Mobile phones, with their myriad choices and opportunities for
personalization, are achieving the place of the auto in that consumers
are using them as a form of identity and to reflect their personality. This is something the Economist observed last year, but I was recently reminded of this.  This is especially true in Europe and Asia where they don’t have as much of a car culture as in the US, but it is changing here as well.  To wit:

-Ever see the business class section of a plane right after landing?  What % of the passengers whip out a Blackberry or Treo?  I wonder if all of them really need to urgently check their emails, or is it a form of signaling and keeping up with the Jones’
-Razrs are the new "it" phone
-I was recently on the subway and there were some kids playing music off of their phones, and loud enough so that the car could hear it…these phones are mini-boomboxes!
-I recently retired my workhorse of a Samsung phone (lasted 3 years), and got a Motorola A630 .  I really like it and have been showing it off to people some of whom get ‘cellphone envy’.   Someone told me that it was a "gangsta" phone because its form factor is so great for text messaging.
-Then there’s the ‘software’ for phones like ringtones, games, music and tv

If this means people make their cars last longer and buy fewer cars, it’ll be good for the environment.  OTOH, the cell phone replacement cycle shorten — witness how carriers give you a phone credit after every year of service.

Walt Mossberg gives a rare rave review of the Sonos Digital Music System:

Dozens of companies offer
gadgets to "stream" the music that’s stored on your computer over a
home network so you can hear it in other parts of the house. But most
of these products are deficient in some way or another.

Many are too hard to set up on a typical home wireless
network. Others have a lousy interface for controlling and selecting
the music in the room where you plan to do remote listening. And nearly
all of them assume that you have good audio systems in the rooms where
you want to do remote listening, and that you know how to hook up the
streaming devices to these audio systems.

But I have been testing a new music-streaming product
that handily overcomes every one of these problems and limitations.
It’s called the Sonos Digital Music System, and it comes from a
start-up company, Sonos Inc., in Santa Barbara, Calif. (www.sonos.com)

It doesn’t get much better than that, folks.  I saw them demo this last year at the Digital Life show at the Javits, and it demo’ed great.  Has a lot of the iPod aesthetic.  Way to go, guys.

This month’s Wired magazine’s cover is titled "The End of Radio (as we know it)", and has articles about satellite radio, podcasting, "indie radio" and Howard Stern.  Amazingly, there is scarcely a mention of internet radio or webcasting.  (I’d link to it but it’s not up on their site yet…supposed to be up later this week).   

Now I’m a subscriber and a fan of Wired and applaud their covering the ‘radio is changing story’.  But I have to admit, I was flabbergasted as to how they could have glossed over such an important part of the  story — to wit, internet radio is a medium that has tens of millions of listeners each week/month according to Arbitron; has thousands if not tens of thousands of channels/stations that people can tune into provided by large corporate players to indie mom&pops out of their basement; and has offered the ability for consumers to create their own broadcast for years.

One of the articles was about the rise of mult-channel, microniche broadcasting.  This is something that internet radio supports much more readily than Podcasting, satellite or HD-Radio (and let’s face it, all of these are simply a technological means of distributing content from producers to consumers).  Why?  Because including copyrighted music in Podcasts is ILLEGAL.  Sure, the RIAA have bigger fish to fry and probably won’t go after most of the small players out there doing so.  But if anyone starts making real money from it, you can bet they or Harry Fox will come a-knocking.  Most Podcasts are talk/spoken word, though, and so don’t have this problem.  However, internet radio webcasters can use copyrighted music in addition to talk.  The downside?  It’s not as easy to make it portable though there are some companies that are working on this.

The other lesson?  Marketing counts.  In the case of Podcasting, I’ll point you to a previous post
on how the right combination of technology, marketing & ease-of-use
(I’d also add timing to this) can lead to escape velocity.  OTOH satellite radio used the brute force method, which is to say their awareness and marketing stems from the billions they raised from Wall St. that they went on to spend on goodies like satellites, studios & Stern.  Of course they had a worthy product to sell that was also easy-to-use.

Update:  The articles are now online.