How the Spotify Phone will impact Starbucks in 2010

Music streaming service Spotify has hit a winning streak. Not content with winning awards for its Web-based music-streaming service, it’s also set to take the mobile world by storm, firstly with a Spotify app for Android phones (above, and in the video below) and the iPhone, and now with a dedicated Spotify phone.

Most companies are happy enough with just a smartphone app to add to their Web app, but Spotify figures that it might as well go the whole hog and build an entire phone around its service. And why not? If Twitter and Facebook can do it, then surely the world’s most talked about music streaming service can too?

But a Spotify phone won’t just shake up the mobile phone world – it’ll shake up Starbucks, too. Read on after the jump to see how…

Spotify Phone Rumours

The Spotify phone hasn’t been officially announced yet, but the rumours surrounding its development are strong, and it makes genuine business sense. The rumours themselves started when the chairman of Hutchison Whampoa, Li Ka-Shing, bought a stake in Spotify.

Never heard of him? He’s the guy who built a huge mobile network in the UK before selling it to France Telecom for billions. That mobile network was Orange. Not content with doing it once, he did it again, building the Three network across Europe.

After that, he bought INQ, the small mobile phone manufacturer that specialises in phones that tightly integrate with socially-oriented web apps, such as Twitter, Facebook and Skype. Rounding off the rumour comes the latest news that INQ CEO Frank Meehan has just been appointed onto Spotify’s board.

So Spotify now has financial and managerial backing from a huge mobile operator capable of making its own mobile phones that just happen to specialize in socially-oriented Web apps. A Spotify-branded phone is all but inevitable!

Spotify Phone features

There are no details on the features of such a Spotify phone, of course, but that doesn’t stop us speculating!

For a taster, check out the video below of Spotify on an Android phone.

That’s pretty tasty in its own right. But a mobile Spotify has the potential to go much further than simply replicating the desktop experience.

Musical MobSharing

One of the first posts I wrote about on MobileMentalism was a concept I called mobsharing, in which phone users would connect to each other’s mobile phones within a small radius of a WiFi hotspot, such as Starbucks, and browse each other’s library of tunes, sharing the tunes that they liked.

I envisaged different areas and times of day becoming known as good places to hang out for certain styles of music. Starbucks at 5pm, for example, is usually filled with people coming home from work, and so the songs being shared would be very different from those being shared at 3:30pm, when it’s mostly filled by teenagers who’ve just finished school and should really be hanging around street corners drinking cheap cider instead.

If this ever took off, you might find yourself choosing one coffee shop over another simply because of the tunes being shared. Not only would you have access to music that fit your taste, but you’d also be surrounded by people with similar musical tastes to your own. It’s almost guaranteed to be the perfect social meeting point for you, even if you’re surrounded by complete strangers. After all, you know you have at least music in common.

This idea was unlikely to take off while MP3s were being “illegally” shared across mobile phones, and with the ridiculous copy protection schemes the music labels tried to put in place, the idea was dead in the water.

But Spotify doesn’t share music files; it shares playlists and streams the music to you. You never own the tune itself, just the playlist, yet you always have access to it. The majors like it and so do the people, so it’s win-win.

So now, four years after I wrote that post, musical mobsharing just might catch on. And if it does, it’ll change your local Starbucks forever in the process!

This is how it could work..

Musical Mobsharing and the Social Starbucks, thanks to the Spotify Phone

You arrive at Starbucks and check your Spotify phone. You set it to open mode, so other people can see your playlists. The tunes in your playlists are added to everyone else’s in the room, and your phone shows you all the tunes that the people around you are sharing. You therefore get an insant snapshot of the music tastes of the people around you.

You’re free to take other people’s tunes, of course, and add them to your Spotify Starbucks playlist. And so will everyone around you, all sharing hundreds of tunes over their cappucinos.

If Starbucks were really smart, they’d encourage this by setting up a TV that displayed the most popular tunes being shared, and even played them over the shop’s speakers. The mood of Starbucks would therefore directly reflect the musical tastes of its customers at any given time.

Of course, this would also attract other users from the immediate area who also liked the music, as they could hear what was being played, and might drift in if the music also matched their taste.

One extra step would be for Starbucks to provide a Twitter stream and Facebook account for people of that specific Starbucks shop to communicate with each other using their phones. Before you know it, the whole coffee shop would be communicating with each other in a virtuous social circle.

It’s only a small step from there before they start actually talking to each other!

Rather than the usual doom and gloom headlines of how social networks are reducing our friendships to shallow imitations of what we’ve traditionally known, the online networks will be used to enhance our physical network of friends by getting us to talk to people we’d never talk to normally.

Utopian, perhaps, but a real glimpse of the power that socially-inspired Web apps such as Spotify can bring to the real world if people started thinking outside of the box and stopped seeing the virtual and physical worlds as two distinct entities. It’s the mobile phone that can bring the two together, and enlightened companies such as Spotify, INQ, and maybe even Starbucks that could act as the catalyst.

Will it happen? Almost certainly. It’s almost too good an opportunity to miss. When it will happen is the real question. Spotify already have a service where you can phone up and make suggestions. Phone them up now and demand they make the world’s first Musical Mobsharing service! =

Global mobile phone audience passes four billion

Something I picked up via mobile phone body the 160 characters association is this stat that the global mobile / cellphone audience will have passed four billion – or two thirds of the planet – by the end of this year.

It comes from the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO) and is astounding when you consider that 80% of the world’s population lives on less than $10 a day.

In fact according to Bruno Lamborghini (really?), chief of the EITO, “the strongest growth in the use of mobile phones now comes from newly industrialised and developing countries.”

Key areas of growth include India (up 32%), Brazil (up 14%) China (up 12%). Meanwhile the European market is saturated in terms of handsets (at 641 million, there are more phones than people), but people are trading up to Internet enabled smartphones.

From my colleagues at Cow Africa in Cape Town I know that in a lot of the developing world the land line is by-passed completely in favour of the mobile. Much like an increasing number of consumers in the developed world really.

Research from both Europe and the US shows that upwards of a fifth of us use their mobiles as their only phone.

In fact I wonder if mobile phones as opposed to (very worthwhile) ventures like the $100 laptop could become the great technology leveler. Though richer countries are obviously ahead in terms of sales of advanced phones, eventually functionality should even out, especially given the investment that is being made in the mobile space in areas such as sub-saharan Africa.

2013, mobile usage in the United States will approach 100% penetration

If you haven’t noticed, mobile is kind of a big deal.

According to a whole slew of statistics released by market researcher and trends analyzer eMarketer yesterday, mobile phone usage is only continuing to grow, even stateside.

In the U.S., where you’re pretty much expected to own some sort of mobile device, eMarketer marked that this year there are 280.8 million mobile phone subscribers, coming out to 91.4% penetration. The analysis expects to see that number increase steadily over the next few years, approaching complete market penetration in 2013, when it predicts 96.7% market penetration, or 308.7 million mobile phone subscribers.

At most, it’s surprising that we aren’t at 100% penetration already.

The real interesting analysis comes with the tracking of mobile Internet usage penetration. A great deal of tech industry press swirls around competition between the Internet-enabled big smartphone players: the classic BlackBerry, Apple and its chic iPhone, Google and its open standards Android OS, just to name a few.

But how many consumers are actually using their phones to connect to the Internet? According to eMarketer, still not that many.

Despite its growth in recent years, due to falling costs and improving usability, mobile Internet is still a young technology only utilized by 73.7 million people, or 26.3% of mobile phone subscribers. Only in the past year has mobile Internet usage penetrated through to one in four mobile users. Costs should continue to drop steadily, usability will likely only get better, and usage will also rise, but slowly. Hitting 50% penetration is not too far off, according to eMarketer, which predicts 43.5% penetration in 2013, when about 134.3 million mobile subscribers should be going on the Internet through their phones.

The significance of these juxtaposed data sets is that it gives service providers some pretty straightforward priorities. Calling and texting will persist as the most essential tasks of any mobile phone, and they are the first two features that (most) consumers will expect to work painlessly. Thus, service providers will fight over who has the strongest call network, while at the same time building the foundations for more robust Internet speeds, in preparation for the rising tide of mobile Internet users.

As for future products, let’s just say that BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android are only the beginning of innovation.

Ghana Mobile Gold

Street sellers of mobile are  out selling shops.

One basic commodity that has shed its expensive tag in Ghana and the world at large is the mobile phone. In the early 90’s mobile phones in Ghana were a very expensive and scarce commodity.

At the time, these tiny and portable electronic devices were not only considered the preserve of the rich in the society, but they were also very difficult to come by. People who possessed such electronic gadgets were accorded appreciable magnitude of respect.

However, this story can no longer be told today, particularly when mobile phones are widely patronized and used in almost every nook and cranny of Ghana. Thanks to telecommunication companies like Mobile Telecommunications Network (MTN), Vodafone, Tigo, Kasapa and Zain it is now possible for us to reach our relatives who live in the hinterlands. Now in Ghana, with a minimum of GH¢1 and an amount of GH¢20, one can get both a cell phone and a starter pack to allow him/her to be hooked on any of the telecommunication companies in the country.

If you doubt this, we would entreat you to travel to the remotest of any of the ten regions in Ghana where you will find a plethora of ordinary charcoal, food and porridge sellers, Grannies and Grandpas, all using a mobile phone. This growth of technological gadgetry can only tell us that within Ghanaian culture mobile phones have become a basic necessity.

In Today’s world people are ready to dole out huge sums of money to the tune of between GH¢600-1, 000 USD400 to USD 660 Ghana cedis in order to purchase the latest Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, or Samsung phone in town.

Currently, giant mobile phone manufacturing companies such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericson and Vodafone are facing stiff competition amongst themselves and are always finding ways of getting more people in the world to purchase their mobile phone products.

One hot spot and area where the mobile phone businesses continue to grow is in Circle, a suburb of Accra. Here, one can see various mobile phone shops with very interesting names, including: Flex Phones, Happy Phones, God Son Entertainment, Big Ambition, Freddie’s Corner, Mobile Phone People and Fuzzy Phones. It is also an arena where, apart from the congested nature of phone shops, people can find either the latest Nokia phone or the newest Sony Ericson in town.

At Circle, as a very busy community in terms of mobile phone dealings, if one is not very careful he/she can be swindled by people who also parade the area as phone sellers. Such elements do not own shops and are known for always sitting on the metallic bars along the pavement.

Their posture alone is enough reason to doubt them, yet in the face of all these signals people purchasing phones are swindled because their prices are relatively cheaper. According to Mr. Gambo Bash, who has worked at Mobile Time in the Circle area for seven years now, the business’s influx of customers is suffering because of those who are selling the phones on the street.

“Our business is going down,” said Mr. Bash. “The outside people can sell more than those who are in the shop.” Their style has been to taunt and persuade consumers with all kinds of sugar coated words before you even enter into any of the registered shops to begin to browse for your phone.

Mr. Bash pointed out that the reason people are buying them on the outside is because they are cheaper even though they are often purchasing stolen merchandise. Unlike the phones sold within stores, which buy their phones from places in Japan and Dubai, those sold on the street offer cell phone buyers no security for the customer if something were to go wrong.

On the other hand, Mr. Hololi Alason, who has worked at Fuzzy Phones since 1995, says that because the shops selling cell phones offer amenities that those who are hawking the products can’t, people often prefer going into to stores.
“When you buy it in the store you have a guarantee, but when you buy it in the markets you don’t have guarantee because it’s stolen,” he said.

However, by selling goods on the street less people are venturing into stores and therefore are making the times hard economically for these entrepreneurs.

“A whole day can go by, and we never sell one,” said Mr. Bash. There is much consensus from those who own cell phone store that in the future the boys selling phones will be out of the street. And it was observed that if nothing is done about the phone hawkers, than they will continue posing a serious threat to the wellbeing of those who are running their cell phone businesses in the future.

By Ato Keelson & Mindy Cooper

iPhone cracked in 2 minutes flat.

“In a Wired news article, iPhone Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski explains how the much touted hardware encryption of the iPhone 3Gs is but a farce, and demonstrates how both the passcode and backup encryption can be bypassed in about two minutes.

Zdziarski also goes on to say that all data on the iPhone — including deleted data — is automatically decrypted by the iPhone when it’s copied, allowing hackers and law enforcement agencies alike access the device’s raw disk as if no encryption were present.

A second demonstration features the recovery of the iPhone’s entire disk while the device is still passcode-locked. According to a similar article in Ars Technica, Zdziarski describes the iPhone’s hardware encryption by saying it’s ‘like putting privacy glass on half your shower door.’

With the iPhone being sold into 20% of Fortune-100s and into the military, just how worried should we be with such shoddy security?“

Announcing the PhoneSuit MiLi Pro…

The MiLi Pro is a breakthrough in iPhone and iPod accessory technology. It’s an iPhone / iPod compatible, rechargeable, micro video projector. The power of the PhoneSuit MiLi Battery has been coupled with the convenience of a portable video projector and speaker system. Watch all of your movies, video clips, podcasts and more with ease! Now you can carry your own personal movie theater with you, anywhere you travel.

http://www.phonesuit.com/products/MiLi_Pro_iPhone_iPod_Video_Projector-18-10.html

Million FREE Minutes

I just had to try this out. It’s an awesome deal.

This company with it’s new mobile phone technology is giving away FREE minutes
to people lucky enough to be first to download their FREE application.

It allows you to make Moblie to Mobile Calls FREE.

A simple text message to download the FREE application is all it takes to get started.

www.staunchinc.com/mobileriche

Text the word FREE to 61 (0)416303498 / 6285857467077

or
email the words FREE minutes to mobileriche@gmail.com

Check out my Slide Show!

Phone-reliant Britons in the grip of ‘nomo-phobia’

Being out of mobile-phone contact is as stressful as moving house or breaking up with a partner for nearly one in five phone users, according to a survey which suggests many Britons are in the grip of “nomo-phobia”.

Anxiety over running out of battery or credit, losing one’s handset and not having network coverage affects 53 per cent of the UK’s 45 million mobile-phone users, according to the study by YouGov.

Stewart Fox-Mills, the head of telephony at the Post Office, which commissioned the survey, said “nomo-phobia” was a real phenomenon for many people. “We’re all familiar with the stressful situations of everyday life such as moving house, break-ups and organising a family Christmas, but it seems being out of mobile contact may be the 21st century’s contribution to our already manic lives,” he said. “Being phoneless and panicked is a symptom of our 24/7 culture.”

Men were more likely than women to be affected by losing mobile phone contact, with 48 per cent of women and 58 per cent of men admitting to feelings of anxiety. More than 20 per cent of the 2,163 people questioned said they never switched off their mobiles, and one in 10 said their job required them to be contactable at all times.

Some 55 per cent cited keeping in touch with friends or family as the main reason for being wedded to their handsets and 9 per cent said having their phone switched off made them anxious.

The Post Office has now produced a guide to avoiding “nomo-phobia” which recommends leaving loved ones an alternative contact number and making a back-up list of all contacts in case the phone is lost or stolen.

The ban on mobile-phone use on planes has posed a problem for those who feel the need to be contactable. But last month, Ofcom, the communications regulator, confirmed British airline passengers could, by next year, use mobiles on aircraft flying above 3,000m. The calls are

$1.3 Million Cell Phone

That’s right, this cell phone retails at a whopping $1.3-million. It features a diamond-encrusted case and a 5-carat blue diamond in place of the center navigation button. No word yet on availability. One more picture after the jump. [via Slashphone]