In The Clouds -- Part 4

I continue to be optimistic -- as described in prior stories -- about Cloud Computing. A week or so ago, however, a major network outage gave me a cause for pause in enthusiasm. My Internet service provider, Comcast, began having problems at 5 AM in the morning. More than twelve hours later there was still a major outage in the area. No TV, no Internet connectivity, and no telephone dial tone since I use Vonage. Fortunately, the iPhone provides phone service and a backup to the web but it is not as full function as the PC. It is nice to have a large flat screen and full-sized keyboard. On the one hand I am happy that all my documents, email, contacts, calendar, music, and pictures are backed up in various clouds but on the other hand it is not so nice to not be able to get to them from the PC. As previously discussed, some applications -- like Quicken and Dreamweaver -- require the PC.

Comcast is great as long as things are working but when things go awry they are terrible. A recent survey on reputation by Harris Interactive put Comcast at #56 out of 60 companies. (See The Dark Lord of Broadband Tries to Fix Comcast's Image in current issue of Wired). A free market with a lot of competition would drive such a company out of business or to higher rankings. Unfortunately, in the U.S. we do not have much competition thanks to the FCC and legions of lobbyists at Comcast and AT&T and Verizon, The Comcast call center system is smart enough to take the 10-digit phone number you key in and tell you that there is "an outage in your area", but if you persist through the call center menus and reach a person they will first ask you for your 10-digit number -- the same one you have already keyed in. The person I spoke to was very nice but had no other information other than "technicians are aware of the problem and are diligently working on it". No estimate of expected restoration of signal but "it usually isn't more than a day". Great. The final comment was "thanks for using Comcast". I said I wish I could. In some ways Comcast is a 21st century communications company but when you have service issues they are a 1970's cable monopoly. Vonage, on the other hand has great customer service. Turns out the Vonage modem went bad recently also. The support rep overnighted a new modem at no charged and called me several times to follow-up to make sure I received it and had it working properly.

The Comcast outage lasted more than 50 hours. There were no follow-up calls nor an available status at any time. Fortunately, outages such as this do not happen very often. I can't remember the last one -- a couple of years at least. I did have a Verizon EV-DO card for backup and while traveling but between the iPhone's increased 3G and WiFi coverage, plus Verizon's $60+ dollars per month cost and less than great service, I recently cancelled the service. At some point Google Gears will provide a way to have local copies of your email and documents.This will allow you to create emails and edit or create documents and then synchronize them when you get connected.

The bottom line is that things break. Moving into the clouds moves the exposure of computer breakdowns in the hands of Google et al but getting between your computer and their requires reliable communications. The communications path includes modems, local networks in your house or business and utility poles which are vulnerable to ice storms. Having an iPhone replaces my modem and local area network with a 3G tower about 2 miles away. At the bottom of the tower is a shed full of equipment. Fortunately, all equipment is getting more and more reliable. The main dependency in the end is having enough competition to motivate the providers to keep their equipment up to date.

January 24, 2009 04:10 PM

Shazam

The crab cakes at Barbara Jean's at the European Village in Palm Coast, Florida were really good and so was the background music. When my wife and I heard "You Really Got A Hold On Me", we immediately recognized the song but could not remember who had recorded it. No problem. Our son whipped out his iPhone and clicked the "Shazam" button. The ingenious application "listened" to the song through the iPhone microphone for fifteen seconds and then a few seconds later presented the album cover and highlighted Smokey Robinson & The Miracles as the performer. In addition, the iPhone presented some options: purchase the song at iTunes, watch a performance of the song on YouTube, review a biography of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, review a discography of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles and purchase or listen to any of their prior recordings, take a picture and attach that picture or any other picture from your iPhone to your "tag" of the song, or share the tag with someone else. My son shared it with me and then I received an email on my iPhone which enabled me to then click on a link in the mail and add the song to my Shazam tags.

Music is no longer a private collection of physical media. It has become a shared media and your "collection" is not limited by shelf space but by how many friends you have and how much meta data you can collect about music that you like. How does Shazam work? Shazam is a mobile phone based music identification service, headquartered in London, England. The service does not work for classical music or live performances but otherwise it does an amazing job. You hold your iPhone, click on "tag now", and the microphone captures the sound and sends it to the Shazam service. An acoustic fingerprint of the music is then matched against a music database. The result is shown on the iPhone screen complete with details on Artist, Album, Title, Genre, Music label, a thumbnail image of the song/album artwork, links to download the song on iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store and, where relevant, show the songs' video on YouTube. You can review your list of tags and reminisce over where you heard each song or look at a picture to remind you. You can decide to add songs from your tag list to iTunes -- which now offers DRM free copies. You can then move songs to another computer, to a portable player, or an MP3 player on your iTrike.

Anybody still buying CD's? I can not imagine why. I used to think XM Radio had a big future but I now have my doubts. I love music and my current favorite way to play it is using Pandora. The music genome at Pandora allows you to pick a genre, a specific title, or an artist and it then creates a "radio" station on your Pandora web page that continuously plays music that "sounds like" the selection you made. You can give a playing song the thumbs up or down with a click and your "station" gets more and more like you like it. When at home I listen to Pandora through the house music system using a Squeezebox which is connected via WiFi to the home LAN. When away from home I use the Pandora application on the iPhone. In most cards these days you can plug your iPhone into an "aux" jack and listen to your favorite Pandora stations. Satellite radio has been disintermediating terrestrial radio and now the Internet is disintermediating satellite. Just like just about every other dimension of business, the Internet is taking a major role in music.

Other patrickWeb music related stories

Music January 14, 2009 11:21 AM