New Gadgets and Gizmos

Now that the launch of the new Macbooks is out of the way, it might be time for Apple to take a look at iTunes and its digital-music-service strategy.

Nokia, the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones, is nipping at Apple’s heels and mounting what could be the biggest challenge yet for iTunes and Apple’s dominance in digital music services.

The first of Nokia’s phones, the 5310 XpressMusic featuring "Comes With Music," a subscription service that offers a year of free unlimited music downloads, will be available to consumers in the United Kingdom starting Thursday.

After a year, users will be charged for the service, but will be allowed to keep all the music they already downloaded.

Over the next two months, two more Nokia phones featuring the new service are expected to hit the market.

Nokia’s entry into the digital-music-services market could force Apple to change its iTunes strategy, say analysts.

Its focus on digital music is a bid to grab a share of the $3.05-billion digital-music-sales market and take a shot at Apple, whose iTunes is the market leader. Nokia is betting that it will add millions of new users
worldwide for its new music service over the next
year-and-a-half.

"There is no getting away from what is happening here, which is a strategic battle with Apple," says Mark Mulligan, vice president at Forrester Research, UK. "Apple opened up a competitive battle on Nokia’s turf with the iPhone, and Nokia is doing the same now with digital music."

Agrees Adam Leach, an analyst with research firm Ovum, "It’s a very ambitious play. If you look at the picture globally, there are very few companies in the world that have the muscle to take on Apple in this area, and Nokia is one of those," says Leach.

ITunes, which has had more than 5 billion songs downloaded through it in the last five years, has been at the heart of Apple’s revival. The service, integrated into iPods and iPhones, has turned Apple from a niche player in the computer market to an industry visionary.

"Apple has a trinity — the iPod, iTunes and iPhone — that is almost unbeatable," says Russ Crupnick, digital media analyst with The NPD Group.

But now Apple has reason to be anxious. Unlike other iTunes competitors, Nokia’s Comes With Music will be bundled along with millions of Nokia phones, which makes it significantly different from rivals such as Amazon.com and Walmart that only sell music and not the integrated device-music combination that has given Apple its edge.

That’s not all. Nokia is also building a la carte music stores and has the big four of music rights — Universal, Sony BMG, Warner Music and EMI — signed up along with some independent labels.

This is especially worrisome for Apple because its iTunes store has
seen little innovation in the last few years. "Apple is leading the
market with an out-of-date music store that hasn’t been updated in four
years," says Mulligan.

In response to Nokia’s strategy, Apple may have to consider options such as expanding the "Genius" feature in iTunes that creates a playlist of
songs based on similar musical tastes as indicated by the user, a
full-fledged subscription service or iPhones pre-installed with music, says Mulligan.

In order to stay ahead, Nokia was forced to innovate due to changes in the cellphone business, says Mulligan. Penetration of cellphones in many
markets in Europe and North America is reaching saturation even as
operators are trying to move towards longer contract periods, which
slows down the replacement cycle for the phones.

While Nokia continues to make new handsets, the company is also pressing ahead by launching new services to go beyond just handset manufacturing in an attempt to capture a bigger chunk of the global market.

"We are increasingly moving towards a new type of business where it is
not good enough to be a hardware or service provider anymore," Trevor Madigan, Nokia’s manager of
entertainment and communities in the Americas region, told Wired.com. "You have to have more than the sum of the parts."

Earlier this month, it had a
splashy launch in the United Kingdom for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.
The device, priced at €279, is expected to start shipping in the fourth
quarter of 2008. Two other Nokia phones, the 5310 XpressMusic
(available prepaid through British website CarphoneWarehouse.com at GBP
130) and the N95 8GB (priced at $700), will also have the Comes With
Music service.

“For consumers this means they bring the device home, enter the code
in the box to register the device and then download as much music as
they want for a year,” Madigan says. “The user keeps everything at the end of the year on their PC and can sync it with their phone.”

To burn a CD of the downloaded music, though, users will be
charged extra. It’s not music free of digital rights management, but it
is free for users who just want to listen to music through their PC or
phone.

Nokia is launching the service first in the United Kingdom, where the digital music
market is less developed than in the United States. By the first half of next year,
it hopes to enter the U.S. market. If successful, Comes With Music will significantly grow the digital music market, says Mulligan.

Currently, the closest comparison to Nokia’s new service can be found in Denmark with telecom provider TDC. The company offers unlimited music downloads through its Play service, and so far it has seen more than 60 million downloads since it was launched in March. “That’s remarkable considering the population of Denmark is about 5 million,” says Mulligan.

Over the last two years Nokia has also made a number of acquisitions in areas including social networking and mapping services. Last October, Nokia bought mapping data supplier Navteq for $8 billion. The focus of the new strategy, however, is music. The market for full-track mobile downloads of music alone is expected to reach $4.2 billion by 2012, says research firm In-Stat.

Nokia’s a la carte store, Nokia Music, has been built on acquisitions the company made a few years ago. In August 2006, Nokia bought digital music provider Loudeye and its European distribution business On-Demand Distribution (OD2) for $60 million.

Nokia says it will grow faster than iTunes because its music
services will be launched globally. “Some of our competitors took five
years to get to 15 or 20 markets,” says Madigan. “We plan to bring this to every major market region in a global way in the next two years.”

Roadblocks in Nokia’s global domination plans include the U.S. market, where the company isn’t as dominant as in Asia or Europe, communicating how Comes With Music works and building partnerships with telecom carriers.

"American consumers want ownership, flexibility and portability," says Crupnick. "That’s what Apple provides, and while iTunes hasn’t fundamentally changed over the years, it is a music vault for most users."
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And while the music service itself will be free, downloading over the air carries additional charges from the service providers — that is, if Nokia can convince enough telecom carriers to come on board.

So far, the company hasn’t announced any carrier as a partner. Though speculation has it that 3, the service from Hutchinson Whampoa, could be the first to sign on.

Ultimately, how successful Nokia is hinges on building partnerships with telecom operators, says Leach.

And when it does have those partnerships in its bag, Apple needs to be ready to go to battle.

Also see:
Nokia’s Upcoming Music Phone Takes a Shot at Apple

Mark Verstegen has trained some of the greatest athletes in the world at his Athletes’ Performance facilities in Arizona, California, and Florida. It’s the kind of place where you go if you’re hoping to be a top pick in the NFL draft, but need to boost your 40-yard dash time. The trainers work intensively with these elite athletes, using Verstegen’s techniques, which focus heavily on increasing functional strength and mobility.

So how do you take this experience with the best of the best, and apply it to us mere mortals? Verstegen has written books about his Core Performance method, but last month he opened the Core Performance Center, a gym in Santa Monica that blends his training ideas with some seriously tech.

"One of the key factors in training pro athletes and "achievers" alike is creating a path for sustainable success," says Verstegen. "If you peel back the layers and job titles on athletes and achievers, you will find what I call a "Red Thread" commonality–the instrinsic commitment to excellence, so ultimately the approach to performance is very similar."

The achievers that Verstegen mentions are the target consumers for the Core Performance Centers. "They’re people who want the best in life and are willing to work to achieve it," says Verstegen. "To me, this includes busy moms, overscheduled executives: really any individual who is constantly asking "how can I improve?" Our job is to match their commitment, providing them with proven systems and specialists to ensure that they meet their performance goals."

A central part of the experience at the Core Performance Center is a custom-designed machine called the CPro (it’s pictured at the top of the story). When you start your workout, you log into the CPro, and it retrieves your workout history, and the results of your evaluation by the onsite coaching team. It knows what your workout should be today, and it’s ready to guide you through it.

But first, the machine asks you how you’re feeling. If you’re feeling good, you’re ready to go. But if you say your tired, or sick, or injured, it asks for more information about what’s bothering you, and uses that information to modify your workout.

"The idea for the CPro came from my years of coaching," says Verstegen. Every Coach at Athletes’ Performance has an Assistant Coach working with them, whose job is to set up the next movement for the athlete, to record each movement the athlete has completed, and to help motivate the athlete to complete just one more repetition or work that much harder in a training session. The CPro accomplishes that same objective in the CPC: it demonstrates movements, records each individual’s performance, and automatically adapts if a member is having a tough day or just doesn’t feel well."

It’s that level of adaptation that makes Core Performance Center so interesting to someone like me, who’s been dedicated to tracking his workouts at a micro level. When you walk in the door, you put on a heart rate strap, and the system tracks every beat until you leave. Each repetition you do on the Cpro–using compressed air rather than weights for resistance–is measured for the wattage you produce. The effort you expend doing aerobic work on a treadmill or stationary bike is also captured.

And then all of that is looped back into your plan for the next work out. Basically, the Core Performance Center looks to replace the most time-consuming part of a coach’s job–creating training plans–with tech, freeing up the coaches to, you know, coach.

"For us, the technology enables us to move toward more meaningful interactions with people on the floor during their workouts," says Craig Friedman, the Director of Methodology for Athletes’ Performance. "It’s like a really smart assistant coach."

But that sort of power doesn’t come easily. "There are 18,000 rules in the CPro’s code base," says Athletes’ Performance CTO Jon Zerden. "It basically took us 18 months to translate the logic that our coaches would use to make adjustments into computer code."

Right now, there’s just one Core Performance Center. But Verstegen says the company plans to open more in the next calendar year. If my soreness after a workout at CPC is any gauge, it’s a super-effective way to get in shape, and the intersection of the exercise and information technologies is really impressive.

Well, my favorite Mexican food is authentic Super Burritos with spinach tortilla, refried beans, lots of jalapenos, and everything on it.  If you wanted to make some refried beans homemade style, here’s a cool DIY that shows you how to do that.

This would be also great way to feed your kids some “healthy” refried beans instead of the stuff that’s been sitting on grocery stands for weeks.

Refried Beans! The Man will sell it to you for generally $1.00 or more for maybe 12 oz of cooked beans, and the other 3 ounces some oils, salts, and other flavorings. I can get 1 lb of dried pinto beans for $0.49, and then after soaking and cooking, its really around 2 lbs of refried goodness. All bean, all pure, vegetarian, fat free, and no Hydrogenated fats in it.

via superhealthykids

Brought to you by: Zedomax.com

Food Hack - How to Make Refried Beans!

A+Featured Hacks, burritos, Consumer, Cooking, Cool, DoItYourself!, DoItYourself!, Educational, Entertainment, flavorings, Food, goodness, Hack, Hack, homemade style, how to make refried beans, HOWTO, hydrogenated fats, jalapenos, mexican food, oz, pinto beans, salts, spinach

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Very cool: Tech-savvy musician Rob Morris hooked up his Nintendo
Wiimote to his guitar and used the controller’s accelerometer data to
manipulate the instrument’s sounds. Check out the video above: He tilts
his guitar upward (Star Power, anyone?) to change the pitch, and then
he moves on to crazier sounds by pressing the Wiimote buttons. 

[Hack a Day via Gizmodo]

		Take your Web apps to the desktop with Adobe® AIR™. Let users work offline, access local files and drag and drop from the desktop. Works on Win, Mac and Linux. Download the Adobe AIR SDK.
		www.adobe.com/products/air

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via ohgizmo, Product Page

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Toy Mini RC Hovercraft!

A+Featured Gadgets, business day, charging system, Circuits, Consumer, Cool, Design, Entertainment, Gadgets, Gifts, havoc, Hovercraft, infrared control, kids, rc hovercraft, rc toys, Toys, Travel, Video

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