ForbesOnTech

Midomi Mobile, Perfect Harmony in Music Search-- Right Place Right Time With an iPhone App

Apple opened it’s iPhone online applications store concurrently with the public release of its new 3G iPhone this week. I guess we can all relax now, the sun is coming up in the post-launch world and there appears to be an initial strong flood tide of applications for Apple’s mobile platform.

            There are few surprises in the first round of iPhone applications; location-centric, business, entertainment and personal productivity applications are a;; represented.

            But initially I wanted to focus on an iPhone version of an application category I’ve watched since the 1990’s—music. High on my list of “hot iPhone apps” is  a music search application called Midomi Mobile. What this application does that’s heretofore been missing in music search, is allow its users to hum, sing, and use multiple modes of inputting rough data to find individual or groups of songs.

            Midomi Mobile is from a Sunnyvale startup called Melodis Corp, whose sound recognition-based search technology is something that’s been missing in Internet –based music services until very recently. Midomi Mobile works even if you can’t carry a tune, or if your singing voice sounds like a bullfrog being castrated. Melodis claims it’s musical search technology is extremely accurate.

            In my continuing quest to fill out my 1970’s music catalogue, I’d love to try and hum a few bars from Little Feet’s “song “Red Streamliner” or the Allman’s Brothers “Les Bres in A Minor” to see if this service delivers on its promises. Or, I just might get up around 3 AM and record birdsongs in my orchard to see I it understands I’m trying to identify and locate the Beatles song “Blackbird (singing in the dead of night)”

            The online video demonstration of Midomi is one of the most compelling consumer technology pitches I’ve ever viewed. It’s exactly the sort of pitch that I would respond to when picking companies for Demo, before my retirement several years ago. Besides its apparent accuracy in returning results to difficult queries entered by off-key singing, humming or haphazard lyrics entry, Midomi also has features that let you annotate and share query results and in some cases music, with friends or readers of personal blogs. The new iPhone application also provides simple one-click links to music and related content from sites such as iTunes.

            But what really makes my heart sing about Midomi Mobile is that it’s a perfect match for two key Apple business strategies; iPhone and iTunes. It’s dificul;t to imagine this three-year–old start up not being pitched heavily by Apple when it needs to demonstrate technologies that bolster its key business units.

            Other music search services have come and gone-- but I suspect Melodis’ Midomi Mobile will set a new gold standard in this category. The technology is tightly linked to Apple and this developer is fosued sharply on an application category that show almost no signs of slowing its hockey stick growth.—Jim Forbes—07/11/2008.

Farewell Fake Steve-- Thanks for the Laughs

I guess it’s true; all good things sometimes come to an end. And it seems that the often-hilarious blog “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” has reached that point, according to its author, Daniel Lyons most recently of Forbes and now in the process of moving over to Newsweek.

            In his most recent post here, Lyons announced he was shutting down the Fake Steve Blog, but planned to replace it with one under his own name in the coming weeks.

            For it’s much of its life, the identity of Fake Steve was the subject of a grail-like quest for many of Silicon Valley’s hoi polloi A-list editors. Most of which incorrectly assumed that the author had to be an Apple insider or most likely one of the several editors who have long-standing relationships with the Cupertino, CA, electronics manufacturer.

            The quest took a turn for the bizarre when Forbes’ publisher, Richard Karlgaard, offered a reward for Fake Steve’s identity. Karlgaard apparently couldn’t imagine that the blog’s author was one of his own staffers, which elicited gales of laughter from the small handful of people --mostly former co-workers who recognized his writing style-- who had correctly guessed Lyons as its writer.

            While the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs may be gone, Lyons did a blog to book move, and is offering a bound collection of “best of” posts for $25. The smallish book is being produced by Blurb inc. and can be ordered through Lyon’s Fake Steve blog.

            So long Fake Steve.  I’ll miss the stories of you and Larry rocketing up to San Francisco to go paint balling. I honor the place where your humor and the milk shooting out my nose are one.

            And, Lyons you are one of the funniest reporters I ever worked with. You made trekking overnight from the Foster City PCWeek Bureau to the Prudential Building on Boylston in Boston bearable. Namaste, Dude—Jim Forbes, 07/10/2008

 

Strangling the Twitter Bird, Yet Again!

I’m ready to strangle the Twitter bird with my bare hands. Again!

It takes a lot for me to walk away from an application, but eventually when I reach the point where outages or system unavailability becomes more than I’m willing to put up with, I just say “To hell With it!” and walk away.

I discarded Twitter several months back but came back to it six weeks or so ago, when I wanted to see if I could drive traffic to my blog. I picked up about 40 hit’s a day initially. Enough to temporarily satisfy my justification to go back to Twitter.

But what’s behind my growing disliked of Twitter is the growing use of this short messaging social media network by peeps who find it necessary to post their every move throughout the day. Frankly, I don’t care much that someone is taking a walk through their upscale neighborhood and saw a poison oak plant in the middle of the city.

I used twitter three or four times this week; twice to describe what I think is the most outrageous yellowtail run I’ve seen since I was a young teenager in Southern California

(author’s note--a yellowtail is a very tasty and somewhat feisty member of the tuna family that hangs out around kelp beds). I also used it Friday to briefly note a rattlesnake infestation in my rose and vegetable garden).

I eventually removed seven young diamond backs from my gardens, gently taking them over to the huge field that adjoins my place here in Escondido where I released them to go on about their young rattlesnake lives-- killing and eating gophers, voles, rats and mice.

But what I really don’t like about Twitter is very simple: it’ not reliable enough to be used for serious tasks like monitoring customer satisfaction and related issues. And without reliability, depending on twitter to monitor anything is a lost cause and a waste of precious time.

Furthermore, Twitter seems to bring out the worse in high visibility social media celebs ( so-called “A-list bloggers”). Restated, if I really wanted to know what you had for dinner, and what the traffic was like driving from Tedium to Apathy in Silicon Valley, I would have picked up my phone and called you or sent you a text message. But hell, maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly old dinosaur--Jim Forbes 06/21/2008.

Search Engine Input as a Predictor of Election Results? --Oh My!

Up in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon, I listened as two major radio hosts aired a claim by Yahoo could predict primary election results by monitoring incoming queries.

            The two talk show hosts immediately jumped on Yahoo’s claim, getting a Yahoo spokeswoman on the phone during their broadcast to explain how search could be used to predict election results..

            I listened with amazement as the two radio hosts completely missed what the Yahoo spokeswoman was saying.  What annoyed me is that they seemed incapable of understanding that Yahoo was only talking about incoming searches it was fielding, not all Internet searches.

            At first, I thought their excitement over Yahoo’s claims might have caused them to overlook what Yahoo said. I listened carefully as the spokeswoman again explained Yahoo’s discovery.  And yes, at the end of one spoken sentence, the drill down: searches on our service had been said.

             The two talking heads on KFI AM radio still missed what Yahoo had said and motored on to talk and speculate about the implications of using search results as an election prediction tool. Looking at search queries, as a predictor is a fascinating idea, particularly when it includes the top-ranked search engine.

            It’s just too bad that the talking heads didn’t have either the sense, or the job-related experience to take their thinking a step further by calling Google’s PR department for comment or to get comparable results from their searches.

            All of this makes me wonder: At a time when legions of print reporters are out scrambling for a handful of PR jobs, why aren’t more of them looking to talk radio news for employment?.

            As I listened to the banter on talk radio about Yahoo’s claims, 35 years of reporting experience went into overdrive. The bottom line, however, was very clear, KFI’s two on-air talkers didn’t realize they had just glossed over a topic that could fill an entire week’s worth of shows. More’s the pity though, cause it’s just this sort of topic that keeps me interested in the long-term implications of search engines and how they are changing our lives.—Jim Forbes 05/07/2008

Corporate Social Media Mointoring-- Chapter Two from Dave Churbuck

Over at Churbuck.com is an excellent post here on monitoring blogs and how this process need not be based on paid applications that generate maps or Marshal McLuhan like colored Media Hot or Media Cold colored displays. Dave’s riff is suitable classroom material and goes well beyond the intro to corporate social media drek I’ve seen on the web for the last several years.

A statement Dave posted last night grabbed me: ”Sentiment metrics are particularly vexing, volume sentiments are crap. Be wary of tools that purport to deliver metrics. I subscribe to the manual scoring method of sentiment. If it really matters then the only viable way to tell whether a post is positive or negative is to read it and make the call. Doing so will entail enlisting the support of a team of monitors or moderators, or, if you are a sole operator, doing it yourself.

I suspect that very few corporations have “teams” assigned to monitoring blogs or, more importantly, have the bandwidth and authority to take action on problems as they appear in blogs.

In the end when it comes to Social Media and corporations the winners will have teams or one inspired individual that can drive solutions to problems or troublesome perceptions as they appear.

Reading Churbuck’s riff on advanced social media makes me wish I weren’t retired.  Well almost.—Jim Forbes 04/22.2008

{Mandatory Disclosure: Dave Churbuck and I were coworkers in the last century at PCWeek and are  friends.}

FCC Lays Foundation for National Emergency Texting

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A program to create a nationwide alert system using cell phones and other mobile devices was approved Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission.
An emergency text message would be sent in the event of a widespread disaster, severe weather or child abduction.
The system would send text messages to Americans when an emergency occurs.
The FCC said cell phone companies that voluntarily opt into the system would send text-based alert messages to subscribers in response to three types of events:
A disaster that could jeopardize the health and safety of Americans, such as a terrorist attack; these would trigger a national alert from the president of the United States
Imminent or ongoing threats such as hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes
Child abductions or Amber alerts.
T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and AT&T all stated that they would be likely to opt into the alert system if it is passed by the FCC.
"While we obviously need to review the details of the FCC's decision, we look forward to offering mobile emergency alerts to our customers," AT&T said in a written statement.

A national emergency alert system based on mobile phone texting? It’s about time. But it’s only part of a solution. How about cities, counties and states take a big step further and adopt reverse 911 emergency notification systems.
That’s what we have in San Diego County where I live and it was put to work quickly last fall during the 2007 firestorm season. While there were some minor glitches in the notification system (a couple of neighborhoods were told to evacuate earlier than was necessary) the use of Reverse 911 during the 2007 Fire season is a text book example of how useful some technologies can be in disasters.
I was directly effected by the Witch Creek Fire.  We lost several homes on my street when the fire came roaring through the nearby adjoining city of Ramona, CA. Rather than wait for the “official evacuation notification.” I started collecting my gear as soon as I could see flames cresting the hill that separates my place from Ramona.
The “evacuate now” order came late in the afternoon the next day. By phone.
I loaded my two useless cats in their cages, hooked up my dog and installed him on my front passenger seat and drove by my two elderly neighbors to make sure they were packed and ready to go and had transportation.
Adding emergency text message notification to the system  is the next logical step. But before that happens nationwide cell networks are going to need to become a lot smarter. A whole lot smarter.
One of the problems I foresee is with yahoos like me. My cell phone is a 650 area code number, but I live 400 miles south of Silicon Valley in the 760 area code. Now that cell networks support GPS, it doesn’t seem like too much of a technological stretch to assume that me cell network knows I’m in the 760 area code and any emergency information relative to the specific area is something I need to be aware of.
There are some other baby steps that can be taken to cover the ground needed to keep the citizenry informed.  While I personally don’t like the social media messaging application Teitter.  I believe regional emergency Twitter URL’s could be an important information dissemination channel.
Observationally, the one thing local electronic and print media and local government could have done much better here in North San Diego County during the Witch Creek Fire, was provide better communications to local residents including electronic maps of road closures. More than 500,000 people in my county were told to leave their homes in the last Fire storm. Most of us ended up in emergency shelters. And the one thing that was in real short supply was real time information.
National emergency text messaging is a great first step. The next logical move for it is at the regional, county and city-level.--Jim Forbes 04/09/2008

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Twitter:Strangling the Bird,Or Not?

There are applications that come along and automatically generate buzz and applications that come and go very quickly.

            And this brings me to the social media phenomena Twitter. This 145-word cap limited application is quite the rage among A list bloggers. Contrarian that I am, I have a quite different view of it.  I’m not really very interested in whether or not some one is going to get a cup of coffee at Pete’s in Menlo Park, and I’m even less interested in the fact that they found a parking space right across the street from Pete’s on Santa Cruz Avenue. Twitter might as well be a grill- mounted loudspeaker hoi polloi use to broadcast their regal presence and progression to we lesser mortals, so that we can avert our eyes and bow in time.

            But I can see some uses for Twitter: A.) The best use of it so far was by Dan Lyons, writing from audience at Steve Jobs’ MacWorld opening speech in San Francisco, earlier this year. Lyon’s twitter feeds may have been the funniest things ever posted on the Internet. B.) If I were an executive at a hardware maker or software developer, I can see where my job would be made easier by Twitter, since it gives me a chance to have conversations about product performance, reliability and usability in real time with select customers. C.) The same argument holds true right now, moving into National elections. If I were on a campaign management staff, Twitter could be an important tool in gauging the effectiveness of a dynamic campaign, in real time;D) as someone who was searching for topical local news in the middle of a community-wide conflgration last Fall, I think a dedicated twitter channel could have be equally important to both citizens and first responders.

            I have seen Twitter put to effective use by two good friends who hold high-level marketing positions with PC manufacturing companies. Both use it to stay abreast of customer support issues—which may be one of the most important applications of this mini-Instant Messaging format.

            If I were still working as a producer on Demo Shows, I could see using a Twitter channel for communicating with my audience and for strategic market research, in real time.

            But do I care when someone is jumping into his or her car for a trip across SF Bay to go see a movie? Hell No! I don’t.

            None of this should be interpreted as dismissing the hard work developers have put into Twitter and Twitter applications.  I appreciate good softwaremuch more than most people.

            And I’ve been wrong about things before.  Just last week I was dismissive about my daughter’s chance to win a new car in a lottery. But,  early this morning I got an email from The Lovely Miss Amanda telling me how utterly surprised she was to find out she had just won a brand new 2008 Volkswagen Beetle.—Jim Forbes, 04/07/2008