ABBA, The Cardigans, Ace of Base and Roxette to name just a few – there’s no doubt Swedes have always known how to pump out pop music. So, it should not be a wonder that, once again, it took the Swedes to show how to bring music to the masses in the form of Spotify.

However, in a modern home, the other problem with music is that today most people have their music inside their computer – which, more often than, is a laptop instead of a bulky desktop and anyway probably not stationed anywhere near one’s stereo setup. There are many solutions to this problem, Apple has its Airport Express but it only supports playback from iTunes out of the box. So, if you want to stream Spotify from a bigger set of speakers and without cables this is not a good solution.

For a long time, I was looking for such a solution – no additional cables or stuff to just play audio from my Mac to my living room. I did find a bunch, but most of them were complex and riddled with lots of strange limitations (like cost). I was sure that there had to be an easier way to enjoy Spotify further than 2 meters from my laptop. Many A/V manufacturers sidestep the issue by adding a WLAN, Ethernet and/or USB capability to their hardware, so one can play music out of a shared hard drive but this rules all streaming services, like Spotify, out.

Maybe in the future Spotify might be inside our radio tuners and televisions. The latter is possible already in Sweden and Finland, where you can get Spotify on your digital television thanks to the Swedish-Finnish ISP and mobile operator TeliaSonera. Changing my internet and cable operator just for Spotify sounded a bit too complex solution so that wasn’t for me. But it might be a nice setup for one’s parents – if they weren’t just fine with their CDs, probably. Is it really this difficult to just stream arbitrary audio from one’s laptop to speakers wirelessly?

So, more Swedes to the rescue. The good folks at the hi-fi spekaer company Audio Pro have come up with probably one of the simplest and cross-platform solutions with their wireless offering. But, it’s an USB dongle. Aren’t there enough wireless transmitters inside my MacBook Pro to do the job? Well, thanks to yet another Swedish company, Ericsson, and their Bluetooth technology (with AD2P-profile), streaming audio wirelessly should be simple. So, why not just add Bluetooth inside a radio and then things should work with no wires or restrictions, right?

However, this, like many other Bluetooth applications, hasn’t really caught on. Sony has some setups with Bluetooth, but I went with Audio Pro Radio One. Sure, it looks like any Tivoli Audio’s radio and Tivoli Audios are really nice, but the only “modern” one with any connectivity (and radio presets!) is NetWorks and that one costs an arm and a leg – and even that one can’t stream music from a computer in a simple way. Radio One, on the other hand can, because the smart folks at Audio Pro put a Bluetooth receiver in it.

And so, with Radio One, Spotify and a Mac things are quite straightforward. Because the Radio One acts like an ordinary output device which means you can stream any audio to it. No need for Airport Express or Airfoil, things work even simpler than that. Setting up a Windows-machine should be equally easy as long as you have correct Bluetooth-drivers that have the A2DP profile. Connecting your iPhone – or any other mobile phone with BT – to Radio One? Thanks to Bluetooth, really easy. However, because there’s no iPod or USB dock in Radio One, you’d better watch battery usage or use a stereo cable instead.

So, thanks to a bunch of ingenious Swedes, I can finally stream music from my laptop to my living room. The only limits are that Bluetooth’s range is relatively short and it does consume battery. But no artificial limits like with oh so many other solutions. Aren’t standards and simple solutions a fun thing?

A sidenote: Americans and other developing mobile countries take note, Bluetooth does not mean a wireless headset. Bluetooth can do a lot of pretty cool stuff, but unfortunately introduction of cheap mobile broadband and before that Nokia’s and then Apple’s reluctance to actually support any interesting profile (without crippling them beyond any recognition) on their handsets have meant that Bluetooth is not in the spotlight anymore and is mostly in hands-free headsets and wireless keyboards and mice.

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Thinking a lot about blue and red oceans these days, which was a topic of a New Venture seminar last week (summary post about that coming up). Still not having completed Blue Ocean Strategy, the book (someone told me, reading the summary would suffice. See slides below), I’m still not entirely sure how to get to a blue ocean. More after the slides.

[slideshare id=61974&doc=blue-ocean-strategy-summary4461&w=425]

I know, from the first few chapters, that you analyse features of a competing business. You list them in some kind of chart and map out how far they go and how to beat them with your own features. Taking the case of gaming consoles, which is as good as any, for the two powerful ones, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, we would list:

• Online platform (more Xbox360)
• Huge graphical capabilities (more Playstation, but negligible difference)
• Looks better on HDTV
• DVD-drive (huge, unpredictable format-war at launch)
• Games, Games, Games
• Same (more or less) controllers as usual
• Expensive components overall
• Price point in the $500+ (at that time)
• Aggressive marketing strategy, based on above features, targeted mostly at young men.
• Huge multinational corporations with huge budgets
• Lot’s of industry consolidation, virtual and actual
• Added, due to comment: both players may have other motives, apart from pushing their gaming-plaform (e.g. Blu-ray for Sony & Live-platform for Microsoft)

And I could probably go on.

Fighting Microsoft and Sony would require some serious leaps in logic, you would think. You can see that the leap that Sony and Microsoft made was not too far off. It was based on the assumption that any next generation of console would have to be significantly more powerful than the last. And you could see that, them being huge multinational corporations, the thinking was probably that if any drastic industry change could happen (take that format war), they could make it come true. There’s another industry-change that had to happen for both of these to take off like gangbusters, which was that everyone would buy an HDTV. That didn’t exactly happen.

So, essentially, we had several weaknesses, namely that:

• The format war was undecided, confusing customers.
• HDTVs were expensive.
• The consoles themselves were expensive.
• They were eating up each others already small markets (made small by the three preceding factors).

You could also add that they focussed on the same consumer segments as a weakness, but how could they know, right?

Now, if you read into Blue Ocean Strategy, then you would expect for Nintendo to have anticipated these issues. How would that be possible?

For one, they are industry-insiders, just like Sony and Microsoft, so they would have had access to data about production costs of both competing consoles, as well as of the state of HDTVs and HD DVDs, now and in the near future. Two, being a successful console and game producer, they would also have a good grasp on their audience. Three, they would have their own vision and be able to iterate quickly on it.

When you think about it, the leap of logic wasn’t actually happening from those entering the blue ocean, it was from those operating in the red one: Sony and Microsoft.

I wrote this, because sometimes, as a new player on the market, you aim small. You don’t want to upset the big players in the red ocean and instead want to *grow* a blue one. I don’t think blue oceans are grown, they are instead hidden. Growing an ocean is the worst leap of all, because it means changing people’s behaviour. Core-users of Xbox & Playstation haven’t changed one bit, rather you found new customers that weren’t being addressed by those two marketing strategies.

If you do have to make a leap in logic to launch a product, make sure that the price you pay isn’t to expensive.

End of thought.

Vincent

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