Pay no attention to the temporary site design

To any and all designers who may be reading and cringing at the Blogger standard template being used on this blog, it's just temporary. I just figured it was better to have a blog with a standard template than no blog at all while I found the perfect look.

Yahoo! Music: more proof music subscriptions don't work

Yahoo is its selling music service to Rhapsody America, exiting a business model that a myriad of companies have struggled with. As I wrote last year, the need for digital rights management software to ensure that a subscriber doesn't just download the world the first month and cancel the second is probably the biggest stumbling block to subscriptions, but it's not the only one. And with increasing interest in moving music to mobile devices like Blackberrys and iPhones, the whole business model is just being crushed under technical compromises. I think you're going to see two business models going forward: outright music purchases (i.e., iTunes and Amazon) and streaming music. But at this point, despite Rhapsody picking up Yahoo's customers, I think it's time to declare all-you-can-eat digital music subscriptions officially dead.

Apple and Opera give the mobile Web experience a boost

My iPhone and I have become inseparable as I wander around the Anywhere world. Well, today, Apple decided to up the iPhone ante by introducing $499 16 GByte iPhones and 32 Gbyte iPod touches. Add to that the fact that Opera Software ASA has just started previewing its new Opera Mobile 9.5 Web browser in time for the 3GSM conference in Barcelona next week, and we can see that the lines between the mobile Web and the desktop Web are starting to blur. Not so coincidentally, that's one of the themes of the research I'll be doing over the next year at Yankee Group. My sense is that it's going to become a hot and controversial topic.

Notes From Anywhere

Welcome to Anywhere™. That's the theme we at Yankee Group are currently using to describe our research into how we will communicate with anyone, anywhere, and on any device. It's a vision, not a reality yet. But it is this vision that shapes how we look at the technology landscape today -- and it informs the changes we see on the horizon. My name is Carl Howe, and my day job is Director, Enterprise Software Research, at Yankee Group on the 27th floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston. Read my bio if you want more background, but I spent the first 18 years of my career in Internet research and development, while I've been a professional technology and marketing analyst the last 10 years or so. I spent the last three years or so writing a blog over at Blackfriars Marketing, where my business partner Joe continues helping technology and other companies communicate better. But nowadays, I spend a lot of time in Anywhere. I commute a couple hours a day, and I travel all over the world, both for business and pleasure. I use a Macintosh PowerBook at work in a PC-focused environment, and I do the same from the gaggle of computers in my house. I read my email, check traffic, and browse the Web on my iPhone pretty much everywhere I go. I work in Anywhere just as much as I work at work. This blog is my unedited personal journal as I move around my personal Anywhere world. It's not an official publication of Yankee Group nor does it reflect the official positions of my employer, but it will include my viewpoints and counterpoints on some of those topics and positions. The blog will allow me to put out opinions on events in the news long before Yankee Group formulates an official view or publishes an analysis -- that means we're not always going to agree. Take it all as one person's opinion, not a corporate position. To those of you who come here after reading my work at Blackfriars Marketing, you'll find many of the topics I write about familiar, but I hope you will see a somewhat more mobile focus. All that said, I reserve the right to go off-topic periodically; this is a blog, after all. But best of all, this blog, unlike my Blackfriars one, should be able to support features that many people have requested over the years like in-line comments and perhaps some widgets. I'll know more as I get into it. So if you like this new focus, update your newsreaders and bookmarks because this is where I intend to spend my blogging time from now on. I hope you enjoy my notes from Anywhere.