Pandora is now available on all model year 2011 BMW vehicles – and it’s operated with the existing, familiar BMW controls. In other words, once you bring Pandora to your car via your mobile device, the user experience is integrated with the one you are already familiar with.  No awkward iPhone manipulations required.  And that moves it even closer to an easy dash-driven radio-like experience. Needless to say, anything that makes Pandora work like radio increases the ability t

Since when did I become the guy who didn’t want FM in mobile phones?  Bring it on, device-makers!  Install those chips! Actually, I don’t care whether or not FM is in mobile phones because I don’t think it makes one bit of difference to radio’s future whether it’s there or not (radio “experiences” need to be part of the mobile device ecosystem, to be sure.  But FM chips?  Feh). Jeff Smulyan thinks otherwise (see his reply to my post here).  I have the greatest respect for Jef

This is not a post about the wisdom of FM chips in mobile phones.  I wrote that post already last year and absolutely nothing significant has changed my view since then, nor the facts supporting it. Nor has the resistance to this wrong-headed industry initiative changed. Indeed, it has deepened over time.  And that resistance has been met with an increasingly shrill effort by NAB to lobby Congress and broadcasters and create the impression that they’re lobbying consumers. I s

Rumors are rumors, but patents are real. Whether the technology produced by these patents arrives in the forthcoming iPhone 5 or a later version is anybody’s guess, but it sure makes sense to me that we’ll see this sooner rather than later (although it’s also possible that we’ll never see this). Back in December, Apple quietly submitted a patent application that altered the radio experience for its users and introduced three new elements to the iPhone:  FM, AM, and Satellite

All other things equal, the best way to assess future behavior is to look to past behavior.  That is, rather than ask consumers what they might do tomorrow, ask them what they actually did yesterday.  This gives you behavioral data rather than simply attitudinal data, and it allows people to tell you what they actually do rather than what they think you might want to hear. For example, much discussion has swirled around the presumed appetite in the US for FM chips on mobile p

I’ve been pondering this question: Which way would consumers prefer to listen to the radio on their mobile devices, over the Internet or via an FM receiver built in? We have seen answers to questions like this before (and I have some mobile phone/radio research answers to give you in the next few days that will make some people very unhappy), but the more I look at the question the more I think it’s exactly the wrong one to ask. This question assumes a number of things. First

What happens to your world if FM radio chips are installed on mobile phones? Not much, probably.  But here are two unintended consequences to consider. For a full blow-by-blow look at the implications for FM chips in mobile phones, read this. #chip #digitalstrategy #radio #mobilephone #hear20 #cellphone #fm #featured #markramsey #Media #radioindustry #onlineradio #markramseymedia #hear2com

Yesterday much attention was lavished on Steve Jobs and his announcement of a new and improved iPhone (still and, I would argue, forever lacking a radio receiver, HD or otherwise). Fast Company noted at least one topic that was glaringly absent from Jobs' address:  The much rumored idea of "iTunes in the cloud." Not a peep about iTunes during Steve's speech, which may be a surprise to some who were expecting news about a move to cloud-based storage and content streaming (poss

At the same time, publicity swirled about the radio industry's efforts to push for radio chips on mobile phones. My belief is that neither of these things will have anything to do with the future of mobile radio. First, the folks most likely to be affected by the AT&T price hike are a very small fraction of total users and it's hard to disagree that these folks should pay more than the rest of us.  Further, these rules only apply to 3G usage – not to WiFi use – thus making th