), and disgruntled Toads (Wind in the Willows).

They had a mesmerising affect on me, and I know even today that Joyce passes on those same gifts to my younger cousins in the family (I only wish I knew where she buys them).

Today I came across a fantastic video clip on YouTube showing Alice in Wonderland on the Apple iPad. The pop-up book is alive once again, I thought. Things to do, buttons to press, dragons to slay, and princesses to rescue.

To a generation naturally drawn to the blinding diodes and lights of video games, could the iPad and other technologies like it pave a path back to the wonders of reading? I suspect Aunt Joyce would hope so, but aside from any arguments about literacy, I believe that such applications will bring in a new age of creativity, exploration and opportunity, and not just for the kids, but for the developers too.

N.B. Great Aunt Joyce is also an Aunt to this fella. I wonder what influences she had on his media career?

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Article posted at Free Trade Press – the free trade of ideas.

Oct 17

3 Comments

A Digital Pen saved my life?

I’ve been researching technology innovations across the public sector of late and one technology, Digital Pen and Paper, could, potentially, have quite serious ramifications for our very lives. This sounds dramatic and we may even ask what do Digital Pens offer that can’t be done by other IT innovations? But in a sector swamped in paper it provides an immediate solution that mimics the way work is currently performed whilst benefiting from the digitisation of information.

This short-piece reads as follows:

Select any of the following service areas and within them think about the paper trail that is enacted from the front-line and how much time and resource is spent moving data?

  1. Social Services Home Care
  2. Pest Control
  3. Council Tax
  4. Housing
  5. Food Hygiene
  6. Environmental Health

The numbers can often be dramatic and in some cases over 50% of our organisations time and resource is spent on moving information. Now imagine that very same information can be captured once, at the source, and in an electronic format. Once in an electronic format we can move information around freely and easily. There is no need to employ time and effort re-entering data at the end of the day only for sections of that data to be passed to other departments for re-entry. The economic argument is dramatic, but there is another aspect that is far more fundamental.

Like before, consider each of those same service areas (using traditional pen and paper processes) and consider the likely outcome should a critical piece of information fail to be sent or received.

In all cases, even the slightest delay in an information article not being received could be the difference between life and death. It is that serious really. One delayed housing request could be the difference between an individual losing themselves on the streets or making that critical intervention to rehabilitation. Digital Pen and Paper is one solution to this very problem, as you don’t have to wait for information to be entered onto the central system; it is already there. The Digital Pen and Paper also maintains a second copy of all records and maintains an information trace should it be required.

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