1. What is it? Today any musician(s) can be published to a blog and have an instant audience reacting to them through social book marks. Gone are the days when we had someone tell us what everybody else is listening to. With Web 2.0, we know what everyone else is listening to at any point in time (a.k.a. bleeding edge/underground music.) The Web 2.0 Pass uses mobile technology to automatically have a collaboratively hand filtered stream of bleeding edge/underground music constantly harvested, updated and piped into the customers’ ear . Music sales have been in free fall since 2000, the year file-sharing networks made online copying of music widespread. The launch of Apple’s iTunes service in 2003 was hailed as a potential savior for the industry. But iTunes’ rapid growth has turned it into a Goliath. It often asks for exclusive rights for songs in exchange for prominent placement on its home page. The objective of this enterprise is not to offer another user interface like Pandora or Last FM but rather to devalue that interactive experience by providing a hand filtered stream of bleeding edge/underground mp3s for a low fee. Pandora and Last FM are limited by the listeners’ past listening experiences while the Web 2.0 Pass opens the door to the bleeding edge/underground listening experience. Pandora and Last FM are not our competition anyway. We are competing rather with XM Radio at $500.00/year and Sirrus Satellite Radio at $20.00/month but offering a more bleeding edge product. We take advantage of the WiMAX air interface to sell a recurring service that will continually update the persistent collection of bleeding edge/underground music on the mobile device. None of the applications that we rely on are interactive (Except for those we offer through the toxic iTunes/Amazon Cloud.) Rather, they are “background” computer processes that do not interfere with the user. Instead of having the user sideload the mp3s with UBS or be near a tedious WiFi “hot spot” the mp3s are continuously downloaded automatically from the web. Every spot is a “hot spot.” This product also runs independently of any cellular mobile phone carrier. That sets us apart from all other competitors and establishes us as the insurgent. This program never interrupts the users’ listening experience but does allow incoming phone calls or scheduled alerts. We are only interested in the automation of the entire process of assuring users that they are listening to what everybody else will be listening to in the future without them ever having to go the trouble of listening to what everyone else is listening to now. The” bleeding edge/underground” is simply a social abstraction determined by such Web 2.0 devices as http://technorati.com [13] and Yahoo’s http://del.icio.us [14.] “Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media Technorati is the recognized authority on what's happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. They rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second [13.] The Web 2.0 Pass is driven by innovations in Silicon: The increased amount of physical memory on the mobile device coupled with the release of the Intel Centrino 2 WiMAX enabled laptop with a longer battery life. There is no server side processing in this product because the memory foot print on mobile phones has double in just a record, short period of time and that trend will continue. All transaction processing takes place either on the mobile client or in the iTunes/Amazon cloud . This new product captures and utilizes that Silicon innovation to avoid competition with the huge, fast server farms residing in the costly Google /Yahoo /Microsoft /iTunes /Amazon /Sun cloud. We never want to compete with them on the cloud or speed or edge or platform vectors because they are using non eco friendly technologies like Hydro/Carbon/Fossil Fuel/Natural Gas / Nuclear to power their huge operations. Instead, we want to deploy our device on the WiMAX mobile platforms using only local, mobile, storage and “green”, rechargeable battery processing power. Battery power is now lasting for nineteen hours without a recharge. 2. How Does it Work? Most bands and labels are posting freemp3s of their latest music on their sites. Add to that an army of fans scouring these sites daily, then blogging and bookmarking what they find. The result is a constant stream of bleeding edge/underground music being discovered, sorted, commented, and publicized. Our customers don’t have the time to crawl through all these blogs and social bookmarks. They just want to automatically have the best, bleeding edge/underground tunes on their mobile WiMAX device, so the process was automated with the best API tools for harvesting content from the social web. The Web 2.0 Pass is a device that’s goes and gets bleeding edge/underground mp3s from the Web 2.0 -- like a browser but without displaying what it downloads. There is very little it cannot do. Run the Web 2.0 Pass, give it the Hype Machine list of the URLs to those bleeding edge/underground mp3 blogs, and let it scrape all the new audio files it finds. Then it keeps doing that on a daily basis and save everything into a WiMAX mobile device. It is a virtual radio station of hand-filtered, bleeding edge/underground music . The “bleeding edge/underground” is determined on the “Web 2.0 Pass“ the same way that “PageRank” is determined on Google. And then those ranked in the top 500 are scraped on to the users’ cellular WiMAX device. All the blogs are on the “Hype Machine” (An mp3 blog aggregator) [15] are sorted by a rank which is the number of incoming links from Technocrati [13] multiplied by the number of social bookmarks harvested from del.icio.us. WiMAX continuously automated mp3 down loads will set us apart and start a revolution in music because the user will never have to side load any mp3s from a pc like iTunes and never have to down load mp3s from a mobile phone carrier like the Sprint Store. This device will be free from the Microsoft /Yahoo /Google /Amazon /Apple /Sun cloud as well as the PSTN operators like Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, etc. All mobile phones now use circuit switching to communicate because mobile phones are the “last mile” of the Publically Switched Telephone Network (PSTN.) The billing system for (mobile) phones is established and depends upon the metaphorical completion of a “circuit.” Packet Switching is how internet applications communicate and the billing system is established only to the extent that it is dependent on the PSTN (Virtual Circuits) or upon the new Google /Microsoft /Yahoo /Amazon /Sun cloud. This new cloud is different to the extent that it uses “Private Lines” as opposed to the PSTN. Once the 120 year old PSTN is removed from the model everything changes. Unless America returns to an agrarian economy, dependent on “Wind Farms” all electronic communications systems will eventually be packet switching. Mobile WiMax (worldwide interoperability for microwave access.) is a promising packet switching, IP communications technology continuous over a metropolitan area where transaction processing may be done by the Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) or Subscriber Station (SS) in WiMAX. The iPhone II is 3g; WiMAX is 4g.. 3 Who will Buy it? At the start of this year, iTunes became the largest retailer of music in the U.S., surpassing Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to research firm NPD Group, Inc. iTunes has been the runaway hit of the music business, selling more than five billion song downloads since it started five years ago. The market for wireless applications and services is now huge. The consumer segment consists of games, location-based services, productivity applications, and other generally useful applications. In the near term, these applications will be controlled and distributed by wireless carriers. Telecommunication carries like AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Qwest, MCI, and etc. today only exist as gate keepers to charge tolls and maintain the communications network. Ma Bell was granted legal monopoly status to that end and since her break up every effort has been made by telecom equipment manufactures to adhere to the strict standards set by the telecommunication industry. Since cellular, wireless telephony is nothing more than the last mile of the PSTN cloud to the end user, it is the trunk carriers who are in a position to collect the tariffs for any end users programs or CPEs. As required by, and in spite of, the many laws regulating the telecommunications industry, the food chain is established and is economically sound. The carriers are the gate keepers and they now must be paid before we can be paid [8]. Only the Google / Yahoo / Microsoft / Sun /iTunes / Amazon cloud has found a way around that but at a very heavy environmental cost in terms of Hydro / Carbon / Fossil Fuel / Nuclear Power consumption. These companies run huge server farms connected by private lines that bypass the PSTN and are strategically based near waterfalls and Nuclear Power plants. No other online music store has been able to mount a serious challenge to iTunes. Apple keeps about 30% of the price of each music sale. When Mobile WiMAX becomes available the revenues from the “last mile” will be less transparent because users will no longer need a telephone switch or to complete a circuit. The Telecom companies are dependent upon the circuit switching model for their income. 4 How Will It Generate Income? Last year, U.S. consumers downloaded 844 million individual songs from digital download stores while overall U.S. album sales-of both CDs and digital downloads—declined 21% to 500 million copies in 2007 from 2003, according to Nielson SoundScan. Our revenues will be generated by charging the listener a fee for the transfer of a “tagged” (purchased) mp3 from the stream of continuous mp3s piped into to listener’s ear to the listeners personal play list at $.99 per mp3. Apple isn’t willing to sell songs for more than 99 cents. That means there is no room for price competition no matter how good or unusual the music is. The business model will be identical to HD radio tagging. The concept of tagging (purchasing) allows people to not have to write down a song title whenever they buy an mp3. If they hear a song that they like then they press a button to buy it. Purchases are made through the traditional iTunes/Amazon cloud (Apple gets 30%). Purchased songs can be burned to Audio CD. Users must also pay a monthly flat fee called the “Web 2.0 Pass” that costs US$14.99. This allows a member to listen to unlimited dynamically updated music for a flat monthly fee. We will primarily make our money by selling minutes to users. It’s suspiciously like a telco but more like Skype. The Web 2.0 Pass only allows users to download songs as long as they pay for them on iTunes or Amazon. Web 2.0 Pass songs cannot be burned to Audio CD unless purchased and become unplayable if the subscription should lapse. Initially, there is also included a 14-day Web 2.0 Pass free trial in the package. Blogs are all about self promotion. There can be no legal issues about anyone reselling what is posted on one’s blog. The blog is public domain. The big payoff from the Web 2.0 Pass will only come after WiMAX is in place. Researchers have been working on mobile IP for decades but have never got it to work until WiMAX. With the Wed 2.0 Pass one will be able to listen to the bleeding edge for only $14.99 per month. We will be making money from the users themselves, by selling mp3s that we can get from the free, and using the “Web 2.0 Pass” as bait. The Mobile Internet from WiMAX is being primarily used to avoid the last mile of the PSTN. The challenge is to create a model where the money isn’t coming from the minutes. To do so we have inverted Skype’s business model. The music comes from musicians/bloggers who want to interact with the users. The users are attracted by a combination of cheapness, ease of use, and some convenience that they can’t get elsewhere. And the musicians/bloggers are attracted because they can interact with the users in some way that they can’t find elsewhere. Our focus of attention is the business model of Skype[1] which is a start-up that was co-founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis in 2003. Since its launch the company received substantial media attention because their co-founders have a considerable entrepreneurial track record. More precisely, they were at the roots of KaZaA, with more than 370 millions downloads the most successful Internet software to date (www.skype.com). KaZaA is a music download platform based on peer-to-peer technology that reverberated across the music industry because it allowed users to download music for free. Similarly, their new venture provides a peer-to-peer based communication software. It could be a good candidate to shake up the telecom industry. Skype's software allows anyone with a broadband Internet connection to make free voice over internet protocol (VoIP) calls from Skype to Skype and cheap calls from Skype to any traditional phone in the world or the other way around. Additionally, the software integrates other communication and productivity features (e.g. instant messaging and file exchange, voice mail). While the application is still perceived as an Internet technology for early adopters it is increasingly piercing mainstream market segments. In fact, the technology is progressively integrating and converging with traditional phone technology. Skype has several million users and is adding tens of thousands per day. More than 2 million people use Skype simultaneously. Ten percent of the users are paying customers. The average call time is 6 minutes. In its final form this product, The Web 2.0 Pass, will never interact with a desk top PC. Payment will either be mailed in to a P.O. Box or made over the mobile device itself. For payment purposes we ultimately want a standalone product, separate from any carrier’s cellular net work or any Web server farm anywhere except the ones from which we harvest the music. We want to be able to sell this product to customers with no access to a PC. I’m suggesting an E Business with no web portal. 5 Who Am I? James B. Diskin Started his own consulting business in 1983, worked as a researcher at CMU’s Robotics Institute and financial programmer on Wall Street before he earned his MST in Telecommunication in 1998 from The University of Pittsburgh and since then has worked with Cisco, AT&T, Lucent, and MCI as an automated SONET, T1, DS3, ISDN, trunk/private line tester. http://jbdst8.googlepages .com/home . Automation has been Mr. Diskin’s life’s work and the history of this product. This idea came from his work with AMD in SiValley where he was not only in charge of a large server farm but also wrote automated scripts to simulated the user experience playing Quake IV and Doom 3 in order to test the graphics chips used in Microsoft’s XBox and Nintendo’s Wii [9.] 6. Next Steps Immediately copy the working version that exists on the desktop Vista pc and make the move to a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet ($359.00 on Google Check Out) with 10 Giga bytes of storage and OS 2008 (a desk top Linux.) While we are waiting for the roll out of the Sprint Clear Channel mobile WiMAX network, the N810 WiFi device takes us one step closer in our proof of concept and make us ready for WiMax[12.] This will mean using the Unix cron rather than the MS Task Scheduler but no other difficulties are forecast except where to get the money to pay for the N810. Concurrently we have also found a way to develop the features of the desktop into a Mobile WiMAX device with the recent announcement of the Centrino 2 [16] in July 2008. If Moore’s law [5] is true the lap top devise will evolve into a hand held device and if the past is any guide to the future the circuit switching communications network will evolve into the packet switching network. Only the consumer will decide how fast. An office in Baltimore (WiMAX) would be ideal to beat all the competition to market with this product. References: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype [3] http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/BonCrow.html [4] Surowiecki, James (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations Little, Brown ISBN 0-316-86173-1 [5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(mobile_phone_platform) [6]http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?IA=WO2007035732&DISPLAY=DESC [8] http://www.amazon.com/Telephone-Switching-Systems-Richard-Thompson/dp/1580530885 [10]http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/APPLE_WIMAX_LATIN_AMERICA?SITE=MALOW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT [10]http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/WIMAX_SOLD_OUT?SITE=MALOW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT [10]http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/WIMAX_SWITZERLAND?SITE=MALO&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT [11] Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach 4th Edition by John Hennessy and David Patterson 2007 by Elsevier, Inc. San Francisco, CA. [12]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX [13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati [14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us [15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hype_Machine [17] http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=287