I recently read an interesting posting on a list I subscribe to that I thought you might be interested in. Art Medlar, another list subscriber, wrote that now that his Verizon contract had expired (to say he was happy about this is an understatement) he had been looking around for deals and was rather taken by a pretty good Sprint service deal which includes free EVDO combined with Sprint’s new Treo 700p. After a bit of hacking Art now has access to his entire music collection along with any of the thousands of Internet radio stations, the collections of anyone else who cares to share their music, and over 40,000 concerts from the Live Music Archive. Art’s conclusion: “The iPod is so dead.”
Art disclaims having a gadget fetish but said that “the possibility of always-on internet in my pocket is something I’ve been waiting for for about half my life and it seemed like getting a more-converged device was the right thing.” What lead to Art’s newfound mobile music riches was that the Treo comes with “pTunes”, an app that can receive most sorts of streaming audio from most places and the availability of the free Slimserver from SlimDevices (the guys who produce the Squeezebox). Slimserver can stream audio on Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, and BSD. So, Art set up Slimserver on his home network, a dynamic DNS entry so he could find his home server, and now “my entire music collection is in my pocket.” Wow. For geeks, way cool. Trouble is its way too much technology for the average consumer. Now, howsabout someone providing a simple free application that indexes and sets up a DDNS link via a Web site so that streaming your collection becomes as painless as possible? Instant personal broadcasting … any VCs want to invest? Call me. Anytime.
