evolution of your audio experience

I have had the chance to speak with several of you one on one or in small groups in order to better understand how you experience audio information and entertainment. It turns out that nearly everyone listens to the radio to different degrees nearly every day and people often jump around from one station to another. People like radio because it is easy and free and has some variety and information people like. However, there is significant repetition, lots of commercials, too much talk and in the end there is no way they'll play exactly what you want to hear. Radio is forced to play what they think will be most popular ... top 100 music, brief news highlights ... and yet they are losing customers.

People are now migrating down the tail so that they can listen to the stuff they want. Some have gone the portable mp3 player (ipod etc) way but it seems that many people have not bothered and don't plan on bothering even though they do like to listen to music, news, sports reports and other audio content. Compared to radio, setting up an mp3 player is allot of work. You have to burn piles of CDs which is very time consuming and/or download music off the net (hopefully legaly :). Every time you have something to transfer to your IPOD, you need to dock it and it is tied up for the duration of the transfer. My ipod seems to hang quite often and syncing takes forever even if I have only added a few songs. Then you have to perform S/W upgrades quite often. Most people are not diligent about backing up their hard drives ... what if it crashes and you lose all your tunes?!!!! No wonder many people have not bothered. I'm bothering less and less and I already have one.

I believe I have come up with a completely different model. It will allow people that are too tentative to jump in with no fear. It will also allow intermediate users to do things they cannot imagine doing with any of their existing tools. Advanced users will love the refined and granular customization. The open system will let hackers create entirely new applications ... I can't wait to see what they come up with! I'm not going after the incumbent competition but I'm going after the customers they seem to have a forgotten. It will allow people to surf the long tail to their heart's content! It's time to give everyone complete control of their audio experience.

In preparation for a roadshow, I will send out an invitation to this community to join together in a live session. The next evite you will get from me won't be an annoying noisy animation (sorry about that) ... it will be an invitation to this session. It should be interesting.

This could be huge ... how fun!

Cheers,

Allan Isfan
Engineer with an Iron Ring