Reason #5 : CoverFlow
Reason #4 : Music+TVShows+Movies+Photos+Videos
Reason #3 : Immersive Gaming
Reason #2 : Safari/Wifi bundle
Reason #1 : It’s almost an iPhone!!! 

Sure, a number of things have changed for the iPod Touch and the iPhone, since then.  Notably, the 4th generation iPhone is a vastly different device from its early versions, and you’d be hard pressed to find an all-in-one device that comes close.  However, if you’re looking for a low-cost iPhone-like device but don’t really care about the “phone” part of it, the iPod Touch is still the best money can buy. 

The iTunes music and App store (with hundreds of thousands of apps like Facebook, Twitter, Google Earth etc.) gives your iPod Touch an extensibility unlike any other.  So, if you have easy access to WiFi, you can do a whole lot with this portable gaming and browsing device, and not just use it as a music player!   You may want to stay away from the recently launched iOS4 upgrade, however, since many users have reported stability and battery drain issues.

(Yes, I do realize that, if you’re an audiophile and the only thing that truly matters to you is the “sound quality”, there are better devices out there.  But, the iPod touch is not just a music player… it’s a platform, and should be seen as such.)

As of June 2010, the iTunes v. 9.2 is a significantly improved offering. I’ve also had the opportunity to use the ‘Genius‘ feature and found it to be a commendable effort at making a playlist of similar-sounding songs to the ones you like.  However, the fact still remains that some of the features of iTunes can be quite a pain to tackle for newbies, and you may want to consider test-riding it before taking the plunge.

P.S. For me, the best part of it all is that my new iPod Touch works so beautifully with the Mac at home, syncing in my Contacts, Photos, Safari bookmarks, etc. effortlessly, along with my music library!

Original post, here.

I won’t denigrate assembly lines — they build for the masses. I don’t. This is something very different.

If your music is art, if your vision is unique, I will shape the wood, bend the metal, solder the connections to give you the tool to let your beast run wild.

It’s a pleasure to read Toone’s writings, particularly those categorized as “World View“.  What I found especially noteworthy was his commitment to Quality and Customer Satisfaction, elegantly captured on his Pricing page:

Without risk.

No instrument will ever leave my shop until I am fully confident it is an integrated, functional organism.

The nature of our collaboration is intense, detailed, and openly documented for clear communication. No aspect of your instrument should be a surprise. Please expect to play the instrument for one month to give yourself time to acclimate to your unfamiliar and unique new tool.

If after one month some aspect of the design or sound displeases you, we will negotiate a win-win solution toward restoring your delight, and confidence.

In the unlikely event we are unable to agree upon an equitable solution, I will purchase the instrument from you — at full price — provided the instrument is returned in perfect condition.

My objective is always to delight you.

How many big corporations have the courage to take such a stance and communicate it so clearly to their customers?  Come to think of it, how many individuals do?

It’s essentially an iPhone without the “phone”. 

Building on the iconic iPod platform, the iPod Touch is a stunning example of how design and functionality can not only go hand-in-hand, but make music too!  I recently switched from the excellent (3rd gen) iPod Nano to the even better iPod Touch, and am loving every minute of it…

My effort has always been to share my own experience with any product/service, and stick to the essentials, instead of churning out a 2000-word review.  There’s a lot of folks out there who’ve done a fine job of reviewing the details down to the millimetre.  So, I’ll just give you this:

Top 5 Reasons you should have the iPod Touch!

Reason #5 :
Thanks to CoverFlow, it offers the most realistic, visual experience while browsing through your music collection – CD covers (album artwork) that you can flip through, as if you’re doing it for real.

Reason #4 :
Music+TVShows+Movies+Photos+Videos… there’s almost no form of digital entertainment that your iPod Touch cannot give you access to.  And, once you experience the power of the “pinch” (multi touch), it’s hard to go back to old days!

Reason #3 :
Immersive Gaming – Thanks to revolutionary technologies like MultiTouch and Accelerometer, gaming on the iPod Touch is incomparable to almost any other device.  Not to mention, a huge collection of free and paid games to be downloaded from the iTunes App Store! (Download Labyrinth Lite and watch in awe what this technology can do to gaming…)

Reason #2 :
The Safari/Wifi bundle just needs to be experienced!  The built-in wifi functionality works flawlessly on open and secure wifi networks, and Safari is simply the best browser ever built for a handheld device.  The only thing it cannot do is Flash and Java.

Reason #1 :
It’s almost an iPhone!!!  Don’t forget, the iPod Touch offers you 99% of the iPhone experience, except for the phone component, at 25% of the cost!  So, if you’ve been itching to get your hands on an iPhone and don’t want to change your phone just yet, this is your answer.

The newly launched iPod Touch even offers dedicated volume controls and a speaker, making it 99.5% of an iPhone!

Get one today.  You can thank me later…

Why Not?!

Since I’ve spent an entire post answering the question : Why iPod?, I thought it only fair to include some helpful advice on “Why Not?!”

In my humble opinion, the iTunes software is the single biggest reason why you shouldn’t own an iPod! If you’re thinking of buying any new Apple iPod, I strongly recommend that you download a free copy of iTunes and test ride it first. The world is divided between those who love it and those who want to break their display monitors after trying to make iTunes work they way it should!

Read More:
Apple’s official iPod Touch page | The iPod meets the iPhone review

Update : June 2010

The above review was written in Nov 2008.  Sure, a number of things have changed for the iPod Touch and the iPhone since then.  Notably, the 4th generation iPhone is a vastly different device from its early versions, and you’d be hard pressed to find an all-in-one device that comes close. However, if you’re looking for a low-cost iPhone-like device but don’t really care about the “phone” part of it, the iPod Touch is still the best money can buy. 

The iTunes music and App store (with hundreds and thousands of apps like Facebook, Twitter, Google Earth etc.) gives your iPod Touch an extensibility unlike any other.  So, if you have easy access to WiFi, you can do a whole lot with this portable gaming and browsing device, and not just use it as a music player!   You may want to stay away from the recently launched iOS4 upgrade, however, since many users have reported stability and battery drain issues.

As of June 2010, the iTunes v. 9.2 is also a significantly improved offering. I’ve also had the opportunity to use the ‘Genius‘ feature and found it to be a commendable effort at making a playlist of similar-sounding songs to the ones you like.  However, the fact still remains that some of the features of iTunes can be quite a pain to tackle for newbies, and you may want to consider test-riding it before taking the plunge.

Allow me to explain:  Buy a not-so-popular mobile phone, and you find yourself stranded in situations when you need a charger and no one else can lend you one.  Sign up for an obscure email service and your friends and family will find it difficult to remember your email address.  Got a no-name MP3/MP4 player?  I’m not sure if it will read your music files without needing conversion!

Many of us must have dealt with some or the other version of the above.  The bottom-line is that there is comfort in numbers.  Not to mention, the “Network Effect” that kicks in!

It’s not a problem that plagues individuals, alone.  Apple has historically lost the “PC” war on account of not making its hardware and OS “open” to developers.  The result?  Microsoft came and swept the desktop world, with millions of small and big developers writing applications for a platform they could easily work with.  Sony lost the video-cassette battle to the VHS standard.  As a result, its superior Betacam format was restricted to a niche place in the industry.  Most recently, a fierce war is being fought over DVD standards with entertainment majors like Sony and Toshiba on opposite sides of the BluRay and HD bandwagons.  In each such case, there is major money to be made by the organization that backs the right horse… its survival may just depend on that decision.

For an individual like myself, this “platform power” yields some very powerful and exciting benefits.

A good example is the iconic iPod which has now spawned a whole world of related technologies (e.g. podcasting?) because of its sheer popularity.  Some of the gadgets I own, or services I subscribe to, are no different.

The bluetooth device I own (Jabra BT250) has worked seamlessly with the last six mobile phones I purchased.  The MP3 player in my car (iPod Nano) is loaded with podcasts from Harvard Business School and the NY Times TechTalk.  My blogging service (WordPress) sports widgets that integrate beautifully with my other subscriptions from industry-standards like Feedburner.   And, it doesn’t stop there… Even my state-of-the-art Digital SLR (Nikon D40) is designed to work with any Nikkor lens manufactured by Nikon since the 1970s!!!

Once you begin reaping the benefits of the “platform”, it doesn’t make sense going back, does it?

“Tell me there’s a heaven” by Chris Rea is just that kind of a song. 

Even though you can’t get the complete feel of the song unless you hear it with its excellent music arrangement, the lyrics are so moving that just reading the words should prove well worth the effort.  Here it is:

The little girl she said to me
What are these things that I can see
Each night when I come home from school
When mama calls me in for tea
Oh every night a baby dies
And every night a mama cries
What makes those men do what they do
To make that person black and blue
Grandpa says
They’re happy now
They sit with God
In paradise
With angels’ wings and still somehow
It makes me feel like ice

Tell me there’s a heaven
Tell me that it’s true
Tell me there’s a reason
Why I’m seeing what I do
Tell me there’s a heaven
Where all those people go
Tell me they’re all happy now
Papa tell me that it’s so

So do I tell her that it’s true
That there’s a place for me and you
Where hungry children smile and say
We wouldn’t have no other way
That every painful crack of bones
Is a step along the way
Every wrong done is a game plan
To that great and joyful day

And I’m looking at the father and the son
And I’m looking at the mother and the daughter
And I’m watching them in tears of pain
And I’m watching them suffer
Don’t tell that little girl
Tell me

Tell me there’s a heaven
Tell me that it’s true
Tell me there’s a reason
Why I’m seeing what I do

Tell me there’s a heaven
Where all those people go
Tell me they’re all happy now
Papa tell me that it’s so

Hear that song today to know what a good piece of music can do to your senses.  And then, ponder over its meaning for a bit.

Why would a business school professor want to write a case study about a string quartet? The answer was easy for Robert Austin, a scholar with research expertise in the management of innovation. While attending an academic workshop near Copenhagen, he had the good fortune to meet violinist Paul Robertson, of the acclaimed ensemble Medici String Quartet. It seemed a perfect opportunity to explore the process of creative collaboration, a central theme not just in music but in knowledge-intensive businesses.

Of particular interest to me was its reference to planning, and how our present approach may intrinsically harbour serious limitations:

In business, preparation means thinking something through and establishing a plan. The execution phase is then managing to the plan.

That’s not remotely how the quartet prepared. Early in their career together they, especially Paul, had learned something of great value from Sir Clifford Curzon, a legendary classical pianist. From Curzon they learned to destroy a piece by making a metronome play the wrong tempo; then they tried to play against it. They would come up with ways to make a piece harder to play and would keep adding constraints until they basically couldn’t play it anymore. The idea was to rebuild it after they had destroyed it.

This idea, which is visible elsewhere among very high-level innovators, especially in the arts, is that to achieve greatness and really go to a new place, it’s important to be able to come to a thing that they have seen hundreds of times before, but experience it as if it were entirely new. And use their tremendous ability to deal with it.

When Paul works with young musicians, he pushes them into a zone where they’re still competent but not quite grounded. He’ll take a sad, slow piece and make them play it up-tempo and happy. And then he’ll have them back off. Even for a layperson, even for my ears, you can hear how much better the interactions become.

 

In a way it’s the opposite of planning that happens in business sometimes, which is all about creating patterns we expect.

There are certain situations that require that we innovate because we’re in the world of the unexpected. Think of crisis management. It’s very important in crisis management not to fall into a comfortable pattern because you may be misperceiving the data. Psychologists talk about the initial hypothesis problem: In a crisis, in your eagerness to get control of the situation, you often grasp at an explanation that is incorrect. Afterward, though, you see only confirming data, not disconfirming data.

That’s exactly the kind of rote pattern that the Medici String Quartet’s preparation was aimed at avoiding. It was an effort to prevent the formation of hard preconceptions that they would feel compelled to execute against.

Call it preconceived notions, stereotypes, mind blocks or what have you – we all have them ingrained in our brains, some more than others.  I have a poster on my soft board entitled “Idea Killers” that reminds me of all the things we say (sometimes, I say!), to convince ourselves why it shouldn’t be done… so that I can avoid falling into that trap on a daily basis. 

But, so much of my work in Six Sigma involves analyzing and interpreting data that, sometimes, I can lose touch with that effort, if I am not conscious of the “initial hypothesis” trap.  That’s why I am so glad this HBS article came my way!

What are you doing about the problem?

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript… From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

…In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

It’s a really long essay.  But it’s one worth reading.  Very slowly. 

And, once you’ve done that, take the time to ponder on it.  Ask yourself the questions that matter… the ones that make it relevant to your life…

How quickly does a human being get reduced to seeking external validation, even if he is a genius?  How is it that the only demographic that stood out was noted among children?  How did the shoe-shine woman “get it”, but the busy policy analyst did not?  Are we really making progress if lottery-ticket purchases demand more of our attention than sheer artistic beauty?

When is the last time you spoke louder on your cellphone because of that “infernal racket” in the background?  How many minutes of your precious time would you spend to “stop and stare”?  What would you do if you were at that Metro?

Some of these “individuals” were responsible for the values and principles I have come to cherish.  Some, helped me in the career choices I had to make at the various turning points in my life.  While others, simply exposed my sensibilities to Art, Literature, Music, Movies and such finer aspects of Life.

But, ever so often, these contributions remain unacknowledged.  No one knows about it, but you.

It is widely believed that Sir Isaac Newton had once written in a letter to Robert Hooke (circa 1676): “If I have seen further (than you and Descartes), it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

Truth be told, the phrase is attributable to Bernard of Chartres from the twelfth century, who had once remarked: “Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident.“  Translated from Latin, it means: “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness on sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.”

Ironic, isn’t it?  The phrase that actually speaks of giving credit where credit is due, is itself borrowed from some where without due acknowledgement of its source!

I’d like to take this opportunity to acknowledge one such contribution from someone who’s singularly responsible for the w-i-d-e variety of Music I have come to love, over the past two decades or so – Vivek Doraiswamy. 

Through him, I learned to appreciate artists as diverse as The Righteous Brothers and Dire Straits.  Through him, I was first exposed to the music of John Williams and Sadao Watanabe.  It was he who first introduced me to the BeeGees and to Yanni.  And, it was through him, that I first experienced the melodies of Pat Boone and Pink Floyd. 

If you love music as much as I do, you will realize how much his contribution really means.  It is because of the times we shared, back then, that I now enjoy Hindustani Classical as much as Alternative Rock, Contemporary Jazz as much as the Golden Oldies!!!

Thanks, Vivek.  This wouldn’t have been possible without you.

Mumbai is not on the usual rock circuit, and is quite starved for good concerts.  Most international acts give the city a pass, thanks to unfriendly government regulations and taxes. So it was with much surprise and enthusiasm that, yesterday, we witnessed one of the all-time greats of rock – Mark Knopfler – in concert at the MMRDA grounds! 

A long time ago came a man on a track
walking thirty miles with a pack on his back
and he put down his load where he thought it was the best
made a home in the wilderness

Dire Straits – the band Knopfler founded way back in 1978 – has always been the ultimate source of joy for me.  And it has been a lifelong dream to attend a live concert of Mark Knopfler.  Can you imagine Knopfler on a stage, some rows ahead, playing for you ?!

Here I am again in this mean old town
And you’re so far away from me
And where are you when the sun goes down
You’re so far away from me

So when I learned that he was to perform in Mumbai on 5th March 2005, I couldn’t believe it.  More so because I was scheduled to be on a plane out of India the same day – the one day that I didn’t want to be anywhere else but here!  As luck would have it, just three days before the show, my trip got postponed.  And, it seemed like I was finally going to make it to the show…

how long, how long baby
how long has it been
how long you gonna keep me wondering
how long before you see
stallin’ me was wrong – how long

It was every thing I’d dreamed of, and more.  The arrangements were well coordinated, the audience was well behaved, the sound quality was superb and the music… the music was sheer bliss.

I got my ticket to heaven
and everlasting life
I got a ride all the way to paradise

The Sultan of Swing performed live last night, and I was just a couple of rows away from him!!!

Reading reviews of new releases,
Browsing through CDs in the local music store,
Listening to samples on the listening posts,
Picking up a few CDs on every visit,
Rushing home to rip open the plastic,
Exploring a new album…

Liking some songs and not liking others,
Hitting the Repeat button,
Hitting the Skip too,
Using the Program feature…

Talking about a great song/album to friends,
Finding out that me and a colleague love the same band,
Attending a rock show,
Listening to a live performance with the lights turned off…

I love music.  In every way possible.

What we play is life.  — Louis Armstrong