The Week in Geek – Jan. 15, 2008 (Boston College at MacWorld)

Each January, the hottest ticket in Technology is for Steve Jobs’ Keynote at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. And for the fourth year in a row, Boston College MBA students had VIP access.

The highlight of the show was the MacBook Air. The $1799 base configuration runs an ultra thin 0.16 – 0.76 inch wedge with 13.3 inch screen and 80 GB hard drive (a much more expensive all flash option is available). Also launched, free iPhone software updates and $20 iPod Touch updates that include location-based maps (found via WiFi triangulation), iTunes movie rentals that can be share across devices. And the Time Capsule – a $299 half-gig combo WiFi and backup hard drive that’ll snapshot all the machines in your house via Leopard’s “Time Machine” auto backup & recovery software. Apple TV was upgraded (release two). It now sells for $229, includes rentals, 50 million YouTube streams, and a snappy search & preview interface. CEOs from Intel & Fox were onstage, with Fox announcing DVDs will ship with Apple’s DRM so files can be quickly copied to iPods or streamed over Apple TV.

The event capped the Carroll School’s Graduate TechTrek field study course, a for-credit experience combining class work with a two week field study to Seattle and Silicon Valley. The most extensive program of its kind, the 2008 Boston College TechTrek offered over 25 ‘master class’ sessions with senior executives, entrepreneurs, and financiers, all focused on studying how firms grow from startup to blue chip.

Music Industry Embraces Amazon
Now that Sony BMG has signed with AmazonMP3, Bezos’ firm has every major label offering DRM-free tunes on its site. Apple only has EMI’s unprotected offerings. The NY Times quotes an anonymous music industry exec as saying his firm is prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label’s songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself.  Four years ago, Pepsi and Apple teamed up to offer 100 million free iTunes songs. Now it seams Pepsi and Amazon will offer up to 1 billion free songs, as well as other prizes. The effort will almost certainly prompt users to try out Amazon and load the code that’ll dump these free songs automatically into iTunes. The Times says Amazon will pay record companies roughly 40 cents a track vs. Amazon’s usual payment of 65 to 70 cents. CD sales slid 19% in 2007 last year. Even when adding in the 50 million digital albums sold, overall music sales were still down 9.5%. The labels (who we recall settled on charges of price fixing CD sales a few years back) seem willing to penalize their fastest growing channel partner simply to gain more bargaining power.

Buying iTunes Songs at Starbucks
While on the Seattle portion of our TechTrek I had the opportunity to try out the in-store iTunes purchasing system at Starbucks. The system is by far the slickest example of opt-in, location-based marketing I’ve ever seen. Take out your iPhone or iPod Touch, press the iTunes icon, and a Starbucks icon appears in the lower-left of your handheld (image at left). Cover art and album info for the tune being played at that Starbucks immediately shows on your iPhone. During my visit I could check the store’s ‘Recently Played’ list, as well as recommendation lists titled ‘Must Haves’, ‘Coffeehouse Sound’, “Tunes for Toasting”, among others. Starbucks locations featuring the system also sport an LCD screen showing the cover art of the tune being played (left). One click downloads the song. All data are cached locally, so the digital squirt comes at maximum iPhone WiFi speeds. During separate visits I scarfed the Ray Brown Trio song shown, as well as toe-tapper from ‘The Velvet Fog’, Mel Torme. Each was on my iPhone in less than 20 seconds. With songs costing less than a BC vending machine candy bar, Starbucks has turned music into an impulse purchase. A confirmation receipt appeared in my e-mail within a day, even though I hadn’t launched iTunes from my Mac during iPhone recharge. Kudos to the superior work of Chris Bruzzo’s team at Starbucks. Marketers interested in leveraging the iPhone have a world-class example to follow. If you live in a major US city, your Starbucks should have this by year-end 2008.

British Telecom Gets First XBox 360 IPTV
Microsoft’s IPTV software, Microsoft Mediaroom, has reached one million installations worldwide via 19 different providers including AT&T. While these installations all came through more traditional set-top boxes, British Telecom will soon offer Microsoft’s IPTV service through XBox. Those who have seen the service say it’s super-quick, suffering none of the channel surf delays.

Favorites from CES
The Merc’s Dean Takahashi offers up his faves from the Vegas show, including the combo Taser/MP3 player. iPod Stun?