Industry Traction

About halfway through the Saturday sessions at Talkers something occurred to me. Foneshow is already working with many of the talk show hosts up on the dais speaking.

Stepanie Miller
Thom Hartmann
Jack Rice
Lionel
Cenk Uygur
John Gibson

All already have shows up on Foneshow.

Now if you overlay that with the number of providers that we've been working with who are expanding their relationship and adding a second or third program to their Foneshow offerings you start to see a trend.

Talkers New Media Wrap Up

I attended the Talkers Magazine New Media conference last weekend (Talkers magazine is the trade rag of the talk radio industry). To be honest I wasn't expecting much. The last talk radio conference I attended was Radio and Records (R.I.P.) Talk Radio Seminar out in LA in March and it was like going to a wake. So with low expectations I flew to NYC on Friday afternoon.

I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. Turnout was really strong. The energy in the room great. The industry finally is starting to understand that they are not in the radio business, they're in the media business with a focus on audio, and if they lock their future to terrestrial broadcasters then they'll sink with them.

This is the third time I attended this conference and the change in attitude over that time is quite marked. At Talkers 07 no one even began to understand what we were talking about or why we were there. At Talkers 08 there was a malaise that pervaded everything, everyone clearly knew the game had to change, they just had no idea what that meant. At Talkers 09 the path forward was clear. The internet and mobile are the future of talk media.

Everything always takes longer than you think it will.

Talkers Conference

I'm headed off to the Talkers Conference in NYC this weekend. I am going to miss many of Friday's sessions but I'll be around all day on Saturday.

Good Luck With That

I read today in Inside Radio that the HD radio folks are hoping the Zune can help save them. "The HD Digital Radio Alliance plans to promote the Zune HD to consumers." It might be the other way around, maybe the Zune folks want the HD folks to rescue them...

Imagine the Titanic survivors are picked up by the Lusitania...

I wish both sides luck with that.

Smart Phone Sales

There's this Gartner report floating around about how smart phone sales are strong and cell phone sales as a whole are weak. Several bloggers who are either lazy, bad at math, or have an agenda have made hay of this article. Now anyone who has read this blog regularly knows that I think most "research" reports are self serving crap (I still remember one from 1989 that said 40% of Americans would be using interactive TV by 1994).

Here are the data points from the report:

There were 269.1 million cell phones sold. An 8.6% decrease year over year.
There were 36.4 million smart phones sold. A 12.7 percent increase year over year.

The problem is that comparing percentage changes when the scales are so far disparate is deceiving.

Smart phone sales went from 32,314,000 to 36,404,400. But making a significant percentage jump is easy when you only have relatively small numbers. If I sell 10 of something this month and 20 of it next month I am growing 100% month over month, but I still only sold 20 units.

The relevant statistic is this:

Smart phone sales went from 11% of the cell market to 13.5% of the cell market. Feature phone sales went from 89% of the market to 86.5% of the market.

Despite huge advertising campaigns, and massive free publicity, feature phones still outsell smart phones by about 7 to 1. So the title of the linked article "Smartphones Selling Far Better Than Dumb Ones" is blatantly not true.

BTW, Nokia sold the most smart phones by far:

Nokia 45.1%
Research In Motion 13.3%
Apple 5.3%
HTC 4.0%
Fujitsu 4.1%
Others 28.1%

Edit for clarity

There's a Blogger Who Doesn't like Us

Apparently Tina Whitfield from econsultancy thinks battery life is a tremendous problem for Foneshow (but apparently not for any other mobile app?).

She never asked us about use cases so she really has no data about how users use Foneshow. She's pretty much she's talking out her ass. She says she's a "consultant", that's usually code for unemployed.

My comment on her blog follows (in case she deletes it)...

Erik from Foneshow here,

Actually we have two principal use cases, in neither of which is battery particularly relevant.

Our primary use case is short form audio, generally 2-5 minutes, in these cases the impact on battery life is de minimis. This is about 75% of our listening.

Our secondary use cases are 30-45 minute listens while people commute, but those listens are in the car where the cell phone is plugged in. In that case the impact on battery is totally moot.

Please feel free to touch base if you actually want facts about how our business works instead of your uninformed opinion.

Thanks,

Erik Schwartz

David Rehr is out at NAB

David Rehr has resigned as CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters. I don't really see this as a loss for the industry. In fact, his departure is long overdue. He always reminded me of that guy from the movie "Thank You For Smoking". Before coming to the NAB David lobbied for the beer industry (no, I'm not kidding). He was smooth. He was good looking. But I was never convinced he believed (or even cared about) what he was saying.

Radio didn't need a PR focused lobbyist, they needed a leader. I called David out on some things publicly. But he never gave a damn about emerging technology or the things that could really help the industry. He was happier to repeat the praises of sycophants rather than admit there might be a problem. Radio's problems are huge. HD has been a misguided disaster. There have been PR campaigns like "Radio 2020" and "Radio Heard Here" that did nothing. New channels for programming have been growing while the radio industry has been pretending there is nothing wrong. Finally things got bad enough that the pretending had to stop.

But the real problem is the organization itself. The National Association of Broadcasters. It's a trade organization for the owners of FCC spectrum. It's not a trade organization for the creators of programming. Programming has become divorced from delivery channel. Programming has a future. Broadcasting may not. Some channels like mobile and internet have a strong future. Some channels like broadcasting do not.

I wish David well. I'm sure he will be happy lobbying for whoever hires him next.

Foneshow on Maine Biz Sunday

I was on TV this morning talking about venture capital in Maine.

Here's a link. I had embedded the video but it was auto-starting.

Nantucket Conference

I'm on the ferry to the Nantucket Conference. There seems to be free wifi on the ferry!

The Nantucket Conference is a small entrepreneurship and technology conference. I'm looking forward to a lot of great conversation and networking this weekend.

The iPhone is Not Radio's Savior

In Q1 2009 there were 258 million cell phones shipped worldwide, 3.8 million of them were iPhones. That is about 1.5%.

There's a lot of things broken in the radio industry. Going niche (what I call narrowcasting) is an important part of radio's journey out of the wilderness. But for niches to be viable they cannot be niches within the 1.5% niche of a single mobile OS platform.

Radio has become as important as it is because of its ubiquity. To remain relevant radio needs a new ubiquitous platform. The cell phone can be that platform, 1.5% of the cell phone market can not. Radio is spending a lot of time, money, and energy chasing the brass ring of the iPhone. It is simply not capable of saving them.

Fantasy Sports

We've done a deal with Rotowire, one of the leading providers of fantasy sports information. This is one of our first moves into sports news and programming on Foneshow. They'll be quite a few more in the next few weeks.