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Nokia takes the lead in bringing podcasts to mobile and I think that’s great news!

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Nokia Podcasting Application for S60 at gotomobile.com, now the beta application for the Nokia N91 is available for download here. Thanks for the tip, Steven!

Steven at Nokia informs me that this version is compatible with other S60 3rd edition devices, but not optimized for them yet. The beta is English only with the multilanguage version expected late Fall 2006. So for the ones out there with an N91, go out there and try it. For the ones who don’t know me yet, mobile podcasting (also called mobcasting) is one of my favourite mobile applications.

The Nokia Podcasting application allows you to find, subscribe to and download podcasts over the air with your Nokia N91. After downloading a podcast, you can listen to or watch it when you want.

You can choose whether the Podcasting application uses Wireless LAN (requires WLAN network access) or GPRS/WCDMA packet data (requires a packet data plan) to download podcasts to your Nokia N91.

These are the kind of applications that make the difference as to which phone I’m going to buy next, especially since my iPod broke (yes they do!) some time ago.

Now some music recognition and recommendation service (Musicstrands?) build around those radio podcasts and I’m all set to buy mobile music as I would like to… Actually not really, I still need that flat rate data plan from my operator - guys, what are you waiting for?

3G, Announcements, mobcasting, mobcasts, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, mobile podcast, Music, nokia, Operators, podcasting, podcasts, s60, web 2.0, wi fi

It has been a while since I wrote on mobile music applications; not the ones as we know of them now - simple OTA downloads of ring-, real- and mp3 tones, but the ones that are just coming to the mobile market and are using new, innovative technology to create different business models for the mobile music scene. In a few years from here, buying music will be a complete digital process and the mobile is going to play a crucial part in this. For the readers missing this point, feel free to browse my archives, category mobile music.

One of the companies I discovered last year was Musicstrands. At first that time, I thought another social music service like Last.fm and Pandora, build on collaborative filtering and recommendation technologies to make you discover new music. An sich, to me, the way to go if you’re considering digital music distribution for the coming years. But MusicStrands is different in the way they choose resolutely for Mobile. I got really interested in what they do when I saw their Music Guru demo-presentation during 3GSM, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe. I wrote about that in my 3GSM Afterwrap.

Last weeks’ article from Carlo in Business 2.0 “Your Wireless Future” mentioned them again so I went to visit Musicstrands‘ website for an update. I must admit, I liked the progress and the new stuff I could do with it on my cell phone.

You can download the MyStrands plugin for iTunes, join the community, create your own playlists (or upload existing ones), tag your music and share it with others and receive recommendations form others. A lot of new stuff has been added lately like Playlist builder, tagcloud, m-charts, world map. Check it out!

Check also their MusicStrands Labs and discover their experiments with Music Discovery through Web 2.0 Mashups:

“With these collections of mashups, you are able to discover multi-media content related to your favourite artist/s. Just write down an artist name and click Go. We will fetch the artist biography from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts from Technorati, personal goals from 43things, and events from Upcoming. You can then use recommended artists from MusicStrands to continue the experience and enjoy more multi-media content for those suggested artists.”

Way to go!

Discover MyStrands Mobile, it works on Symbian, Windows Mobile, Smartphones, Java phones, and soon, BREW. You can download the Windows or Java client versions here or visit mobile.musicstrands.com directly from your mobile. Here’s what you get once you created your profile. I leave the discovery process for you to discover

MuscStrands created OpenStrands Public API, a set of web services for developers interested in adding MusicStrands functionality to their non-commercial applications, the obligatory smart move for every self-respecting software development company.

I tried out probably everything I could during a weekend and got all excited about the progress, specifically in the mobile field, everything run smoothly. What MusicStrands offers the mobile industry is desktop, website, and mobile discovery solutions, that work synchronised, and work independently.

After having tried all the goodies, I wondered how MusicStrands positions itself against the ones as last.fm and Pandora including iTunes - they recommend tunes nowadays too, so I asked the guys behind MusicStrands and got in touch with Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria, Vice President, Communication at Musicstrands, he was very helpful giving feedback on my curiosity.

On the question how MusicStrands differs from VisualRadio he answered: “Visual Radio is not a personalized service. MusicStrands builds the technology to provide personalized mobile radios, based on the specific tastes of individuals and groups (plus other functionalities). So I would say these are two different services.”

Asking Gabriel about the key differences with services like last.fm and Pandora, he says:

“last-fm — offers weekly artist recommendations, based on the entire profile of a user; - last.fm does not understand the context of users, most of us have eclectic tastes in music (we may like both Mozart and AC/DC, but never listen to them together) and listen to specific artists or songs at specific moments. Last.fm fails to understand this, and contextual recommendations are critical for the mobile industry (recommend me what I want to listen to NOW, although I like AC/DC, I may not feel like listening to them now). MusicStrands recommends songs, artists and albums. Last.fm recommends artists. And they can only do that weekly. We do that instantly, whenever a recommendation is needed.

Pandora offers currently 400,000 songs and we offer today 6Million and are growing rapidly thanks to our Indy project. Pandora is a group of experts defining similarity; at MusicStrands, it is the community that decides that 2 songs are similar. Their approach is not scalable (because it requires “expert” intervention), MusicStrands’ technology has been designed to scale, to be able to recommend millions of different items to millions of different individuals.”

More on his vision of MusicStrands, as opposed to other technologies:

“It’s all about discovering music and rediscovering your own music library and manage your content.

The idea is to provide contextual music recommendations. Additionally, MusicStrands wants not just to push music, but to help people pull, decide what they may like, and therefore we provide people with tools to dig into the long tail, allowing people to guide the recommender towards the music that each of us might enjoy most. If you don’t like what you get, you can keep digging into the music universe. (by playing with “My recommendations” at the website). Additionally, any independent artist can upload their music, or information about their music, for free to MusicStrands and get discovered!

Many people have told us that their problem is not to find new music, but to manage and rediscover all the music that they already have. And that is why we have the playlist builder, as a way to help people dig into their own music library, as an easy way to fill their iPods.”

In relation if MusicStrands should consider iTunes as a ‘mobile competitor’, Gabriel was pretty straightforward:

“Our technology is scalable, reflects tastes of people, understands context, mobile+online+desktop synchronized solutions work together and independently, and is designed to facilitate the creation of mobile communities around music. I believe social recommendation and discovery technologies will become critical differentiators for online and mobile services. With regard to iTunes mobile presence, there is in fact a lot of room for improvement by building more intelligent mp3 players, with and without connectivity.”

“I truly believe we are approaching a uniquely wonderful age to be a music fan”, I believe so too!

One last thing: the first thing I did - and I normally do - when opening iTunes (now with MyStrands plugin) was playing one of my favourite podcasts in iTunes. This functionality currently doesn’t exist with MusciStrands but I think it would be great to recognise the tunes from a radio podcast and getrecommendations and find out immediately about the tunes playing. I’m sure I would buy immediately some of the weekly tunes played at the Basic Soul podcasts from Simon Harrisson.

BTW: have you noticed that a lot of the great tunes these days are available ONLY on vinyl?

… but that’s for another post!

3GSM, 43things, Analysis, basicsoul, brew, cell phone, collaborative systems, digital music distribution, flickr, J2ME, javaphones, last.fm, Mashup, mobcasting, Mobile Apps, mobile communities, Mobile Content, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Mobile RSS, mobile social media, mobile web, Music, music search, musicguru, musicstrands, Operators, pandora, podcasting, podcasts, social media, symbian, technorati, upcoming, upcoming.org, visualradio, we media, web 2.0, wikipedia, windows mobile, youtube

Got this one in through Markus, looks like a great app!

MyTunesRSS helps you create RSS feeds of the music in your iTunes music library. You can play the tracks in the feed with any device (supporting WLAN) that has a browser and supports RSS feeds. One such device for example is the Sony Playstation Portable.

TunesRSS is an application that starts a server. You can access this server with any web browser - according the documentation - search your iTunes music library and create an individual play list. The play list is published as an RSS feed with the feed items containing links to the music files. The songs are streamed to the device through the WLAN feature.

You can search your library by artist and album and create an RSS feed from the results. In theory you can podcast your entire library, or playlist by playlist.

I haven’t been able to test it myself yet (I have to update my system!) but this should work on a wi-fi enabled mobile too. Anyone in it for a test? Wink me if it works. I wouldn’t try it over 3G yet though

How long still before iTunes gets to any mobile device?

3G, itunes, Mashup, mobcasting, Mobile Apps, mobile music, Mobile RSS, podcasts, rss, wi fi

When I originally wrote more than a year ago about Mobcasting at the Wireless World Forum I simply had “podcasting to the mobile phone” in mind.

Some weeks later, the term was coined by Andy Carvin from the Digital Divide Network in his When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting, stating “to describe groups of people using mobile phones to create podcasts on a common subject, particularly in the contexts of civic engagement or political action.”

A slightly different interpretation of the same term showing that a standard terminology has not been found yet for this new mobile channel - feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions which term should be applied best.

Anyway, the Mobcasting Experiment was demonstrated later as part of a collaborative blog called Katrina Aftermath, which allowed members of the public to post multimedia content regarding Hurricane Katrina.

Reading yesterdays’ Reuters News on latest commercial mobcasting initiatives, it looks like the mobile industry is going to use the term mobcasting to the meaning of “mobile podcast”, not to get confused with mobile activism or the meaning we can find currently at Wikipedia.

Here below some examples of company pressrelases I picked up related to mobcasting to show the current confusion (think Virgin and mobile activism?)

Mobile Podcasting from Motorola and Yahoo! demonstrated at 3GSM World Congress.

Virgin Brings Podcasts to Mobile Phones, calling these casts “mobcasts”.

“Mobcasts will significantly extend the appeal of podcasts by making them accessible to far more radio listeners…”

And what about Melodeo’s Mobilcast?

Yesterdays’ Reuters article mentions:

“A year ago podcasting was just a fad with a cool name. In recent weeks, the format has taken several steps toward becoming big business, but the major record labels are not eager to partner with the growing format. The audio blog phenomenon that began as free, grassroots rantings is being commercialized through advertising and subscription fees.”

Anyway, what I found interesting was the Pod2Mob anouncement of starting selling ads in their podcasts.

“The trend has expanded into the mobile space. On March 27, Mobile podcasting service Pod2Mobile introduced an automated advertising program that inserts 20-second audio ads at the beginning of participating podcasts.”

I cannot test the service yet over here in Europe but to me mobcasting or mobile podcasting is the way I consume music and news on my mobile.

I download my favourite podcasts automatically in iTunes or other audiofeeds and beam them to my external memory card so I can listen to them whenever, wherever on my mobile. Now creating some tool for automatic mobile podcast subscription makes sense, I’d consider paying a subscription for that - though creating audiofeeds for mobile isn’t very complex, inserting ads as Pod2Mob proposes might as well be a way to go, as long as the inserted ads are well proportioned and don’t become annoying.

But for mobcasting to break through, we need, apart from a capacity of phone memory storage, above all a reasonable dataplan* since podcasts come in at an average 30-60 Mb per radio show, you don’t need a calculator to see that 10-15 shows get easily to the 1Gb limit, often proposed.

In US, mobcasting can take off rapidly probably due to their fixed rate data plans but here in Europe, I think I still have to do it the oldfashioned way, as described above, meaning the operators won’t earn a dime on me, a pity knowing there are some real interesting new mobile revenue channels created I’m willing to pay for.

To me mobile podcasts are what I’m listening to on my mobile, especially since my iPod broke this winter - just out of garantuee and I don’t think I’m going to buy another one knowing all this technology becomes now definately available on my mobile phone…

* referring to Open Letter To Vodafone

UPDATE: when writing this post I was not aware about the fuzz among podcasters about Pod2Mob inserting ads without the consent of the podcasters. You can read all about at Adam Curry’s podshow:

“As discussed in today’s Daily Source Code, a new company called pod2mob is inserting advertising in their mobile streams of podcasts, all podcasts, without the owner’s consent. I’m hoping lawyers won’t have to be called in, but all podcast producers should be defending their copyrights against this commercial usage of their property.”

An interesting conversation of some 76 comments to date followed Curry’s anouncement (!)

A couple of hours ago, Moconews reported in an update with Hal Bringman from Pod2Mob:

“… at the moment podcasters don’t receive any revenue from the ads and aren’t involved in placing the ads in the podcasts. We are very much open to working with podcasters to create every kind of opportunity for them.” … “We’ll be announcing a program for this down the road, we’ve been engaging podcasters about how it could work.”

Rafat Ali from Moconews correctly closes his update with the note that “it’s a far cry from being compared to Google AdSense which was a boon not only for advertisers but for small content publishers who suddenly had a way to get some cash to support their sites.”

Some more birth complications for user-driven content going commercial…

Tags: mobcasting mobcast mobile podcasting mobile podcast audiocast audiofeed mobilcast podcast podcasting pod2mob advertising

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