Hasta La Gadget!

Looks like the reports that have been in play for months now have finally been confirmed: Beats Electronics, known best for their hip Dr Dre headphones and partly backed by HTC (who had also been a rumored MOG buyer), is indeed buying the music streaming service MOG, with the acquisition now confirmed by both sides.

The move will give MOG — struggling to grow against the runaway success of Spotify — a new lease of life tied to a specific hardware maker; and Beats another step up on the consumer electronics experience, following in the mold of Apple in providing the whole package from one brand.

“The addition of MOG’s music service to the Beats portfolio will provide a truly end-to-end music experience,” David Hyman, the founder and CEO of MOG told USA Today. Although the deal has been in play since March of this year, this was in fact the first confirmation by either side that they are linking up. We’re still contacting both companies for a direct confirmation. Update: Beats has now issued a formal release:

“[Beats] was never about just headphones. We’ve…expanded the Beats mission to every other link in the music experience chain – speakers, mobile phones, personal computers and automobile sound systems. With MOG, we are adding the best music service to the Beats portfolio for the first truly end-to-end music experience. With their talent and technology, the possibilities around future innovation are endless,” said Luke Wood, president and COO of Beats. MOG will remain an independent company post-acquisition, and the MOG Music Network, an ad-network and online music service, is not part of the deal. The LA Times further reports that the price paid by Beats was less than $10 million. [original story continues below]

What we don’t know yet is how the two companies will actually integrate their services together: “time  will tell” is all Hyman would say in response to that question. And there is also the question of how and if this will play with HTC, which invested $309 million in Beats in August 2011. The handset maker has been struggling against Samsung in the Android smartphone space but has been trying to fight back with a strategy that, like this deal between Beats and MOG, plays into making service investments to sit on top of its hardware, and further differentiate it from the rest of the Android pack.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Beats is taking a leaf from Apple’s book by looking for a way to control the music streaming experience, as well as the hardware that gets used to consume it — that sits in contrast to a number of other new hardware entrants at the moment. Sonos, for example, has a robust API platform that it uses to bring in a number of music streaming services into the fold to consume through its music streaming hub and speakers.

This is a first acquisition for Beats. No indication yet on whether we should be expecting more.

Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre, the two founders of Beats, did not comment in the USA today piece, but we do get a quote from president and chief operating officer Luke Wood also underscoring how owning music services is part of the Beats’ bigger vision: ”Beats was created as a response to the complete erosion of the music experience… Our whole reason for starting Beats was to try to bring emotion back into that experience. We believe music services is a vital part of that ecosystem.”

Given that producer Iovine and musician Dr Dre are music industry heavyweights, it’s not really a surprise seeing them make a stab at music services as well as hardware — they are part of the army of music industry people who have been impacted by the rise of digital media and subsequent fall in traditional media sales (and the margins that came with them), and have been developing their super high-quality sound products in response to that.

This gives them another chance to have a crack at righting that their own way, by bolting on an actual music service, and an engineering/management team that knows how to execute that kind of product.

The whole logic behind the creation of Beats has been about sound quality, so it’s unsurprising that this seems to have also played a role in the MOG acquisition, too:  ”They were the first service to offer their entire catalog in the 320-kilobit format,” Woods notes.

MOG is one of the older of the music streaming services — founded in 2005, and now containing 16 million tracks for listening — and it was perhaps too far ahead of its time. The later arrival of Spotify seemed perfectly in tune with the rise of better broadband connections, flat-rate mobile data and a public that was finally moving away from being tied to their old CD collections so that they could consume their music on their fancy new smartphones. While Spotify and others like Rdio have extended their services outside of their home markets, MOG only recently (June 2012) made its first foray outside of the U.S., to Australia in a partnership with carrier Telstra.

MOG has of course kept up with the times, with deals with LG and Samsung for smart TVs and other services, and a Facebook streaming service as well, including an in-car deal with Ford — but it’s perhaps not quite picked up the same kind of mindshare as Spotify in the process.  Its service costs $4.99 per month for unlimited ad-free streaming; $9.99 to throw unlimited portable downloads into the mix.

The ubiquity of MOG’s service was another selling point for the Beats folks: ”They understand that the consumer wants ubiquity,” Woods noted.

Mio made some fairly cool heart-rate watches a few years ago but they required you to place a finger on two little pads while running in order to take the measurements. It was interesting, and when you consider that most other heart-rate watches require a chest strap, fairly unique. However, nobody wanted to touch a little thinger just to get their heart rate.

Enter the Mio Alpha. This new product uses a precise light sensor to sense your heart rate on the go. No straps, no muss, no fuss. It’s pretty ingenious.

I got a chance to sit down with the watch a few days ago and I was really impressed. They’re tooling up right now to start manufacturing them and they will cost $99 when you pre-order through Kickstarter. The watches work by sensing changes in blood volume moving through the skin. It takes a moment to begin sensing but once it’s figured out your heart rate it’s ready to go. A small LED on the top tells you if you’re in the proper heart-rate zone and you can program it for various activity levels.

They’re looking for $100,000 and they’ve already hit $30K so things look good for an on-time arrival. Given that this watch does away with annoying straps and futzing, I’m pretty excited.

Project Page

I feel like we’re watching Google TV roll by and off into a nearby ditch. The company doesn’t have much dedication to the platform and, like Apple TV, GTV is failing to gain traction.

As Ryan notes, outside of a few I/O sessions, Google said very little about the Google TV project this year and I’m almost certain it means they’ve scrapped the project but don’t want to tell their partners. They are running seminars on the platform at I/O, but until they’ve officially announced the closure they have to maintain appearances.

To be clear, I’ve been a fairly accepting user of GTV for a while – it was once my go-to smart TV solution, after the Boxee Box – but it’s clear that Google can gain no foothold in the treacherous world of set-top boxes. Here are a few reasons why.

First, television broadcasters don’t want to work with anyone who aims to make money off their content. Sure they’ll sell a program here or there, but unless the set-top in your home is streaming out the unadulterated streams coming out of their satellites, they don’t want any part of it. By co-opting search and discovery, Google looks to the broadcasters like a parasitic organism rather than a money maker. TiVo (barely) survives because it acts as a smart VCR. Apple TV and GTV are slow to spread because they are, at best, glorified media players and they will never be anything more without real broadcaster buy-in.

Second, no one is sure what a smart TV is supposed to be, but GTV isn’t it. No one can quite put their finger on what they want a TV to do. Is it supposed to stream home content? Allow you to watch YouTube on the big screen? Offer ways to tweet from your couch? All those things happen more quickly and more efficiently on laptops and tablets. Why co-opt the biggest screen in the house?

GTV is sort of an overlay on the TV world just as Google Glass is supposed to be an overlay on the real world. Unfortunately, this sort of overlay rarely works in practice as it distracts from the program at hand. TV watchers aren’t an active lot. All of this talk about a second screen offering streaming stats is cool for about one minute when you’re trying to figure out who starred in Flight Plan. Once you realize the stewardess is Erika Christensen who was also in Swimfan, you’re pretty much done with the second screen. Nobody wants to check into programs or search for related videos or tweet from their TV. Nobody.

I could be wrong. Maybe Google has a real zinger coming up for us in the GTV space. But the set-top box will soon be eclipsed by more powerful DVRs or game consoles that offer real value versus perceived value. I’d far prefer, say, my Xbox to provide unfettered access to TV content than have the GTV sit there between me and a Dish subscription. DVRs already perfected the best things about television. Anything else is just a distraction.

Something strange happened this week with WakeMate, a Y Combinator-funded project that was a tech world high flyer for a while. The product, a wrist strap that sensed your movement during sleep and ostensibly woke you at exactly the right time, was on hold. In 2010 the product apparently burst into flames (literally) and little was heard from the company at all.

Suddenly, however, co-founder Greg Nemeth began approaching media to write about a new WakeMate project. He wrote in an email:

Nemeth also used the WakeMate Twitter account and email address to send word of a new project.

Over the next few days, Nemeth began talking about a Kickstarter project and then quickly moved the project to Indiegogo where it launched as a Three Thirds project (not to be confused with the name of the original company, Perfect Third).

Then all heck broke loose. Nemeth apparently wasn’t  authorized to use the WakeMate list or the Twitter feed. People donated $37,000 to the cause in the expectation that WakeMate was behind another cool product. A little buzz built up but folks were confused: the email was riddled with typos and there was no mention of the product on the WakeMate site.

It transpired that none of this was WakeMate-sanctioned. Nemeth meant it to be a WakeMate product, but apparently his co-founder Arun Gupta didn’t get the memo.

“I intended on MiLife+ being affiliated with WakeMate but I did not communicate that to the people at WakeMate,” said Nemeth. “It was a mistake on my part. MiLife+ has been cancelled.”

Gupta, for his part, knew nothing of the product until everyone else did.

“I did not know anything about MiLife+ until yesterday afternoon,” he said. He wrote on the Wakemate blog:

In short, Nemeth went ahead and used Wakemate resources, meager as they might be, to pitch a new product. Lack of communication, a potentially unamicable split, and lack of social media controls all led to a perfect storm of product disappointment.

“Using the list was a mistake and the list has been deleted. Arun did not know,” said Nemeth.

WakeMate is no longer selling product and Gupta now controls the Twitter feed. Both parties are saying very little.

“The company still exists as we are keeping the product running and service up while we work on open sourcing the technology. No new features will be added to the WakeMate product,” said Gupta.

“This was an unfortunate situation but it has been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Hopefully we can just put this behind us,” he said.

[Image: Juan Nel/Shutterstock]

Take that, conventional wisdom! The oddball Google Nexus Q is made in the good ol’ US of A, proving that electronics can be assembled outside of China.

This fun little tidbit wasn’t mentioned during the Nexus Q’s announcement yesterday. Sure enough, a label on the bottom of the device says “Designed and Manufactured in the U.S.A.” That little label is also why the device costs so much.

Speaking to the NYT Andy Rubin explained that making the device in the U.S. is a bit of an experiment. “Why don’t we try it and see what happens,” he said. Rubin went on to state that Google is not in a sort of crusade with this project. In fact Google hasn’t revealed the actual Silicon Valley manufacturer nor is it saying where the Q’s components are made.

There was a time when electronics were made in the U.S. Early computer giants such as HP, Dell, even Atari made their products in the U.S. The promise of cheaper labor lured these companies elsewhere.

But things are changing again. The cost of labor in China is rising quickly. Plus, there is a large advantage to having your manufacturer literally down the road from the designers. Instead of spending weeks in China, engineers and designers can drive 10 minutes down the road to solve an issue.

The Q itself seems to be a bit of an experiment as well. Google revealed the product yesterday at its yearly developers conference. Basically, the Q is jukebox which pulls media from Google’s cloud services. An Android phone or tablet tells the Q what media to play, and the Q grabs the media from online. This is fundamentally different from Apple’s Airplay service which produces the same result, but instead streams the media from the mobile device itself. The Q is a bit strange, and with a price of $299, it’s a hard sell for what’s essentially a set of features that should be built into Google’s other streaming product, the floundering Google TV.

The Q’s higher price is a direct result of assembling it in the U.S., says Google. The company hopes to drop the price over time as the product volume increases. But the question remains, will consumers, even American consumers, spend $299 on a device with a very limited feature set even if it’s made in the U.S.?

[image via NYT and Wired]