Rakesh Agrawal’s Blog

I’ve been using the new Nike Plus iPhone app to track my runs… It’s really cool. It talks to you while you’re running, letting you know your pace for each mile you run and it uploads all the data to Nike’s website so you can chart your progress and get a view of your run on Google Maps with a speed gradient that shows you where you ran faster and where you ran slower.  I’m sure there’s more the the website, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Anyways, I carried my iPhone in my hand on my first run but that wasn’t any fun so I went looking for an iPhone armband that I could wear while running.  After poking around reading reviews on Amazon.com and reading random review through Google, last week I bought two armbands for my iPhone 4.  The first one, was the Apple iPhone 4 / iPhone 4G Black Mesh Sport Armband.  It’s not so good… it’s fit to the iPhone 4 but you have to remove the iPhone 4 from whatever case/bumper you have it in and then you have to really squeeze it into this thing to use it.  And once it’s in there, operating the screen is something you can only do by forcefully pushing the piece of thick plastic against the iPhone’s screen.  I can’t even say what it’s like when it’s actually fastened on your arm because I haven’t even tried it yet.

The other iPhone 4 armband I tried out was Grantwood’s Tuneband for iPhone 4 — this one works pretty well.

It comes with it’s own iPhone 4 cover and then the velcro armband slips through a slits on the back of that case.  I wear it slightly above my elbow and it stays in place while I run.  The armband is made mostly of a stretchy nylon (?) material so when you pull and apply the velcro, the whole thing is tensioned on your arm.  I don’t have huge arms but they aren’t that skinny either… with the length of the strap and location of the velcro, if my arms were any skinnier, I’d have to wear this thing higher on my arm, closer to my shoulder.  And there might even be some people whose arms are two thin for this particular strap.  But it works great for me!

I was surprised to see the name brands in iPhone cases (Belkin, Speck, etc) don’t have their own armbands for sports… There’s the  Nike+Armband for iPhone but it hasn’t been re-designed for the iPhone 4 — come on Nike!

The last thing I’ll say is that even though the Nike app is cool with it’s visualizations, GPS maps, Nike Plus website, etc. the is the iPhone feels a  little bit big to be carrying around on runs like this.  So maybe I’ll get one of those Garmin or Polar wristwatches instead.  Meanwhile, the Tuneband from Grantwood is my iPhone armband of choice, I recommend it!

Jason McElweenie did an SEO project for us at SnapStream and Piping and he did some great work for us (if you happen to visit our sites, a lot of the changes he recommended for SnapStream are pending a new site template that we’re still debugging). So, anyways I wanted to wish him best of luck with his new Houston-focused marketing agency, the “You Might Know Me” marketing agency.

Jason, JR and Kerri: best of luck to you all!

Some details from Jason’s email announcing the new venture:

You Might Know Me – A Marketing Agency
Partners: JR Cohen, Jason McElweenie, Kerri Ryan
Website (almost): www.ymkmagency.com
Phone: (713) 487-5112
Facebook | Twitter

What we do: marketing strategy, online strategy, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media, events, video, and design…and a few more things.

A couple of weeks ago, after setting up Sonos for a family member, I had lots of fresh thoughts on Apple’s iTunes + Airport Express whole home audio solution (which I run at my house) vs. Sonos’ system for whole home audio, so I jotted them down as a series of tweets. Here they are in a single blog post:

1. Sonos just works. Apple’s Airport Express + AirTunes requires some setup.

2. Sonos supports Rhapsody, Pandora & other music services. Airport Express only supports playing back music that’s in your iTunes library.

3. Sonos is more expensive — about $300-400 per room. You can get an Airport Express on eBay (that’s where I bought the three that I’m running in my house) for $60-70.

4. Sonos’ software seems more instant on. With Apple Airport Express, you use the “Remote” iPhone app, which can be laggy & behave weirdly.

5. Sonos lets you control the volume of each zone independently. With Apple Airport Express, there’s one volume level across all zones. (UPDATE: this has now been fixed in iTunes 10 and Airplay. See my post on what’s new in Airplay.)

6. Sonos’ search function is terrible, forcing you to first pick search by title / artist / etc. Apple Remote search is a simple one box, the way it should be.

7. Sonos has dedicated touchscreen device (it’s handy and gets used). No such option With Apple Airport Express, iPhone “Remote” app is it.

8. Sonos let’s you play multiple tracks, each in it’s own zone. Airport Express doesn’t. It’s one song in the zones you select.

9. Sonos seems to be more robust in dealing with wifi problems. The music with my Apple Airport Express system will glitch sometimes (see AirTunes Airport audio stream drops or cuts out). Of all of Sonos’ strengths / Apple’s weaknesses, this is probably the most significant. There’s nothing worse than having some nice music playing while you have friends over and then having it just completely cut out in the middle. I’m hoping with Apple’s renewed interest in whole home audio (see what’s new with Airplay in iTunes 10), they’re going to quickly fix this.

10. Sonos has the S5 all-in-one wifi digital music interface + amp + speakers box. It’s awesome. No such option with Apple Airport Express. (UPDATE: with Apple’s new AirPlay being opened to 3rd parties, this is no longer an advantage for Sonos… You’ll see lots of standalone speakers (and more) that are as simple as the S5. Like this iHome Airplay speaker that’s been announced.)

So while it might look like the list above says, “Sonos is the only way to go!”, that’s not true. Apple’s solution totally works, it just has some limitations. And some of those limitations have been eliminated with Apple’s Airplay upgrade in iTunes 10.

Here’s where Apple’s Airport Express + iTunes is compelling, at least for me. To wire up my four “zones” in my house, the total cost was:

4 Airport Expresses = 4 x $70 = $280

4 amps (I use this one) = 4 x $55 = $220

4 sets of speakers = 4 x $100 (roughly) = $400

The same same setup with Sonos would have been at least $1100 more! (Sonos 90, which is equivalent to the Airport Express, is $350, ie $280 more than Airport Express. $280 x 4 = $1120 more)

Amidst bigger announcements last week, Apple quietly announced a new version of their “whole home audio” technology: AirPlay (formerly known as AirTunes). To my knowledge, here’s what’s new:

• The game changer: Apple appears to be opening up the AirPlay protocol to 3rd parties, as reported by Engadget here and here. Here’s a teaser from iHome on their upcoming AirPlay speakers:

  

  What makes this exciting is setting up whole home audio with Apple + iTunes will now be a LOT easier. Before, the only option was to get an Airport Express, combine it with an amp and some speakers. Yes, complicated. Now, with AirPlay being built in 3rd party products, you’ll be able to get standalone speakers off-the-shelf, plug them into power and that’s it! They’ll just show up as speakers available in iTunes. Just like the Sonos S5. This is going to bring a lot more people to Apple’s whole home audio solution.

• This is a smaller thing, but I haven’t seen it reported anywhere else: iTunes 10′s AirPlay “audio zone” selector now features volume controls for each zone. Screenshots:

  
  The new "zone selector" drop down in the bottom right of the iTunes window (where it says "Living Room")

  
  New volume control per zone in iTunes 10 Airplay

  I’m excited about this, first, because it’s useful. We had a birthday party last weekend and had music going in the backyard and the living at the same time, but it was too loud in the backyard and not loud enough in the living room. This is what I needed to get the audio levels right. Sonos has always had this.

• The thing that excites me about both of these items is Apple is paying attention to distributing music around the house. Hopefully they have or will fix long-standing problems with AirTunes/AirPlay (like the “audio stream drops or cuts out” problem) as more people use this technology! And hopefully, by the same token, the technology will see more feature additions too… For example, I want to be able to access music services like Pandora and Rhapsody on my iTunes+Airport Express whole home audio system. And I want to be able to play one song in one room and another song in another room… all from the same instance of iTunes.