Post date: Aug 20, 2010 1:19:35 AM
Definitely not an adult forum so mostly the last part only, unsatisfied demand. Remember the good ole' days when we used to sit around whittling wood or twiddling our thumbs until some company with a strange name made something that set our hearts a throbbing and our purse strings a loosening? Well no more! Rather than waiting for products, nowadays, product innovation is coming right from the proletariat. The masses are now taking it upon themselves to develop solutions to satisfy their unending thirst (too much Twilight, True Blood, Vampire Diaries etc..) for the next big thing. One key example is the Media Player that plays movies stored either in a DLNA type Digital Media Server or downloaded from the Internet and stored on an external hard disk, on your TV. The first media players on the market were from non-players in the Consumer Electronics market but have since carved out a niche for themselves, e.g. Western Digital, Seagate. Then another range from relatively new companies on the scene e.g. Astone. Well I don't need to tell you something you don't know, but the point of this posting is to show another unrequited demand. Internet Car Radio. NPR recently released the following graph of usage of its mobile App (http://textpattern.kurthanson.com/articles/1021/rain-819-npr-releases-mobile-and-web-traffic-stats)
Guess where the peak demands are? Right! Morning commute time! Only one little problem, though there are some Internet Car Radio solutions avaiilable, the whole industry doesn't think that there is even a de facto standard yet (see my previous blogs). Another point, this is NOT Pandora, this is NOT Last.FM, this is NOT Receiva, this is NPR. NPR is a whole bunch of radio stations on the Internet that broadcast all sorts of things. The figures are very much about demand for Internet Radio just like the FM radio services we have today. The demand is definitely there. The figures show it, people are using whatever is out there to fulfill it, yet the suppliers recognize they don't have it. What "it" is, only time and innovation, will tell.