Fast Company | Digital Squared: Living in an iTunes World: “What all technology companies have in common is a desperate need to increase revenue. And enabling the digital acquisition of digital products is a vehicle to that end, as is the creation of a Wi-Fi country. It is in Dell Computer’s and Hewlett-Packard’s interests to produce personal computers that make it easy to burn your own CDs and DVDs. It is in Intel’s interest to build ever-faster chips that enable computers to burn CDs and DVDs more easily. It is in the phone company’s interest to get more homes linked to the Internet at very high rates of speed. The interests of all of those key industries are conspiring to create a vast marketplace for the digital acquisition of digital products.
The missing piece, of course, is the content-providing community, which has been battling digital distribution tooth and nail since Napster. ITunes’ success should now make every company, from gaming outfits to television networks, warm to the possibility. For recording artists like Bruce Springsteen, every concert can be remixed and sold as an album. For cable-television networks such as A&E and The History Channel, documentaries that have been sitting on a shelf can become profit centers.”
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this is going to be huge. broadband, wi-fi, digital products, real-time acqusition… where is the opportunity for a startup in this mess? how do you get in the middle of it all, in a way that provides values to consumers and/or service providers, without getting crushed? what’s unique?