.Dust

Some weeks ago I read an inter­est­ing arti­cle titled “Mobile music down­load too com­plex” on Digit Online.

In the arti­cle were reported some statements:

• Buy­ing music on a mobile phone is expen­sive, com­pli­cated and slow.
• Sim­pli­fy­ing the process is the key.
• On aver­age, users must click 20 times in a process that takes around two min­utes to buy a ring tone.
• So many plat­forms aren’t capa­ble of even the most basic con­tent configurations.

I agree on all of these statements.

When I found myself design­ing a new Media Player with inte­grated shop­ping capa­bil­i­ties I had all of these lim­i­ta­tions crys­tal clear in my mind. I ended up design­ing the 3Player.

I think that with that prod­uct we over­came all the limitations:

• It was the first J2ME appli­ca­tion inte­grat­ing a Media player and the shop­ping expe­ri­ence in the same product.
• On some mobile phone you could shop while lis­ten­ing at music.
• We designed a com­pelling user inter­face and deliv­ered a sim­ple method by which the user could be alerted of new entries in the catalog.
• Quick search in the cat­a­log was imple­mented as well.
• The user could also load his music on the mobile phone and it could be played by the 3Player.
• We sup­ported MP3 ID tags for all music.
• The appli­ca­tion was very fine tuned and since we were run­ning on a UMTS net­work down­load times were very good.

The project was quite chal­leng­ing at the time (Novem­ber 2005)

• I was not sure that we could have a Java Vir­tual Machine play­ing music and browse the cat­a­log at the same time.
• Imple­ment­ing DRM at J2ME level required some cus­tom devel­op­ment by hand­set vendors.
• A lot of optional JSRs were required to make the whole thing work.
• RMS is evil, most of the times.
• Port­ing the appli­ca­tion to dif­fer­ent archi­tec­tures was quite a challenge.

It was Novem­ber 2005 and after the appli­ca­tion was deliv­ered in Italy and lanched with Mimmo (LG U8550 pack­aged with bun­dled exter­nal speak­ers and the brand new Eros Ramaz­zotti album) it was ported to other H3G coun­tries. In 2006 H3G Swe­den won the 3GSM Award for “Best Made For Mobile Music Service”.

I think that the 3Player was a great project. All of the peo­ple involved in the project had a great com­mit­ment and brought in a great exe­cu­tion. That was a per­fect exam­ple of real inno­va­tion. Look at what tech­nol­ogy can give to you, recom­bine stuff, be clever and deliver some­thing new to the market.

A lot of lessons were learnt from that project:

• If you want to be inno­v­a­tive you need to take some risk. (In 3Player we decided to go with Java instead of hav­ing a native application).
• Even if you have a great idea you need to have senior man­age­ment sup­port to get it through the process faster enough to con­tinue to be innovative.
• You can­not do all by your­self. Sup­port from third party devel­oper and mobile phone man­u­fac­turer was crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of the 3Player.

I can­not say thanks enough to Fil­ippo De Vita from bee­weeb. He is a very tal­ented guy with a great vision on what mobile appli­ca­tions should be.

The arti­cle from Digit end with the fol­low­ing sen­tence: Apple iPhone, the com­bined MP3 Player and mobile phone expected to hit the US mar­ket later this year, is a step in the right direction.

Well, I think we did this at least a cou­ple of years before.

Why do I blog this? Sort of cel­e­bra­tion of some good work I did in the past and a very good exam­ple of an inno­v­a­tive prod­uct brought to the mar­ket with an inno­v­a­tive process.

Related posts:

1. What I want from a Music Phone
2. My fat mobile phone
3. Why you call it “a phone”?
4. iPhone spec­u­la­tions
5. Bat­tery killed the Mobile Inter­net star