2011 18
Spotify vs. Rdio – and the winner is…
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
I have been using both Spotify and Rdio for quite some time now. Following the recent rumors that Spotify will launch in the U.S. this year, I felt like writing a detailed comparison between the two products based on my experience so far.
While broadly speaking the business model is the same, my impression is that the general approach of both companies is quite different (I am friends with the founders of both companies and a small investor in Rdio but I hope this does not affect the objectivity of my post). Rdio seems to have built a music streaming service around a social networking core. Spotify’s core is music streaming, offering social features on top. You notice the difference at once when you log into the desktop application. Spotify’s home screen shows you new releases and a news feed that combines information from Spotify with activity in Facebook. On the left side you can immediately access your playlists and start listening. Log in to Rdio on the other hand, and almost everything you see is based on the activity of your social network in Rdio. You see the songs that have the most “heavy rotation” in your network, you have a feed of recent activities of your network and you see the artists that are most popular among your network. What Rdio tries to do is create your own music listening community very much like Runkeeper creates your sports community.
In general, Rdio has a much more social graph feel than Spotify. You can follow friends and other people Twitter-style, find friends with whom you are connected on existing networks (like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc.), get recommendations for people and influencers to follow and find out more about your own followers or the network of people you are following. It’s also possible to see which users have been listening to specific artists, albums or even songs. And you can write your own reviews on an album and artist level. You can also see how often a specific song has been played, and you can browse through other people’s libraries or playlists based on certain songs/artists/albums they have in their collection. Rdio’s charts also integrate some of these features and feel more complete than Spotify’s. All of this is really great for discovering new music provided that you actually have a network of friends in Rdio which is what so far is lacking because of the relatively small size of the community compared to Spotify. Now this is the case in the countries in which Spotify is active. But in USA Rdio has an advantage over Spotify which has not launched there yet.
Spotify is much more like iTunes. From the above list of features, Spotify only supports Facebook integration and users can only subscribe to individual playlists, but they cannot follow other users like as they can with Rdio. I read somewhere that Spotify is much more “track-oriented” than Rdio, and I agree. Your search results consist of a long list of individual tracks, also if you search for an artist. Rdio arranges search results into four categories: artists, albums, songs and playlists, and people. This is neat, but also more time-consuming if you know what you’re looking for and just want music to start playing right away. Spotify is much more no-frills, but more intuitive and way faster.
In terms of speed I found Rdio to be rather slow and unresponsive. It’s possible that this happens to me because I am in Europe, where Rdio is officially not yet available. But for whatever reason this interferes with the music listening experience. On average, it took about 5-10 seconds for a song to start streaming. This also happened when navigating through the desktop app, which uses Adobe Air and is web-based. Spotify’s proprietary P2P software is a huge difference. Everything is basically instant, there is no noticeable delay between the time you click on a song and it actually starts playing (when streaming). Also scrolling through a song feels like having it on your hard drive.
Check out this detailed comparison between the iOS apps of Rdio and Spotify. I prefer Spotify, but as with most things this boils down to a matter of taste. If you have Shazam on your iPhone or Android, you can now also play found songs directly by hitting the “play with Spotify” button.
What’s really cool and useful is that Spotify now allows you to manage your iPod directly (but not the iPod touch), bypassing iTunes entirely. And even users of the free app (see the embedded spreadsheet below) can now use the mobile apps, but only with tracks they actually own (no streaming).
Importing your existing tracks is a huge advantage of Spotify: you can add your own tracks to the player, even if they are not in the Spotify catalogue. As mentioned above, you can then sync them easily to your mobile device (over the cloud) and listen to them anywhere, also being offline. Spotify supports many different music formats and can also complete missing track information automatically, due to a partnership with Gracenote. Rdio can only match your iTunes collection, and if they don’t have the rights for a song you can’t listen to it with Rdio.
Spotify wants to replace all your existing music players. And for me, it does. I can have all my music in one place, everything is synced over the cloud with any device I might use, and it’s super easy. In addition, the audio quality of Spotify is great, especially if you have subscribed to the Premium service (up to 320kbps). There have been some complaints about Rdio’s audio quality, but I didn’t experience any problems in this regard. Another advantage of Spotify’s longer existence and large following are the many web goodies, which are resources/apps built around Spotify, like playlist sharing sites, remote control apps, music discovery, etc.
Conclusion: so far Spotify is clearly the better product. It has all the features you need, is super easy to use and very fast (no delay in streaming songs) and it can really replace your existing music players. You can import all your music files, even those that are not in the Spotify catalogue, and sync them to your mobile devices.
Maybe Rdio is simply overloaded with too many features that are nice to have, but not essential. Of course they will be more relevant as Rdio’s popularity increases and more of your peers start using the service. But for the time being you have everything you need in Spotify, and it’s super simple to understand and use. Considering the comparably late launch of Rdio, they nevertheless have achieved a lot. But Spotify is still better, at least for me. Another example of why simplicity wins.
Two thing’s I’d like to see in the future for both Rdio and Spotify are an equalizer (doesn’t have to be the full-blown thing, but it should include some presets) and of course a native iPad app.
Lastly I would like to say that Janus Friis is an amazing designer, the man behind Skype and a mighty rival for Daniel Ek, so while Spotify is the winner at this stage this could be a long tennis match with a different result in the next set to be played in USA.
Thanks Merten Wulfert for his help on this post.
Here’s a comparative spreadsheet which complements my post:
Related articles
- Rdio: Bringing Music Streaming to the Desktop (appreaders.com)
- Rdio Taps Developers to Compete in Digital Music Arena (gigaom.com)
My good friend Blake Krikorian just launched his most recent project – R2. It’s an Android app that allows you to control virtually anything that is connected via Crestron (the market leader in automation systems for buildings) in your home or office. How does it work? First of all you need to have a Crestron system installed, for example you could use it to control your lighting, shades, climate, audio, security, and so on. There are tens of thousands of devices and services that can be controlled with Crestron. Once you have downloaded and set up the R2 app, it will then allow you to manage any connected device/function from one place. R2 just needs an Android device and a WiFi or 3G connection. So if you’re sitting in your garden and feel like listening to some music, you just take out your Android phone or tablet and with a few taps turn on your home sound system. You can even control multiple buildings with this app.
R2 is a really useful and fun app. It’s comforting to know that you can control your house from basically anywhere. You could check if the alarm is turned on, switch on and off the lighting system, pre-heat the oven when you’re in a rush, or crank up the music during the day to get even with the annoying neighbor who always throws loud parties during the weekends 
What’s also very smart is that R2 is compatible with Crestron’s existing iOS apps (Mobile Pro and Mobile Pro G), so it runs projects that were originally created for iOS devices, eliminating the need to rewrite the entire app. Crestron-authorized developers can also keep using their existing development tools, which saves them lots of time and will enable them to quickly develop new features that can take advantage of Android’s strengths.
Can’t wait to test this system in my house!
Fring has once more improved the mobile video calling world by introducing group video calling for Android and iPhone. If you have a WiFi connection (e.g. using a Fonera) or a fast 3G connection, you can make video calls with up to four friends simultaneously for free and see them all on one screen. This is useful at a social level but also for people who are constantly on the move and need to hold frequent work-related meetings. Lately I am using video more and more at work and it is saving me a lot on air travel. It’s much more personal to have video calls than only hearing each other’s voices, and you avoid annoying things like people getting distracted or even walking out of the room during the conversation (really, that happens).
I’m very happy that my friend Avi Schechter and his team at Fring keep coming up with great innovations.
Onavo just launched today. Onavo is an iPhone app that compresses the data that goes through your iPhone and shrinks your overall data usage. Onavo can compress data of many services/apps (like Facebook, Twitter, Google maps, web, e-mail and many others) to make your data plan last longer. Onavo is especially useful when you’re roaming, since data costs are still excessively high and Fon, while approaching 4 million hotspots, is still lacking in coverage.
If you think that you don’t need this app since you never roam you’d be surprised to find out that most “unlimited data” plans actually have limits. Onavo can also get more speed out of your connection when you are on EDGE by sending less data with more information. Onavo works as a background service, so once you install it you don’t have to worry about it again. Plus Onavo shows you how much data is being used by each app and how much you are saving. Android and iPad apps will come later on.
Here’s an interview with co-founder and CEO Guy Rosen on TechCrunch.
Disclosure: I’m an advisor to Onavo.
Image via Wikipedia
Just had dinner with my friend Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer one of Germany‘s top media and newspaper groups. During dinner we spoke about the future of newspapers, a subject very relevant to him since his company still makes most of their revenues and earnings from them. Indeed Axel Springer has Bild, the largest circulation paper in Europe, it also has the less popular but more informative Die Welt. In our conversation a trend came up that is worth sharing.
While downloading without paying has caused tremendous revenue erosion for record labels and studios, it is the culture of everything on the internet should be free that is hurting newspapers. In the case of newspapers it is not that people copy their content online for all to get it for free. What happens in the print industry is that owners put the content online and the revenues they make on online advertising do not compensate what they lose in print. But that is because the PC is an instrument that has made people used to not paying. While in print content owners can both sell the newspaper or magazine AND make money from advertising very few are willing to pay for content delivered to their PC. People have come to expect that everything that happens in a PC other than paying your DSL/Cable/Fiber provider should be free. But this is a psychological stance. It is hard to understand why this is the case but what is clear is that with other hardware come different habits. So the same is not true of smartphones and tablets. In a way what Apple has done is made people used to paying again both for apps (formerly known as software) and for content through iTunes. And that is also happening with Android both for smartphones and soon for tablets (Android tablets are still not a real contender for the iPad but Android smartphones are for the iPhone). So as people migrate from PCs to smartphones and tablets they will not find it offensive to pay, just like they don’t find it offensive to pay in the Sony PS3, or in Microsoft XBOX. Bottom line is this: if you have content think less of PCs and the web as we know it and more of smartphones, tablets and gaming platforms. That’s where the money is. Or may be. In the meantime Axel Springer is doing a remarkable transformation from offline to online. This migration should be good inspiration for my friends who run the New York Times, El Pais and other newspapers and magazines.
2011 23
How Twitter can really make money
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Image via CrunchBase
Twitter just tried that useless sponsored trend bar that is of no benefit to users known as the “dickbar”. After this failure, Twitter will probably try regular ads. That will be less annoying but still not the current Twitter experience. Now one way Twitter could make tons of money and keep their wonderful experience intact is to charge businesses. How would this work? Well if a brand wants to be on Twitter, and most brands in the world already are, so say if they want to STAY on twitter, they will be charged something like $10 per month per every 1000 followers they have on Twitter. Why would the brands pay? Because they use twitter to reach their customers. In this way it is brands that will think about how to make the best use of Twitter and Twitter continues to look and feel the same way while they make money for bringing followers to businesses.
Facebook could do the same btw, charge businesses to open pages and groups and let people do it for free.
In all this I would make an exception for media businesses or businesses who enrich the eco system.
Related articles
- Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive (marco.org)
- Justin Williams on Twitter’s Dickbar (carpeaqua.com)
- Jeff Rock on Twitter’s Dickbar (jeffrock.com)
- Twitter Employees Build An Actual #Dickbar Bar (businessinsider.com)
In this video you see my son Tom and I conducting a simple, yet important experiment, that allows you to approximate the speed of light only using a microwave oven and cheese. How? Well the speed of light is equal to the frequency times the wavelength. And a microwave oven comes with an indication in the back that shows the frequency. Ours is 2450 MHz. So then all you need to do is to melt cheese in a plate and with a simple ruler measure the distances between the first two areas in the cheese that start melting. In order to do this it is important that you prevent the platter of the microwave from turning. For other details just watch the video.
2011 22
What Larry Page should do as the new CEO of Google
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
After four years of working with Google as CEO of Fon (Google is our largest non financial investor) I would like to share what my experience has been like as a way to answer what I consider Larry’s biggest challenge as new CEO is. I write what follows in a spirit of friendship, with tremendous admiration for what Google has accomplished, and gratitude for its investment in Fon.
Google is an incredible company, a global giant that has just announced record financial results. A company that was built with a combination of great ideas coming mainly from its founders and amazing execution on the part of Eric Schmidt. But the biggest challenge I see at Google is that it still works like a university. This needs to change. At Google many managers come up with their own projects, frequently without a real connection to the whole enterprise and without real leadership from the top. As a result most fail. Google is a collection of brilliant minds, which is great for research but not for the execution of a visionary masterplan.
My concrete experience with Google relates to WiFi. In this field over the last four years I had the opportunity of watching Google hoping and failing to become globally relevant in WiFi connectivity. In the meantime 50 employee Fon has become the largest WiFi network in the world with over 3 million hotspots mostly in Japan and the UK, growing in other countries and hopefully soon in USA as well. But other than the investment for which we are grateful, everything else we tried to do with Google was a failure.
What I saw in Google’s WiFi´s effort were different “professors” running around with different ideas, trying to line up Google resources behind them only to end up with aborted projects. Initiatives like WiFi San Francisco, municipal WiFi throughout USA, never took off because of lack of company wide support. And WiFi is but one example. There are many areas in which Google has experimented and failed because of lack of vision, focus and consistency. For example the Orkut vs Facebook lost battle or the Twitter vs Buzz debacle. Googlers work for a great corporation but when they need company wide support for their initiatives most of the time they don’t get it. Sometimes they leave in frustration. Employee churn is now a big problem at Google and it needs not be. Churn comes from first making people believe they can do anything but then depriving them of the company support that is needed to succeed in their endeavors.
What Larry Page needs to do now is to change this situation and this can only be done by narrowing Google’s focus. Larry needs to spend weeks going over each Google project in detail. In this process he only needs to ask: Does this project make search or Android better? If it does not, kill it, and redeploy those talented employees into projects that do. And Sergey, in his new role as the head of business development needs to have the same discipline and only stick to new projects that enhance the two core areas of the company search which includes ads, and Android. Android is an incredible success so far and can be the computing platform of the future. Google TV should also be closely integrated with Youtube and in the end be part of Android. Youtube is another amazing but disjointed asset, add full length content and music to it and you have the iTunes that Android needs. Google Chrome is a huge success and that is good because those of us who use it (120 million of us) love to search off the browser box. If Larry succeeds in focusing, and I think he will, Google employees will work in projects that are backed by the company and are part of a common vision. Employee churn will decrease. Google will do even better.
As it stands today, in terms of management, Google is the opposite of Apple. Steve Jobs, who I had a chance to meet in private, is a genius dictator with a very strong vision. The whole company aligns behind him to execute. And lately, Apple’s Spartan style is winning over Google’s democracy. Larry and Sergey need to learn from Steve: to lead, to be tough and to say no (but hopefully without Steve’s ability to humiliate others when making a point). Google, like Apple, needs to adopt great design. I know that both Larry and Sergey come from the design school of “I don’t care how it looks so long as it works brilliantly”. Still I wonder how many people are not using AdSense because of how ugly the ads are. Apple has shown that both design and functionality are needed to succeed. For us at Fon, Apple, a company that is not even our investor, has been surprisingly easier to deal with than Google. Apple wants WiFi everywhere. That simple. In Japan, every iPhone is sold with a Fonera so there is more WiFi. We did a simple integration, it works well, and we have deployed millions of foneras in Japan together with Softbank. At Google, so far, we have been unable to integrate with Android regardless of the fact that we are partly owned by Google. We are millions of units ahead with iOS than Android. And every other project that we tried to implement with Google did not get off the ground. Failed to gain company wide support.
We all like democracy, but businesses, whether we like it or not, are more dictatorships than democracies. Even employees who like to debate issues outside of work prefer a clear sense of direction from those at the top at work. A clear mission. Google is not a start up that needs to find its destiny. Google has found its destiny and it is great. Time has come to focus on it and execute with a more forceful management style.
Disclosure: I am a happy Google shareholder and I am thankful to Eric, Larry, Sergey and all Google employees for their rising value.
Quoring is very similar to blogging. Indeed an open source clone of Quora will probably fork out of WordPress soon and already it is not hard to hack a Quora out of WP.
But Quora is better than blogging in one aspect. It addresses the key flaw of blogging, and that is fairness. In blogging, a lucky few who write get a significant number of readers. Blogging is frustrating for most others. The internet is littered with abandoned blogs that few read. Bloggers then lose interest. The way Quora addresses this is that it invites “blogger types” but forces them to behave differently, to take turns at blogging. Quora is like a blog in which, if you choose the subject, you can’t write the article, and if you write the article you cannot choose the subject. Quora has a teacher who does not allow one student to answer questions but actively seeks classroom participation.