Cartwright Reed

the iofy platform: the future of spoken audio

In 2005 we were working on the next generation of the iofy spoken audio platform. The company had been successfully selling our first digital spoken audio on websites like PimsleurDirect for a year or so, but we had a lot of work to do, and there were some pretty dispiriting things going on - like the Sony Rootkit scandal.

About that time, I came upon Fred Wilson's post on the future of media:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.  Thanks Dave.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

Fred's vision of how media should be was clean and refreshing, and it was what we wanted to do. We wanted to make spoken audio content an intelligently chunked, non-proprietary, syndicatable, monetizable citizen of the net.

Three years later, we are finally completing a solid platform; where we can enable people to enjoy spoken audio in a way that goes with the grain of the Internet (courtesy Paul Graham). We've gotten validation from publishers, resellers and distributors: now we need to show consumers a good time.

I'm looking forward to talking to people about this at the PLA in two weeks. See you soon!

Wednesday morning links

Item: O'Reilly has uploaded some of the presentations from the Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York two weeks ago. Although I enjoyed the conference, I was surprised by the tension between the old guard - hard goods contingent and a somewhat wifty "digital solves everything" group. Most O'Reilly conferences are a bit more hard core. I missed this presentation by Kirk Biglione, but the uploaded PDF is a compelling review of the mistakes made by the music industry in the jump to digital.

Item: You should check out Chris Anderson's post on his new "FREE" meme at Wired.  It's entertaining reading and has a lot of implications for digital media (and could have the legs of his last meme). I think that the characteristics of your digital offering defines the business model, not vice versa, but "FREE" is a great new investigation of digital goods.

Item: "Apple's iTunes will likely whip past Wal-Mart Stores to become the largest U.S. music retailer sometime this year." See the CNET post.

Rock Band and Twitter

I promised that I'd blog about Rock Band and Twitter today.

First up is Rock Band, which, if you're not a video game fan, is Harmonix's next generation virtual band version of Guitar Hero video game. Rock Band comes complete with guitar, a drum kit and a microphone. We got it for the iofy end-of-the-year party, and people continue to use it after hours.

As PCWorld describes it, people who play Rock Band immediately go out and buy the songs from the video game, or get the soundtrack from iTunes. It certainly had that effect on me. Virtually playing music is a strong inducement to buy it!

Now Twitter is something else. For those of you that haven't encountered Twitter, it's a microblogging service commonly used to create and read messages on mobile devices.

Sol Young,  iofy's VP of Engineering, has become a dedicated twitterer.  I use Twitter in-house as a easy way to text to groups, but Sol answers the question "What are you doing?" without letting the audience slow him down (you can follow him here). Two weekends ago, Sol twittered that he was "pallbearing".

...So why did I bring these two topics up? Rock Band represents where media is going: people can interact with the music instead of passively listening to it. With Twitter, Sol annotates what he's doing when he's  doing it, interacting with his personal media track.

Two great examples of how to mashup everyday life and media.