From iPod to ourPod: a New Wi-Fi Music Player

Related link: http://www.passalongnetworks.com/corp_press120505.html

When you hit a party catered by an outfit called Debbie Does Dinner, you’re bound to be surprised. As I strolled toward the buffet of unpronounceable appetizers last night, I saw two executives who seemed to be laser-tagging each other with their PDAs.

Stopping to rubberneck in the dim light, I learned that the men were actually Kurt Thielen and Dave Jaworsky, the president and CEO of SoniqCast and PassAlong Networks, respectively. They were attempting to duplicate their feat from earlier that day at the Digital Living Room 2005 conference—wirelessly transferring a song between their handheld Tao Wireless Media players. In itself, that’s an interesting trick, but the real breakthrough was that initiating the transfer simultaneously sent a payment to the record label. Apparently, yesterday was the first time that a paid, personal, wireless transfer process had been demonstrated publicly.

The Tao Wireless Media Player includes a 20GB hard drive, Wi-Fi detector, FM transmitter, and—appropriately for its socializing theme—dual headphone jacks.

The Tao player, which should be available later this month, is also a collaboration. It’s built by a company called Giant, best known for its FRS two-way radios. SoniqCast wrote the software and PassAlong supplied the digital rights management (DRM) for music files.

PassAlong has an intriguing system that reminds me of Weed, the service that rewards listeners for sharing files. From what I could grasp (give it a shot), members earn points when they pass a music file to someone else and the recipient buys it. Those points can be used to buy more music from PassAlong. The Tao player also supports buying audio files from Audible, such as spoken books, and can be configured to load itself with, say, spoken versions of the Wall Street Journal every morning.

The player had more tricks behind its glowing orange screen. (Thielen told me SoniqCast planned to introduce a color-screen version with photo support next month at CES.) Not only can it connect to other Tao players and Wi-Fi-equipped computers, it can also download audio from the Internet via public hotspots.

It remains to be seen how easy these transfer and payment processes really are. (The demo I was watching failed.) But it made me ponder how technology has made the music experience more and more solitary. Now that musicians have the tools to be one-man bands (as well as one-man recording studios), we collaborate less. Now that listeners can carry thousands of songs in a pocket and listen to them on headphones (often jammed deep into ear canals), we tune out the sounds around us.

The Tao Wireless Media Player may be the first portable player since the boombox to restore the social experience of recorded music. Or it may fizzle, as have so many overly sophisticated products before it. But now that the ability to transfer music wirelessly between portable devices is here, I’m betting it will spawn new applications and social networks the inventors can’t have imagined.

What new sonic worlds do you think two-way music players will open?