My absence from my blog has been too long, and caused by circumstances both beyond my control and totally unforseeable, but that is a drama for another day, and one that I will get to, when I have it all figured out.
I have had a great time in prior posts talking about aggregating innovative ideas. My logic has been that it is nobody is building all the cool technology, but rather the test is whether you can find the parts of the puzzle, understand them, connect them, and really end up with something very cool. So, this post is about that idea, and not anything more weighty.
So…stepping back in time, I recall a conversation at a restaurant in Palo Alto probably 2–3 years ago. It was late, and present were Scoble, Winer, Arrington and others. and the topic du jour was whether Pandora would last a day, a month, a year, or whatever. Having no clue what Pandora was, I was not critical to the discussion. I later found Pandora, created an account and promptly forgot about it.
Fast forward to last fall, e.g. 2007, I spoke at the Office 2.0 conference and as a speaker, I ended up with an iPhone. As a long time T-Mobile customer, I figured, that I was basically screwed, and then came “jail-break 101”, and one of my pals hacked my iPhone, and Voila…it worked great on T-Mobile, but it gets better.
When V2 of the iPhone came along, complete with the application store, I again found my nose pressed against the glass, as hacked iPhones couldn’t access the iPhone application store. Never fear, the geeks fixed that almost immediately, the hack of my phone was available in no time flat, and whammo I had a bunch of applications, including Pandora.
But I was close, but no cigar to a very elegant solution. With headphones on the music was great. But pretty solitary experience. The bad news being that the plug on the iPhone was non-standard and such that you couldn’t plug it into say decent powered speakers.
So, I let my imagination run amuck as they say, and realized that my pals at Etymotic Research (*disclaimer below..) would know how to fix this, e.g. some kind of plug combo, that would allow me to connect my iPhone playing Pandora to my wonderful power speakers from Altec-Lansing.
Today the plug came, and tonight I am in something that looks like musical heaven.
The iPhone is plugged into the combo plug and then into great speakers, and I am listening to the “Jack Johnson” channel on Pandora, and right now Nora Jones is singing. No commercials, no cost, and no worries.
The music is great, my investment almost zero, and it doesn’t get much better than this. And as I tell people, a lot of this stuff isn’t magic, but rather about work, e.g. trying to figure out how you put all the great technologies together.
*…Etymotic Research is a great company, great people, great products, ideas, technology and they are my friends. I have done some consulting work for them, their products are extraordinary, and I unconditionally recommend to you…They execute better than anyone I know as to the things they build…
Good to have you back Buzz. It has been too long indeed. Looking forward to your future writings.
M.
Posted by: Michael Sampson | October 07, 2008 at 12:02 PM