“You bought the iPhone? Which one?”- Apple & Cisco Kiss and Make Up

News of Apple’s iPhone leaked months ago. Steve Jobs, with his typical anti-establishment maneuvers, drew the limelight from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) by holding the MacWorld expo in the middle of CES. And the wrench that got thrown into Apple’s plan- Cisco systems, in Q3 2006, announced their plans to release their own iPhone, patented a few years ago.

Apple’s run into problems just like this before with Apple Corps, the Beatles record company. Jobs and Apple can’t help it, branding is what drives their business. From the all white, sleek electronics, to the iEverything that is in their product line, to the cute little Apple logo and white earbuds shamelessly sported by iPod generation everywhere you go, Apple relies on their creative branding to keep up in a world dominated by Bill Gates.

Cisco, who had slowly been creeping away from the forefront of the tech industry, felt that this was their time to grab some of world’s stage and reassert their tech prowess. And so the negotiations began, and a deadline was set. Then it was delayed. Then it was delayed again. Apple lunges, Cisco perries, and vice versa. Now, it seems, a resolution has been reached.

Cisco claims no financial interest in the resolution, only hopes for a future in which Cisco Systems could work with the notoriously closed Apple. This being said, its estimated that between $25 million and $50 million passed hands from Apple to Cisco. This deal is like allowing the bully to steal your lunch money, and hoping to work with him in the future. Apple pulled a Microsoft and pushed around Cisco. While $50 million would put a smile on my face, the iPhone has the opportunity to do to the mobile world what the iPod did to the mp3 world, and $50 million is nothing in that picture.

Cisco took care of dinner for tomorrow night with the deal. Heck, they took care of dinner for a while, but they gave up their bargaining chip and now they have to live with the decision they made. The iPhone could, very unlikely, bomb and Cisco made the right decision. Then again, the iPhone could take the market by storm and Cisco could be left with the scraps of Apple’s dinner. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

How Smart is the iPhone?

Reviews have been out for a while, and competitors are starting to surface for Apple's uh-mazing iPhone. Here I'll just go over a few things about the iPhone to sum it up for everyone.

IT'S NOT A SMARTPHONE!
- smartphones, by definition, can run 3rd party software on their OS. Sadly, the iPhone can't. This means that what it comes with, which is a fairly substantial selection, is what you get. They may be changing this in future editions, but we'll have to wait and see.
- touchscreen QWERTY keyboard. No stylus, no keypad- this could be awkward. For those people that use their phone's for e-mail and more text intensive applications, a touchscreen keyboard could prove troublesome. I like Samsung's new phone that incorporates a slideaway QWERTY keyboard, with a predominantly touchscreen interface.
- Competitors: like I mentioned above, Samsung already has a phone in the works that will be a great side-by-side comparison with the iPhone. Also, LG released an entirely touchscreen phone designed with the help of Italian fashion staple Prada.

YouTube Founders Finally Make Money

YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen just registered to sell their stock (read more here). Firstly, this shows that these guys actually did make some money. Up until this point it was a misnomer that they were rich. They merely sold their company, and had stock in the new company, but were ultimately accountable to the shareholders at large.
What does this say about YouTube and Google's relationship? Don't hold me to this, but it says that Mark Cuban was right. YouTube is a great idea, but a bad business venture. The copyright infringement liability is still an unsettled issue, and could potentially wipe out the venture. Monetizing the service is going to be very tricky without upsetting users who are accustomed to the ad-free, streamlined user interface. Not to mention that the videos are of poor quality. This contributes to the guerrilla, viral aspect of the service, but consumers today are obsessed with quality (do you really need 7 megapixels?), and that's something that YouTube does not offer.
So what next? Joost (pronounced Yoe-st) is planning on transforming the internet-TV dialogue by bringing quality video to your computer screen. Quality is something people pay for, not grainy, yet hilarious, four minute videos.
The bottom line- Chen and Hurley cashed out because they realize that YouTube is a Craig's List, not an eBay. It's an awesome service, as long as its free, but you're not going to be making TV off of it. When it's all said and done, Google created a whole lot of buzz with their purchase of YouTube, which makes it a billion dollar press release.

A Match Made in Heaven

Today's feature...another entry about music - but this one's educational and you WILL find your next favorite band if you follow these simple steps (yes, I can make guarantees on here...just try and sue me- not really, but yeah, go ahead and try).

1. Set up an account with Pandora, a program created by the good folks at the Music Genome Project (MGP).

• Pandora is essentially a streaming radio, but you get to program the stations. Yes, I know other programs have this capability (Musicmatch Jukebox was one of the originals), but Pandora incorporates the immense database of the MGP. The MGP basically tags songs, just like you would tag photos, with phrases describing the quality of each song, ranging from the instrumentation, to the genre, to the lyrics, and even the timbre of the vocals.
• You create a radio station by starting with an artist/band or song that you like, and Pandora generates songs that are strikingly similar to the one used to create the station. You can then give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", look at why Pandora selected that song, and if you really like the song you can bookmark it where it is saved in your profile for future reference.

2. Look at the songs you bookmarked and check to see if that artist is on MySpace. Today alone I found 3 new artists that I particularly enjoy (Looper, What Made Milwaukee Famous, and Ms. John Soda).

• Not to preach to the choir or treat the few readers I have as idiots, but MySpace is the largest social networking site on the internet, and even has a search function dedicated to searching for artists.
• Typically, an artist's MySpace page will have 4 songs available for streaming, and some even have downloads available.

3. Check iTunes to see if the album or song is available for download. If not, call your local record store, visit the artist's website (which is sometimes their MySpace page- as is the case with a trio I really enjoy, One Block Radius).

• For God's sake (no, I'm not talking about a divine rice wine from Japan), do not illegally download the track. Pandora goes out of it's way to mix in lesser known groups with the more mainstream ones. Support these guys so they can become rich and then you can illegally download the track because they're millionaires anyway.

There you have it, Jake's 3 easy steps to finding your next favorite new band. Leave a comment about a band you want me to check out, or if you have another awesome suggestion as to how I should go about finding my next favorite band.

Alien Gives Boston the Finger- Terror Ensues

This has got to be a joke. I first read about this yesterday and thought it was going to blow over because it is so ridiculous. Turner Broadcasting, promoting Aqua Teen Hunger Force (an animated show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim) employed a non-traditional media marketing campaign of posting up lite-brite style images of a character from the show in 10 major American cities. See them assemble and install one such device here.

So what is the big deal? Apparently Boston officials didn't find the lightsnipes, as they're called, so entertaining. I can understand misunderstandings (that's poetry baby!), but jailing two individuals responsible for installing the devices under charges including inciting hysteria. According to the Boston Globe: "Elected officials said there is no room for battery-powered contraptions on bridges and overpasses in a post Sept. 11 world."

That statement really irked me. We live in a post 9/11 world, yes, and we always will. There's absolutely no way to go back and undo that event, at least until Marty McFly saves the day. So a neon, heavily pixilated alien giving people the bird is how the terrorists are going to get us? Nevermind the loosely secured railways and seaports- its the aliens giving us the bird that we should worry about. We live amongst morons...sad yet oddly entertaining.