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MP3s From The Phone Box
An Economist writes "The .com bubble has come and gone, but the great ideas and implementations are starting to come through thick and fast now. The BBC reports on a planned development in the UK - download MP3s (or the like) from the phone box. Walking along the street and fancy a song - just plug in your iPod/MuVo/iRiver/whatever... awesome! Perhaps the lauded benefits of eCommunication are just beginning to be felt - plus it increases the viability of old-tech phone boxes, which are socially beneficial but financially challenged."
I'm envisioning someone figuring out how to boot off an iPod and using spare hard drive space to trade pirated software.
Hmm... Warezchalking?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Can somone say $hit or get off the pot? Geeebus, as if people don't take long enough at the phone booth.
Now I can get 16 kbps quality music for 10 cents a minute and 2 bucks a song.
Think about it - they are tergetting a niche market (Ipod owners) with an even nichier product (downloading songs on the road). And, to top it off, how often will a given person do it? Maybe once or twice, for that one time you are own the road and need a particular song. Otherwise, you'd get most of your music at home. I mean, they are losing money with telephone calls (where you might actually get repeat customers), and that doesn't even require them to pay for a high speed connection. No, I suspect this project is doomed already.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Cause its so more practical to load music at a phonebooth, in public, than in the comfort of your home. I don't see the point here, honestly. An Ipod hold so much music that you'll always have something non-boring to listen to anyway.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
"Under the plans, anyone owning an iPod or portable music player would be able to go into a phonebox and download a song while out shopping or on a lunch break."
Well, just about every player has a different method of song transfer. Many require databases to be constructed, and there are so many obscure models out there... Most don't have Line-Ins to record off of, so what are they going to do?
Can't say that I speak for everyone, but I really can't imagine using this service. How often do you find yourself walking down the street thinking "man, I'd pay anything just to listen to some Moby right now"?
And it's not so much the cost. Who wants to stand there, navigate a bunch of menus and wait for a download just for a 3-minute song?
Maybe I'd pay for general internet access, but I can do that at a coffee shop. If I'm tired of what I've got on my iPod, I can always listen to the radio. The concept just doesn't seem to fill a desire.
The last time I used a public phone was probably only a couple months ago, when I was out without my cell phone and needed to phone somebody. Believe it or not, not everyone has a working cell phone on them at all times, and the ability to make phone calls from a public place at a nominal fee really is useful.
Too much repetition my too much repetition!
Kudos for the time-travel-was-only-phase-1 dept. for writing a story that made me actually RTFA, because even after reading it few times in a row I didn't understand a single thing. Now, when I have RTFA and know what are we talking about, I have an idea. Why cannot they install CD-R burners and CD/booklet printers in booths of some sort to allow buying the same music as a customly composed CD having only to reload it with CD-Rs, paper and ink once in a while, while making every single song ever recorded available in the most convenient way imaginable and for relatively low cost and minimal overhead?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
On their recent tour, the Pixies offered CDs of the show recorded and mized live to fans walking out the door. I could see a kiosk at concert venues allowing fans to downlaod the night's show to their iPod. It would proably be faster than burning CDs. A phone both however, is not something I currently associate with music, and I don't thing it would catch on, but i buy most of my CD's at concerts, where I know the money is going to the artist. Apple is going to realse a U2 special edition iPod next week, and is rumored to be working on A sub $200 flash player. How long till digital complete overtakes cd's?
sorry 'bout the mess...
So, you want a 3 day waiting period on phone sex and internet porn?
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Up take for niche services like these requires very low entry requirements - like low price, little registration hazzles, ultra convenient - in order to gain momentum.
And btw, if wireless internet over cellular ever gets realistically cheap - it should just kill off this phonebooth music downloading idea easily.
Sunset over the lake, cool mist over the bridge; A leave upon the ripples, the snow reflects its glow.
Man don't even joke like that....
Sometimes when you're traveling you find out that your provider dosen't work in a certain area. That or your phone decides to die. Not everyday happenings, but they sure as hell seem beneficial to you then.
From the product offering it sounds like the idea was given life from a bunch of yes men, and not things like demographic surveys and similar technologies that are currently in place.
I'm not suggesting stifiling innovation, but to me, this sounds like a sales pitch that will prove worthless in the long run, and come to think of it, in the short run. People just don't need instant gradification under every circumstance. Imagine that, Mr. marketer.How about being able to download old episodes of Dr Who from a phone booth... how cool would that be?
Other possible things to dispense from a phone booth:
Phone booths are for making phone calls. I don't want to download mp3s, read my email, or order takeout from my public phone. For starters I'd like to be able to make calls. With mobiles so prevalent public phone boths are being scrapped and falling into disrepair everywhere. There aren't many places in my local area I can even make a public phone call from a booth anymore.
.com bomb thinking all over again. "I know. Lets put in lots of infrastructure for a small return and wonder why the share price doesn't continue to skyrocket while our losses mount."
What advantage does public phone mp3 offer over at home internet access? If you're on the road there are Internet cafes everywhere already - many of them with 24 hr acces - and provided they'll let you hook into their computer you're all set.
I'd be more excited about wireless broadband downloads on a small mp3 player like the ipod. All you'd need is the wireless modem built in, plus a simple interface to have a music store in your pocket. THAT would be more worthwhile.
Phone booth mp3 downloads are old
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Not all of us either care to or can afford to carry a cell phone with us everywhere we go.
When the original MPMan came out in Korea, these little booths popped up close to 10 years ago. I think it succeeded over there, but I don't see it being a big enough market on this side of the ocean.
Shouldn't be making these things any more useful. Publically available land lines for voice communication should be outlawed. If everyone were required to talk over wireless, the government (specifically the NSA) could do a better job at tracking down terrorists that are scouting around our country, using public phones to report their progress. There would no longer be a need for cooperation from the obstructionist telephone companies. Powerful satelites would be able to pluck everything from the air.
I disagree.
You forget to mention TERRORISTS. And while we're at it, we should ban email, personal ads, and the Post Office is a proven mode of delivery for anthrax. Anyone speaking in a foreign language had better not try that in public either.
Whilst not the big thing they used to be, keeping a few in service is worthwhile.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
But now we can download songs? Well! That's something new and useless. Why would I want to do that when I could 1) do it at home more easily or 2) do it at a record store with more selection?
.mp3s for a fee but anything will do, like wifi access just for example. Anything really to justify their existance if for nothing else but 911 access.
I think that's rather the point. Because of mobile phones it seems like the phone booth is less nessicary than it once was. I have to admit, the reason I got a mobile again is simply because because i'm not seeing as many public telephones as i'd like. So why the hell not offer a useful service from these places that are otherwise not as profitable as they once were.
So why the hell not offer some form of useful service. The street locations are already alocated, they have power and phone lines attached to them, why not let them do something. Not nessicarly offering
Public telephones... more than just for drug dealing.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
iPod compatible? Sounds like Real Networks to me. But I still don't know how they will get the music into your iPod catalog w/o iTunes integration, which Apple is unlikely to give up...
The phone boxes may already be using VOIP, contain sufficient CPU power, and USB host support might be a no brainer. These phone boxes may already contain a small PC.
TFA also says they will start with their information kiosks which already have net access.
This may be an obvious next step, and a simple software change (though I agree, it seems pointless)
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
The .com bubble has come and gone, but the great ideas and implementations are starting to come through thick and fast now.
And look! Everyone's still unemployed! The entire fucking economy is using computers, and the average technically-intelligent person has about as much chance of finding a job in technology that lasts longer than five weeks as they do of pulling a Faberge egg out of their ass.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Buy expensive PDA... use skype. Instant really cool really cheap cell phone.
Would be quite useful, except for the fact that most of them are positioned in locations that have nowhere within range suitable for sitting with a laptop ... and especially no nearby car parking spaces.
I'll give you an example - in English sports, there are several competitions involving teams from throughout the WHOLE COUNTRY, and not one of them is known as the 'World Series'.
And how long befor some enterprising hack , fixes the phone box so that it always downloads Malware into your ipod ?
Master of Peng Shui.Ancient oriental art of Penguin Arranging)
It's a big problem for BT. They are required to maintain the phone box network (and rightly so, about 15% of 999 calls - 911 calls for our American friends - are made using those), but now everyone has a mobile phone there's no way to make money on all but a few boxes at Railway stations etc. They've managed to get the Govt. to allow them to close a lot of phone boxes, but lots remain. It costs £2500 a year to maintain a rural phone box...
Hence the proliferation of ingeniuos ways to make more money. e-mail in phone boxes; putting city mobile phone masts on top of them; now this.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Actually, the main reason we don't get things like this at the same speed as Hong Kong is that practically nowhere has the same economies of scale as Hong Kong. The population density there is insane, so relatively small infrastructure investments can reach huge markets. I have a friend there who has a 10Mbit Internet connection at home, and is paying about half what I pay for a 750Kbit in the UK. On the other hand, a flat the size of mine would be a long way out of my budget if I lived in Hong Kong.
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