Going to concerts these days can mean staring at either your smartphone, or the one held aloft by the person in front of you, to the point that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs recently issued an edict commanding their fans to watch the show, not those screens. However, the band’s singer, Karen O, carved out a…
Spotify’s strategy, from the beginning, has included allowing people to listen for free on the desktop. There’s a catch when it comes to playing that music away from a computer. If they want to take the millions of tracks on Spotify to their iPhones, Androids, televisions, or other devices, Spotify users have to pay for…
We love our music apps, and the smartphones that made it commonplace to carry around advanced, diverse music functionality, rather than relying on a “dumb” iPod or waiting until you get back to your computer to try the cool stuff. However, phones are getting in the way of apps. Case in point: You’re listening to…
Much ink has been spilt on the wisdom of crowds, and that ink has a good point: Sometimes the most difficult problems can be solved by simply floating questions out there and seeing if anyone has an answer. As one of many examples of the power of crowdsourcing, Netflix significantly improved its movie recommendations by offering…
The clear and present shift from computers to phones-that-act-sort-of-like-computers passed a major milestone last quarter, according to a recent report. The electronics industry shipped more smartphones in the U.S. than they did personal computers for the first time says a prominent consultant, echoing an early IDC report posted by Forbes that said the same. “For…
These days, everyone seems to have a smartphone or, at the very least, what the industry calls a “feature phone,” whose main “feature” appears to be an inability to install apps. Nonetheless, people all over the world purchased new phones at a record-breaking clip during last three months of 2010. The worldwide mobile phone market surged…
For the first time, music fans in the United States are approximately as likely to stream music as to download it, according to numbers shared with Evolver.fm by the NPD Group market analysis firm. Apparently, the purchasing of downloaded music from iTunes or Amazon — or even the free downloading of songs from peer-to-peer file sharing…
Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I hear the same story from home audio companies: Almost nobody buys nice stereo speakers anymore. Instead, they’re picking up surround sound speakers for their home entertainment centers, desktop speakers for their computers and iPod docks for everywhere else. That means the best speakers in…
