Cyloop is a music portal that is having significant success in the Spanish speaking world that is making inroads into English and soon other languages. Today I met and spent 90 minutes with Demian Bellumio, the founder of Cyloop who came to see me at my office. During that meeting I saw the first potentially sustainable future of the record label. As it is very late here in Spain and I have to catch a flight to NYC tomorrow to give a speech at Columbia University my alma mater I will make a few comments and not an in depth analysis.

First of all Demian is a very unlikely entrepreneur to come up with such a hit as Cyloop. His background is not in music. But in the short time I spent with Demian I could see that he has a natural ability to learn a new sector, that he has extremely developed entrepreneurial instincts even though he mostly worked for others til now and that there must be something especially harmonious in the trio who started Cyloop. This trio consists of three Argentines friends from childhood living in Miami, Demian is the CEO/biz dev type, his brother is the designer and his best friend the “musician” in Cyloop.

Now what is the proof that Cyloop is on to something radical in the music world? That in countries where all you need to do if you want music is go to The Pirate Bay and download it for free without breaking the law (yes, to download music for personal use is legal in Spain), Cyloop is growing faster than piracy. How do they do it? Well first they teamed up with Spain´s largest portal, Terra to become their music channel. Secondly they got all the record labels in the States and Uk to give them most of their music, and thirdly they created a MEDIA experience out of listening to music. This is what in my view distinguishes Cyloop from say, Last.fm who now also has access to all the music from the record labels. The difference is that Cyloop is not about loading your MP3 player which in any case you can´t do there unless you use software to divert streamed audio into your hard drive. Cyloop is about musicians and their fans meeting in a site with a My Space spirit but with more editorial control and with their music included. What will the post Cyloop world look like? Kind of like now but with more money to those making music. A world in which consumers see ads as they enjoy music, buy merchandising, build an emotional bond with the musician that leads to concert ticket sales and the overall experience ressembles interactive TV more than radio. Cyloop is also the music portal of Warner Music and many other sites.

I’ve recently found out about Modu, a company based in Israel developing a new concept of mobile phone. At first sight, modu is just a very small mobile phone (smaller then an iPod Nano), but what is really cool and most important about this device, is that it comes as a central part of a whole ecosystem. Users will be able to slip their modu into a variety of modu jackets, an evolution of what we are used to call “covers”, or into modu mates, devices like video players, navigation systems or digital cameras.

Modu jackets provide users with a new look for their phone, but also additional functionalities. For example, if you slip your modu in a blackberry-like jacket, your modu becomes a business phone with a QWERTY keyboard, if you slip it into a multimedia phone jacket, you get a camera, music controls and an embedded speaker. Slip it into a “modu kid” jacket, and it becomes the perfect phone for kids, with big buttons and special keys to call mom and dad. Companies can design their custom branded jackets and provide them in partnership with modu.

A modu phone can give connectivity and additional features to modu mates, that can be all kind of gadgets. If modu will get the traction and critical mass needed for device makers to adopt the technology, modu users will be able to slip their modu phone into a digital picture frame, a camera, a gps device, etc. Visiting modu’s website you can get a good idea of “jackets” and “mates” that could soon be available.

This is quite smart: by building a modu mate a consumer electronics manufacturer could get a device with communication capabilities and connectivity while saving a lot of the time and effort required for development and approval from operators or regulation authorities like the FCC. There are lots of devices for which connectivity and communication capabilities would make a lot of sense, but replicating a whole mobile phone is just not worth the hassle. Bluetooth, of course, is a good and already popular alternative.

Unfortunately this phone doesn’t seem to provide WiFi access and not even 3G. For a phone that should give connectivity to other devices, relying on GPRS seems not a good choice, probably forced by space constraints. WiFi would be a perfect fit, giving fast and cheap connectivity when at home (think cameras, digital frames, video devices).

Modu plans to start selling the phone in October with Telecom Italia in Italy, OAA Vimpel Communications in Russia and Cellcom in Israel, for less then 200€ including a jacket.

Well around 1300 Iraqis got fired yesterday for being ineffective at battling other Iraqis. USA must pull out of Iraq now.