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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.

Sylvia at Piping created this photomosaic of the people at Piping Technology and the products we manufacture… pretty cool:

It was created using a web-based mosaic making tool called zumyn. The first photo mosaics I saw online were made by an MIT guy, Rob Silvers… Who I discovered through Philip Greenspun’s personal blog. Back then he had been commissioned to do photo mosaic for the rich and famous like Bill Gates (out of currency bills from around the world).

One of the side projects I’ve been working on is building a new website for India House Houston, a non-profit community center. The site’s new home is:

http://www.indiahouseinc.org/

If you’ve never been to the building, here’s what it looks like:

It’s located in Southwest Houston near Beltway 8 and 59 (8888 West Bellfort, 77031 to be exact).

The interesting thing about the website: Initially, I had planned to hire someone to configure a Joomla site for the organization. But then I remembered I could create a site with Google Sites. It turns out that Google Sites has become more and more featured so you can build a reasonable brochureware type of website with it. In my opinion, the beauty of this is there’s all this great integration with all of the Google services. Stuff like:
* Google Webmaster Central
* Google Analytics
* Google Sitemaps (Google Sites automatically generates a sitemap when you’re Google Site is set to be accessible to the outside world).
* Google Docs and Picasa albums integration (“gadgets” make it really easy to embed these in your Google Site)

As a content management system, it no doubt has it’s shortcomings. But for getting started quickly with as little effort as possible, it totally hits the mark.

Anyhow, the site is definitely under construction, but I have people adding content to it and before the end of this week, it should at least be “content & feature complete”.

I attended TEDxHouston last weekend and really enjoyed myself. I took a bunch of notes during some of the talks, so in reverse chronological order (last talk of the conference to the first talk of the conference), here they are: (and if you’re interested, here’s more information on each of the speakers from the TEDxHouston website)

David eagleman

Neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine
Rice undergrad

There are 10,000 galaxies
Each with 100,000,000,000 stars
—> Enormity of mysteries that surround us.

Beyond the end of the pier – vastness of our ignorance.

We are products of our culture, religious stories of one generation become fictional entertainment for next generation.

There are the religious fanatics and then there are the neo-atheists, not a whole lot in between.

Possibilian – tools of science and rule out certain parts of possibility space.

Mat Johnson
Novelist
University of Houston

Uncle (grandfather?) who ran to Chicago because of a fight he had with white person

I’m an African American of mixed descent
Black boy who looked white.

Incognegro – a graphic novel
Lynching – murder by mob violence
2400 black men, women, and children were killed from 1880-1930.

Dominic Walsh

Choreogrpaher / Dancer

Let the audience in on our creative process
Encourage audience to have creative confidence

Gracie Cavanar

Recipes for success

Childhood obesity
Change the way children eat.

Obesity is a stealth killer
1980 to 2006 — obesity rates doubled

Seed to plate nutrition education system. Weave garden lessons through all of the curriculum. Chefs are the heart of it.

Chefs in Schools.

60 of houston’s finest chefs in Houston.

Teach children the essence of how to cook. Teach over 3,000 children a month.

White House – helping us take our program coast to coast.

Message is powerful. Kids are trying vegetables.

Hope farms. 100 acres urban agricultural garden. Schools need to serve better lunches and mandate PE.

Fresh food access in all neighbordhoods.

Monica Pope

Monica Pope
Chef

Inspiring
20 years restaurant

Houseguest — inspiring
Most of my cooking career hasn’t been about cooking.

Grew up in sw Houston — stay out of my parents hair. City grandkids. Went to work with grandmother.

New campfire.

Mark Johnson, Hometta

Reboot value system for housing

Problems
– not built to last
– oversized
– stylistically wrong

Exterior decorative shutters — even of you could close them, they wouldn’t cover the window.

Stone but only on 25% of the house

People should be more involved in design.

People who build homes should be more concerned with impressing their children than their friends.

Houses should be designed so you can grow into them — when you get hold — master bedroom in ground floor.

The Slow Movement. Have a lot of success in getting people to think about what they consume, what them farm. — apply to housing.

McDonalds in Rome – largest – 450 seats. Slow food movement came from this.

Slow home movement — two guys in Canada. Veeeeery small.

Stephen Klineberg

Stephen Klineberg
Rice University

Oil boom — 80s
City world famous for fewest controls

Oil boom collapsed
100k jobs lost by end of 1983

Identical questions for nearly 30 years

Every business needs to figure out how to capitalize on Houston’s burgeoning diversity. Falling whites, largely Latino and black.

Chinese – wei chi – mix of “danger” and “opporunity” (word for crisis)

Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum & Dr. Maria Odom

Rice University

Real world engineering design challenges

Every year 9M children under age of 5 die. !!!!!!!!!

We’ve forgotten these children.

Haitian saying “you do not learn to swim in the library, you learn to swimmer in the river”

Backpack
Salad spinner – blood centerfuge

Incubator for newborns
Plywood and lightbulbs and simple electronics — field repair
Photo therapy system — $2k – 6k / unit

Cary Wolfe

Post humanism

Two sides to story
– humans transcending biology – frankenstein, kurzweil (transhumansim)

Problems of transhumanism
Extremists become more dnagerous

Familiar and old desire – transecend biology

Contracdiction –
1. Separates us from traditional human body functions
2. Guided by very human values

Biographical beings – other creatures on the planet

Animal rights

Equal rights for animals?

Dan Phillips

The phoenix connection

Sustainable home builders
70-80% recycled materials

Repetition creates patterns – desire for patterns are what keep us wasting stuff. Kinda subvert the dominant paradigm.

Appolonian mindset creates tremendous waste (vs dionsyien)

Jean Paul Sartre – the divided self, behave differnetly in private vs around others.

Same group think affects building standards. Self perpetuating.

Change housing from a commodity to something that bubbles up from inside.

Brene brown

/ feelings that are most unomfortable to us are the most important
Lean into the discomfort — what they say in social work.
Shame = fear of disconnection
Vulnerability
People who felt love and belonging and people didn’t. One diff: former felt worthy of love and belonging.
“wholehearted”
Embraced vulnerability — willingness to say I love you first.
Breakdown aka spiritual awakening (ha!)
We numb vulnerablity (obesity, drugs, medicated)
We make the uncertain, certain
We perfect — try to perfect our children

I’m surprised at just how easy it was to repair the loose flash shoe on my Canon Digital Rebel XT!

I followed the instructions here conraderb.com (found through a Google search) and once I figured out what to do, it took me about 30 seconds to do the repair.

The flash shoe, which was loose and causing the flash to not fire at all or to fire at full strength (so photographs were all washed out), is now fixed and my flash is working perfectly. And the connection between the flash and the camera feels like new (even when it was working right, it had been feeling a little bit loose).

Sooo Google announced their living room product strategy — Google TV.

Seems to me like a sound strategy with the right pieces in place:

– Android platform that 3rd parties can develop against, adapted for the TV -check!
– Google less-than-free business model (ie they’ll pay cable or satellite providers a nice cut of their ad revenues in Google search, maps, etc) -check! (See bgurley post on the “less than free” business model concept)
– deals with hardware makers (Sony, Intel, Logitech) -check!
– deal with a TV provider (Dish Networks) to provide initial go to market beachhead -check!

So I think all the pieces are there for Google to try and get the TV-as-a-platform party started. Apple lead the smartphone party with the iPhone, but they might end up being the follower on this one (though maybe not if this strategic leak from Apple about the next generation Apple TV is to be believed).

And as I see it, all of this is good news for the “DIY HTPC” enthusiasts, the people that were the lifeblood of our Beyond TV product at SnapStream when we were focused on the consumer market. These are the same enthusiasts that turned to companies/products like SageTV, Meedio, MediaPortal, Windows Media Center Edition (longest name in the bunch… has to be Microsoft’s product!) and GB-PVR to turbo-charge their home entertainment systems.

Why’s this good news for HTPC enthusiasts?

Well, to all those 3rd party developers that built Beyond Media plug-ins, that built plugins/extensions for SageTV… you always wondered whether it was worthwhile to build on our piddly “platform”… it wasn’t, at least not beyond impressing your friends.

At SnapStream, we always had our hands full building our own applications, and never had time (or, truth be told, the expertise or experience) to make a real attempt to build a platform with a complete ecosystem of hardware, content, services and 3rd party developer tools. If you look at the other products mentioned above, you’ll find that the same is true.

Now, with Google TV, and likely with a future competing platform from Apple, 3rd party developers (both enthusiasts and professional developers) will have an incentive to build applications for the living room– there’s a platform that will have real users, real market traction and growth, and real methods for monetizing users.

I, for one, can’t wait to see how some of the creativity that we saw amongst SnapStream developer enthusiasts will flourish on these new upcoming TV platforms. Some of the TV apps that people developed at one time for SnapStream:

– DVD Library — jukebox for all your ripped DVDs — like Kaleidescape or Real’s RealDVD product (both of which were sued)
– Caller ID — see who’s calling on the big screen while you’re watching TV
– Internet Radio (on your big-screen TV)
– Stocks (on your big-screen TV)

And this is only the tip of the iceberg of innovation that we’ll see come to the big-screen in the living room. It’ll be a “gold rush” for developers building apps for the television!

Oh and one other thing. What about Roku? They make the popular $99 box for your TV. IMO they’re the closest thing to a Google TV competitor. They have a solid hardware product, a growing number of content providers delivering content to it, and even something of a platform for 3rd party developers. It would seem that they’re a direct competitor to Google TV! But Roku won’t be able to compete with Google’s “less than free” advertising subsidized business model. So if I were Roku, I wouldn’t want to end up as the Symbian or Palm WebOS of the TV space. I’d drop my own platform and throw everything I have into becoming _the_ hardware platform for Google TV. I’d want to be to Google TV what HTC is to Android. Yes Google’s announced Sony as their hardware partner, but Roku’s scrappier and seems less likely to screw up a Google TV hardware device.

I write this as I slog through the complexity and confusion that is eBay’s “eBay Selling” app for the iPhone (selling my Dad’s old Palm Pre)– at this moment, I’m literally waiting for eBay’s app to upload photographs, my 5th attempt to get the Palm Pre listed on eBay through this iPhone app!!

Someone needs to do an auction website + app for the iPhone that’s dead simple — like Posterous does for blogging.

Posterous’s tagline on their frontpage is “the dead simple place to post everything” and I want to see “the dead simple place to sell anything.”

Let me pre-fill my preferences and what-not on their website.

Then point my iPhone’s camera at what I want to sell and take some photos. Give me a really simple app on the iPhone. Kill most of the options that eBay’s throws in the way of getting an item listed. Let the photographs do the selling.

It took me about 20 minutes to get this item posted for sale on eBay. I should have been able to list it in 5 minutes.

I’ve got about 10 other things in my home office that I really want to get rid of but that’s 10×20 = 200 minutes = 3+ hours… and that isn’t time I want to spend.

Make it so dead simple that a celebrity with a cell phone can sell their stuff to the celebrity mongering public. After all, part of what’s made twitter so successful is making it so dead simple that people who otherwise had no time or interest, are suddenly engaged by the medium.

[Note: I’m a Salesforce user at two companies — my software company, SnapStream, and a manufacturing company, Piping Technology. So I’ve spent a fair bit of time inside of Salesforce as a user.]

Marc Benioff wrote: “A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone.” Ironically, Salesforce’s pricing is a barrier to entry that they’ll need to knock down to succeed. They’ve built their business being less expensive than the competition (Siebel, etc), but that’s not inexpensive enough to compete with Google and others. Consider the relative value of Google Apps Premier at $50 / user / year vs. Salesforce at $800 / year! And they announced Salesforce Chatter pricing at $50 / user / month! Nuts, if you ask me… pricing from another era.

And they’ve always had one foot in and one foot out of the 3rd party app market (Salesforce AppExchange?). As a Salesforce user, I’ve often been attracted to the idea of 3rd party plug-ins — for a better solution to creating and sending customers quotations for example. But then I discovered that 3rd party plug-ins only work for customeres that pay for API access. Even after paying the few thousand $$ for API access (have to buy it for every account!), getting 3rd apps to work was complex and confusing. Google’s App’s Marketplace, in general comparison, makes it point and click simple to deploy 3rd party services.

And as far as all this talk about streams and enterprise activity feeds, I have yet to see or use Chatter, but if I have to add everyone else at my company onto Salesforce or Chatter at $50-65 / user / month, forget it! I already use Google Apps and when they roll out Buzz for Google Apps account, I’m thinking that it’ll do most or all of what Chatter promises to do for users.

So at the very least, Salesforce has their work cut out for them in this space! I’m not betting on their winning — they have an existing business they’d have to cannibalize. And that existing business has never struck me as very nimble, given the pace of their software updates and how they seem to provision customers across discrete servers/server farms vs. in a truly distributed fashion.

I got mine in the mail earlier this week. There’s not much to it, but it’s pretty slick.

(click the photo above to see more photographs of the Google Nexus One dock on my Flickr account… photos taken with my iPhone 🙂 )