Happy Birthday, Napster

It was today in 1999 when a then-Northeastern University student Shawn Fanning changed the digital entertainment industry for good. The program he released was called Napster, and it made it stupidly easy to share just about anything. Within a matter of two years, the program went from relative obscurity to 15 million unique users monthly by its peak in February 2001.

I’m not going to sit here and act holier than thou: as a sophmore at Temple University in 2000, I was turned onto Napster by a fellow fraternity brother. Within a few days I was hooked — I had amassed quite the collection of music and videos. So were practically all my college friends with a computer.

Half the stuff I had was those old songs from my youth. Come on, I was like every other college student: I had no money (maybe I should have stopped spending my money on alcohol, but I do digress) and wasn’t about to go drop $15 just for one or two songs that I liked.

Napster made it really easy to solve that problem and at no cost. It’s popularity on some college campuses –including Temple — brought some networks to their knees as hundreds, if not thousands, of students were downloading simultaneously.

Almost immediately, the record industry jumped to action, suing Fanning and Napster in December 1999, although they were not successful in shutting down the network until July 2001.

From there, its assets would be fought over: Bertlesmann attempted to buy the company in 2002 for $85 million, although a judge would later block it. It would later be acquired by Roxio for use of its name for the pressplay service, and most recently was sold to Best Buy for $121 million in 2008.

The significance of Napster has not escaped even the current proprietors of the Na brand. In a post commemorating the anniversary, CEO Chris Gorog admits the industry is still trying to recapture the “excitement” of the original Napster.

Indeed the current service is trying to bring back “free” with its new offering that allows you to listen to an unlimited amount of music and offers five free MP3s on top of that. But you’re still paying $5 a month either way.

Chris may have used the anniversary to “pimp” his new offering as one commenter put it — but he is right about one thing. Without the original Napster, we’d be far behind where we are now. The service made the entertainment industry realize that consumers want more power, and the current state of digital entertainment – and a move back to DRM-free content — owes a lot to Mr. Fanning and that P2P software that swept the world one June day 10 years ago.

A Layman’s Guide to Apple’s WWDC

Many had hoped that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference would signal the triumphant return of Steve Jobs. It looks like that may not be happening, but there looks to be plenty of other possible outcomes for what we might see at Apple’s yearly developer confab.

Traditionally this has been a developer event, thus any announcements we see here usually are non-consumer. If its not consumer news, what should you expect? Announcements on Mac OS X, new computer systems, new development tools.

At WWDC 2009 it may be slightly different, but only because of the way Apple’s refresh cycle is falling combined with products it already had in the pipe that are ready for prime time. Below, I’ve listed what I think is the Most Likely, Likely, and Not Likely as a guide for those of us Apple fans who may not have the time (or will) to track every Apple rumor that comes across the wires. My thoughts are below the fold.

Before I forget: be sure to participate in our WWDC Prediction Challenge for a chance to win a $100 Apple gift certificate!

Continue reading this story…

Toshiba (Finally) Does Netbooks

Toshiba has been just about the only significant PC manufacturer who hasn’t jumped on the netbook bandwagon in the U.S. market. Until today, that is–the company is announcing the Mini NB205, its first small, low-cost laptop. (Toshiba prefers to call these mini notebooks, not netbooks; I don’t know if the resolution of the netbook trademark spat will affect its choice of moniker.)

When I got an advance peek at the NB205 last week, Toshiba representatives told me that the company decided to wait to ship a netbook (er, a mini notebook) until it could do it right. And the units they showed me did look decidedly upscale–the first models I’ve seen that compete with Samsung’s for general luxe feel. For $399, you get a 2.9-pound machine in a textured, metallic-finish case (in blue, brown white, or pink). The keyboard boasts the comfy and practical through-the-case design and is  as close to full-size as you can get in a machine with a 10.1″ LED screen, and the list of specs is respectable: a 160GB hard disk with a movement sensor, a Webcam, USB that charges even when the laptop is powered off, a decent-sized touchpad with well-postioned buttons, 802.11g/b WiFi, Ethernet, and Bluetooth. For now, it runs Windows XP.

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Twitter Not A Big Hit Among Young Adults

While the 18-24 year old demographic is almost entirely on one social network or another according to a study by the Participatory Media Network – 99 percent to be exact — only a little over a fifth of this group is using Twitter.

The study was released at TWTRCON ’09 in San Francisco, which if you didn’t know (and why didn’t you!) Technologizer’s own Harry McCracken was the “official Twitterer.”

Of this group, 85 percent follow their friends, 54 percent follow celebrities, and 29 percent follow both family and companies. PMN says that this highlights that there is room to grow Twitter as a “marketing vehicle,” but as Caroline McCarthy at Cnet seems to argue on the flipside companies have already been using the microblogging service for marketing purposes for quite awhile.

She seems to say that this isn’t the best news for these folks, and I’d tend to agree. Maybe companies have overestimated the desire for a deeper connection to their customers, and the demand isn’t there. In any case, its all still fairly new so it might be too early to judge just yet.

Regardless, Twitter seems to have quite the untapped potential customer base in this ever increasingly connected demographic. It will be interesting to see what this means for its future. It’s clear the company is going to have to continue to invest in infrastructure as these folks come online — it also could mean Mr. Failwhale may become an ever more increasing visitor to us already dealing with Twitter’s not-so-stellar record of uptime.

Bing: Am I Missing Something?

Well, the tech world is all aflutter over Microsoft’s Bing, which as Harry pointed out early this morning is live in preview mode. I have tried this search engine, and honestly I am not seeing what the big deal is over it.

Yes, this is a massive improvement over Live Search — I 100% agree with that. I don’t know what Microsoft may have been going for that other than to rebrand MSN Search after it went Live-crazy. I always found Live Search to be severely lacking in the results department.

Bing definitely improves on that. But I don’t see where it excels over what’s already available out there on the Internets. I’d argue that Microsoft’s latest effort for all intents and purposes merely matches Google, rather than surpassing it by any great distance.

In the end, is this enough to make people switch? I doubt it. Most of us are quite comfortable with using Google for our daily searches, cause it works well. Why would we want to switch to another that only seems to really “skin” what Mountain View was already somewhat doing?

This is not to say by any means that Bing will be a failure. #1, it will get a huge boost in the next month or two simply from interested surfers wanting to see what the buzz is all about. #2, it is an improvement, and not everybody is so tied to Google that they won’t switch.

For me however, Bing just isn’t it. I’m glad to see Microsoft is finally serious about search — but I don’t think matching your competition is going to win the day in the end.

The Kindle DX Arrives Next Week

Amazon has announced that it’ll start shiping its jumbo-sized e-reader, the Kindle DX, on June 10th, a week from this Wednesday. On paper (ahem!), it’s not a breakthrough device–it’s pretty much the current Kindle 2, only more of it, with the capability to display PDFs. But the larger screen’s ability to display more words with less reformatting could make for a meainingfully more pleasing reading experience. Look for a review on Technologizer as soon as we can swing it…

5Words for Monday, June 1st, 2009

Greetings from LAX, tech lovers…

“Netbook” trademark spat is over.

Advertising invades the Kindle. Sorta.

Should YouTube charge for uploads?

Hey, it’s Space Invaders soap!

U.S. may get streaming BBC.

Om Malik’s Palm Pre impressions.

eMusic gets older Sony music.

Look, Up in the Sky! It’s Wi-Fi!

At this very moment, I”m using inflight Wi-Fi for the third time in my life–and for the first time, it’s putting me in a good mood. The first time I did so was on a demo flight for the now-defunct Boeing Connexion service, and it essentially failed to work; the second time was on one of the last Connexion-equipped flights, and the fact that I knew it was going away put me in a melancholy mood. Even though Connexion, even when it worked, was kinda sluggish and kinda pricey.

This morning, however, I’m on a Virgin America flight with Gogo service. It’s six bucks for my flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and is quite speedy–YouTube is playing back more smoothly than it sometimes does via my home network. Virgin is the first carrier with an all-Wi-Fl fleet; it’s instantly become my default carrier on any route it travels. 

I should probably segue here into a sober rumination on the virtues of being disconnected and the downside of living in a world in which spending even 59 minutes (our flight time) without Internet access is a hardship. I’ll probably write one eventually, but for now, I’m happy. And it’s going to feel weird when I hear the plane’s wheels touch ground at  ourdestination and I have no need to seize my phone, fire up e-mail, and try to catch up…

Bing is Go

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine isn’t scheduled to officially replace Live Search until next Wednesday, but it’s now up and available in preview mode at Bing.com. If you try it out, let us know what you think; me, I plan to try and use it for a bit whenever I’d usually turn to Google, so my impressions are real-world ones based on my own everyday searches. I’ll share my impressions as I form them.

To recap, Bing attempts to differentiate itself from what Steve Ballmer would call “the market leader” in search by focusing on helping users with four common action-oriented search tasks: making a purchase, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business. Here’s what you get at the top if you search for mazda3–not a plain link to Mazda’s site, but a sort of mini-review with user ratings, links to specs and safety stats, and more:

TWTRCON Wrapup: Good Show, Everybody!

A couple of months ago, I had an idle thought: Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a conference that brought smart people together to figure out what Twitter means for businesses of all sorts and all sizes? The folks at Modern Media took my question and ran with it, and today TWTRCON SF 09 happened at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco,. I’m biased, but I thought it was a hit; lots of folks who attended said they had a great time.

The day was cohosted by Modern’s Tonia Ries and Gina Smith, and was packed with guests: prominent twitters like Laura (@pistachio) Fitton, MC Hammer, Guy Kawasaki, Dave McClure, Stefanie (@adventuregirl) Michaels, and Steve Rubel; journalists and writers including Shel Israel, Rafe Needleman, Jeremiah Owyang, Paul Saffo, and Kara Swisher; folks from Boingo, Cisco, Comcast, Dell, eBay, Intuit, Wells Fargo, and other major companies; Twitter companies such as CoTweet and HootSuite; Twitter’s Anamitra Banerji, and more. (That’s Hammer, Adventuregirl, and Gina in the photo at right, by Marie Domingo.)

I had the interesting duty of being the conference’s official twitterer, and spent the day trying to convey the flavor of the event to those who couldn’t attend in person. I quickly discovered that I had lots of help, though–scads of folks inside the room and around cyberspace used the #twtrcon hashtag to share their thoughts on what the speakers had to say. The conversation was so spirited that our hashtag became the #1 trending topic on Twitter (see proof st right).

What did I take away from spending my Sunday thinking about Twitter? Lots of things, but here are some highlights:

• It’s pointless to participate in Twitter unless you’re willing to be authentic and honest. And maybe a little funny, too.
• For a business, participating in Twitter is an obligation; don’t do it unless you’re willing to dedicate the resources needed to do it right.
• You’re not going to make money directly from Twitter. But you might engage your consumers (and mend fences with folks who don’t like your company) enough to see an impact on your revenue.
• Twitter should ignore all the hubbub over whether it can make money and concentrate on growing, growing growing.
• A few years from now, Twitter-like services may be so fundamental to communications that the notion of a conference dedicate to Twitter seems quaint.

Thanks to everyone who made TWTRCON a blast–organizers, speakers, attendees, and those who attended virtually via Twitter. Thinking of it was easy; you’re the guys who made it such a useful, engaging reality.