The MoPR Blog

CTIA’s Fall Wireless and I.T. & Entertainment Expo last month brought together companies from all over the wireless space including developers, content owners, systems integrators and solutions providers.  And even though the show felt much smaller than past shows we have a attended, it still managed to attract a crowd of some of the most innovative and cutting edge technologies in the wireless market today.

One such innovative and cutting edge technology comes from SeeqPod. Full disclosure:  I was a huge SeeqPod fan to begin with.  But nothing seals the deal more than meeting with their awesome team on person and getting more familiar with the service and its features.

Here’s a video we did with Seeqpod:

Mobility PR interviews Seeqpod from Mobility Public Relations on Vimeo.

What is it?
SeeqPod is a playable search engine designed specifically for crawling the web to find audio, video, and podcasts.  Described as the search engine for music, SeeqPod  has a reported index of over 8 million songs which are all available on-demand.  It’s instant gratification for the music lover- and we can’t get enough of it here at the MoPR HQ.

How does it work?
Simply type in the song you want to listen to, SeeqPod scours the web for it, and voila-you’ve got your music, on-demand. Create playlists, too, in order to really customize your SeeqPod page.  And of course not every song ever created has made it to the site yet, but I challenge you to search your current favorite tune and NOT find it in the index.

What makes it so compelling to us?
So what’s better than SeeqPod on your computer?  SeeqPod mobile which was released during CTIA.

Steve Doss, SeeqPod’s VP of Mobile and Consumer Electronics, said that the “new Mobile Discovery solution allows for multiple integration options, including the customized cataloguing of music, text and other media…When it comes to music in particular, SeeqPod technology can help your customers discover new songs or rediscover forgotten favorites.”

The uh-oh factor
So now you’ve got your SeeqPod with you anywhere.  Everything seems to be going perfectly- except for that one nasty little issue of a lawsuit currently in the works with the Warner Music Group who is suing the company for profiting on copyrighted works.

Warner claims that it’s an “unlawful music service that directly engages in, encourages, and facilitates the mass infringement of Plaintiffs’ and other intellectual property owners’ copyrighted works.”

Different from music sites like Pandora and Last.fm who have to advertise on their sites in order to afford their signed licensing deals with copyright owners, SeeqPod is currently protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and its “Safe Harbor” clause which allows SeeqPod to continue streaming the music as long as it isn’t hosted on their server.   For the record, it sounds like what SeeqPod is doing is completely legal.  And until someone tells them otherwise, they don’t intend on stopping.  We certainly hope they don’t!

So what does this all mean for the future of music search engines?  No one really knows for sure.  For now, SeeqPod is safe (yippee!) while others like Pandora struggle to gain advertising to pay the high price of royalties.  And since record labels aren’t giving up easily, this battle could wage on for a while.

What do you think?  Should companies like SeeqPod have to pay royalties or are the record labels being too greedy?  Let us know your thoughts.

While cruising around last month’s CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment 2008 show I noticed a few fun, products and technologies. However, one in particular really interested me – a new low energy Bluetooth technology.

The Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) had a series of videos on display at CTIA featuring low energy Bluetooth technology and its impact on the lifestyle, healthcare and sports and fitness markets. While the videos were a little theatrical, the overall message was clear - low energy Bluetooth technology is the wave of the future in mobile devices and consumer electronic connectivity.

In previous years many companies have been hesitant to utilize Bluetooth in product designs based on size and battery life limitations. Fortunately for those companies, Bluetooth SIG companies have made great strides in improving Bluetooth technology so that size and battery life are no longer a hurdle in product development. The new low energy Bluetooth technology allows for low power consumption, which in turn extends battery life, all while in a smaller package than previously available Bluetooth technologies. The Bluetooth SIG says this will provide new market opportunities to companies producing Bluetooth enabled devices enabling more products to be developed for applications in sports, wellness and entertainment.

Bluetooth is the most widely used technology for connecting electronic devices with more than half of all cell phones sold today being Bluetooth compatible. By opening up the market and allowing Bluetooth energy to be applied to products not previously thought possible with today’s standard, the Bluetooth SIG is making great strides in developing the mobile phone into the “computing hub of the future.” As we all know, mobile phones are being used more frequently for a wide variety of applications including entertainment, data storage and connectivity.

Curious about the Bluetooth SIG? The privately held, not-for-profit trade association began in fall of 1998. The following year, the Bluetooth 1.0 specification was released. Member companies of the Bluetooth SIG are leaders in their spaces and are dedicated to the development of innovative new Bluetooth wireless technologies. The Bluetooth SIG now includes Ericsson, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, and Toshiba, and thousands of other companies.

The low energy Bluetooth technology standard is expected to be released in early 2009 with the first products featuring the technology to be available late next year.

This emerging technology is one to watch in coming months and has the potential to expand the ever-growing mobility market. The new technology will allow for low power devices to connect to mobile phones opening the door for new applications to be used and also make it possible for more devices to be able to be connected. More mobile phones will be able to support location based services for example and will also be able to be connected to devices like watches and sensors.

Low energy Bluetooth technology will fill the demand for embedded wireless technology that is long lasting and power independent.

Go here for more information.

Bloggers do it daily (or sometimes weekly). If you’re reading this, you read blogs or at least this blog [and we thank you for doing so, by the way]. We think blogging is important to the industry, so much so that we recommend blogging strategies to clients, write weekly posts for this blog, and even write our own personal blogs during the off hours.

Technorati has just released a new report, 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report, which offers compelling research that blogging isn’t going away. According to the report, “bloggers collectively create nearly one million blog posts each day.”

What really interested us about the research is that blogs have hit the mainstream, and now have representation in top-10 website lists across all key categories. Bloggers are important to watch, Technorati says, because they are often the first ones to use new web applications and are highly influential in speeding adoption. We totally agree with that. Here are some more blogger facts:

• Bloggers spend twice as much time online as US adults age 18-49, and spend only one-third as much time watching TV.
• Bloggers participate in an average of five Web 2.0 activities, such as RSS and Twitter, while they are online.
• Men and women are equally likely to blog about products or services.
• Though the subjects that bloggers cover run the gamut, the most popular are personal/lifestyle topics and technology. Posting product brand reviews is one of the most prevalent activities that cuts across topics.

Are you frustrated with news sites on your iPhone? Apparently a lot of people are. Keynote Systems announced the results of its first ever “Keynote WebEffective for iPhone” study of actual user satisfaction of mobile Web sites. The study found that more than 75 participants were tasked with finding an entertainment news story, reading a news article, and searching for a story on a specific topic then sending it to a friend. And here’s the feedback they got:

• Satisfaction rates were low for both Yahoo! (51 percent) and Fox News (64 percent) mobile Web sites and less than half of users found the sites to be appealing.
• Only four percent of users tapped into advertising; nearly a quarter noticed advertising but did not click through.
• While Fox News users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be better than a computer experience, Yahoo! users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be much worse than a computer experience.
• Expected user frustrations included site errors, cluttered pages, poor site speed as well as excessive scrolling.

So, who’s at fault here? The iPhone itself or the mobile application developers not designing user-friendly interfaces?

You like it, you buy it. We wrote about YouTube’s new metrics tool last week and now we’ve learned they have more up their sleeves. If you’ve ever viewed a video on YouTube with a great soundtrack, you often see comments from other users asking about the name of the song and where they can download it. According to YouTube’s blog, now there’s a way to not only get that information but also purchase the song.

According to YouTube, click-to-buy links are “non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features.”  YouTube has started embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly-released video game Spore on videos from Electronic Arts.

Is Twitter a legit way to post and track outbound messaging? Maybe, if it’s done right. Here’s one way to do it right: a new tool from Twittertise lets marketers [or publishers] schedule Twitter messages for publication at a specific time.  According to Twittertise, it also lets companies schedule and track the effectiveness of their communications on Twitter.

Tweets, say the company, sent via Twittertise are infinitely trackable: you know how many clicks you got and from what sources.

Gather round the mobile for the new episode of The Office. If you read our post earlier in the week, watching TV in living rooms might be a quaint pastime from the olden days. Here’s more proof: a new report from Juniper Research says consumer spending on mobile broadcast TV will reach $2.7 billion by 2013. The increasing availability of mobile handsets capable of receiving free-to-air analogue and digital terrestrial TV signals will adversely impact the prospects for dedicated mobile broadcast TV networks.

Other findings from the report include:

• In terms of end-user revenues, the U.S. will be the largest single market for mobile broadcast TV services in 2013, followed by South Korea and China.
• MediaFLO services are likely to be deployed in parts of Asia and in the UK by the end of 2010.

Show of hands: who actually watches broadcast TV on their mobiles? Tell us your experiences.