I have a weird and slightly lazy dream to some day sit in my favorite recliner and productively work my tail off in comfort.  A couple months back, I even did a little experiment.  I positioned my portable projector from the office at the ceiling of my house and reclined a recliner back.  I set up my laptop keyboard on an inclined keyboard holder and typed away while laying back and looking straight ahead at the ceiling.

I’ll admit that it worked but not as well as I would have liked.  I was very comfortable, but the distance was a little to short to get the projected image large enough to be comfortable. 

Canon does have some new projectors that have an amazing capacity to make very large images from a short distance.  You can even look at a mindmap at like 20% zoom and see the individual topics extremely clearly but I digress.

Anyway, my idea or day dream was slightly reinforced about a week and a half back while I was attending CES in Las Vegas.  I came across the i-FI chair that I would describe as a recliner with the sound system built into it. 

Now, I have never been terribly impressed with the concepts of investing in home theater furniture such that you feel like you have a miniature movie theater in your house.  I’ll take a great couch or recliner any day.  I do not need something that feels like a goofy theater seat chair.

Plus, I have three kids under 10 and its not too hard for them to regularly recreate that spilled sticky ambience on any given surface in the house!

Amazing Voice Clarity in the Sound

Now, as I test drove this chair at CES, I rapidly learned what almost everyone there learned.  The sound quality is not only great, but for very loud movies engineered for surround sound, you can understand what people are saying as if there is not a lot of surround sound background noise. 

I’m sure you’ve probably watched a movie at home where you had to turn the sound up to 40 to hear the words and then when the action picks up, all the trim in your house is vibrated away to dust.  This chair seems to eliminate that catch 22.  Plus, it has a very cool built in ability to create a sound vibration in the chair without cranking up a sub woofer that can be felt in the ground from 10 miles away like listening to a freight train through a rail road track.

(video of the LA Times here, I’m standing in the background in some of the frames, but the LA times video is kind of rough, they are writers and not film types I guess)

 

All in all, I’m not crazy about the name that the i-Fi Company has come up with but in all fairness this is not only a chair for to work with your home entertainment system, but it is also an iPod accessory that enables you to dock your iPod.  So they seem to have the obligatory ‘i’ in the name.  That said, I can’t think of a better name to counter my critical view of their name, so I guess I should just leave it there.  Its priced at about the level you could expect for a high end comfortable leather recliner.

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Here’s a simple alert that should ring true with your common sense.  Wearing headphones for your iPod during a lightning storm is a good way to blow your mind, literally.  A man wearing headphones attached to his iPod was struck by lightning.

Now that would typically flash over a person and a minor amount of damage would happen.  However, when the electricity hits something metallic, like headphones in the ears, or the wire attached to the iPod or that shiny metal backed iPod itself, that electricity is going to burn and penetrate. (Listening to MP3s in a storm could blow your mind - health)

So if a storm crops up, get out of harms way.  Leave the iPod home or in the car.  You might even want to pick up a water proof accessory to drop your iPod into if it starts to storm so that you’ll be protected from the burn.

But if you just have to listen to your music while you are outside in a lightning storm maybe you should pick up some car or truck accessories that let you crank up your music or audio book and blast it from your vehicle at a distance.

That or just take a day off from exercise.

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I’m sure many of you have seen the series of ads from Apple where they put the Mac guy (rumored to have been fired or quit) together with the PC guy, where they then proceed to talk about their existence as dedicated Mac and PC users.

Well here is an ad for the Zune flipping the Mac v PC ad by comparing the Zune to the iPod.  Just remember to watch where you point that thing . . .

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Apple has spent years developing the image that they are cool, their products are cool, their services are cool and so are their customers.

Recent ad campaigns have highlighted the differences between Mac-cool and PC-nerdiness. 

What happens when the nerdy reality hits the Mac road?

Apple’s iPod was launched with much fanfare and some of that fanfare came from their infamous Duke iPod campaign, convincing the university to provide iPod’s to incoming freshmen.  That was almost 6 years ago.

These days some of those students have graduated and moved into the workforce.  The lecture like podcasts they received from their professors to ’study’ at school are now being adapted to the corporate world.

Podcasts are meeting the corporate rank and file coming to them in their iPod ear buds.  Podcasts training employees on the routine and mundane lectures on safety.  Podcasts relaying the latest financial results or quarterly company pitch.

The idea is that employees can listen to their iPods while they are doing ‘whatever’ and continue to accomplish the mission.  Defining that ‘whatever’ time however is where things could fracture the Apple mystique.  Does the average worker want to listen to a training lecture about Driving Safety while they are commuting home from work?  Is that even safe?

The podcast has a significant potential to help companies get the message out, quickly, effectively and on the cheap.  Employees however are already feeling the personal time pinch.  Just because an employee is ’salaried’ does that mean they should fill their every waking hour multi-tasking.

If employees reach their multi-tasking angst tipping point, will the backlash be felt by the employer or will they take their anger out on the messenger and shoot their iPod?

The Wall Street Journal covered this blurring of the lines between work and leisure time in their article The Boss Puts The iPod to Work by Anjali Athavaley .  In that article, they discussed the perk of getting a free iPod balanced with the bossy bug in their ear, providing instructions in their free time.

At the end of the day, most employees in the short term will probably enjoy the perk.  They will probably also enjoy the reduction of boring lectures and training sessions in employee packed rooms and cafeterias.  In a few years though, what will they think of this technology after the old way has disappeared.  Companies need to start working on redefining their mix to help their employees maintain a work life balance otherwise the iPod will suffer less than the employer when the tipping point is reached.

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“Speculation has mounted that Apple is developing its own mobile phone — popularly labeled the iPhone — that will combine the stylish design of its iPod music and video player with mobile phone features.”

Last fall Apple and Motorola released the Rokr after working together to produce the phone, its launch almost died within minutes when Steve Jobs used the media event for the Rokr to break the news about the Ipod Nano, which promptly stole the thunder from the doomed Rokr.

Now Walt Mossberg and a number of media analysts believe that Apple working with Softbank will be working to release “a media-playing cellphone and a home-media hub” both of which would jab right back in the eye of their former partner Motorola, who has been producing home-media hubs for several years now. Motorola is also known for cellphones.

Partnering with Softbank would be a smart move for Apple, as Apple has little experience partnering with Wireless carriers. Large carriers might be enthused to get the next “Ipod” like device on a service plan, however bringing and inexperienced cell phone maker up to speed would not be an easy sell.

Hence Apple’s original partnering with number 2 cell phone ‘manufacturer’ Motorola and now Softbank, which has a long history of breaking new technical ground in the cellular industry especially in Japan.

The biggest question will actually come from Apple’s ability to remain current. Cell phone makers do not need Apple to provide cell phones with MP3 and media capabilities. Apple has broken ground in bringing the MP3 listening audience home to a store where they pay for music and media, however their unwillingness to open up their standards to other manufacturers smacks both of a future monopoly and sounds a lot like the broken record of a business plan that was Apple computer in the early 90’s when PC manufacturer’s ran circles around the companies sales, despite selling inferior products.

In consumer electronics, price rules the day especially when the price drops. Features need to be great at first, but as the product moves out to the masses, it only needs to be good enough. Apple has a lot of work to do to stay ahead with the early adopters and keep the market feeling the need to pay top dollar for a product that anyone can manufacture.

Apple, Softbank plan iPod mobile phones

This articles with all its goofy brand names and trademarks has played havoc on my spell checker. We are rapidly moving towards the day where there will be no names left.

Article written by Brett Bumeter.

Brett Bumeter works as a Business Developer for Softduit Partners, which he founded in 2005. Previous to Softduit, Brett Bumeter worked in the consumer electronics for 6 years. Several of those years spent working with Motorola. Brett has also worked for Army Intelligence as an intelligence analyst and for the USPS. Brett has a double major in Accounting and Finance and a Master’s in Laws in International Taxation.

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