From Radio Ink: While the radio industry grapples with what it should be doing about the connected car, there may be some comfort in knowing consumers are still a bit baffled by the connected car as well. Nielsen’s new AutoTECHCAST report shows that nearly one-third of consumers have never heard of these technology-enabled vehicles. “These consumers don’t know what connected cars do, and are not associating vehicle brands with infotainment badging.” Both the auto and radio in

How do radio, online radio, and podcasting fit into the larger pattern of tech trends washing over today’s audiences? What’s the power of audio in the first place? Peter Kafka is a great person to ask. Peter is Senior Editor for Media at Re/code, the digital news platform launched by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Peter has been covering media and technology since 1997 for Forbes, forbes.com, and the brand that became Business Insider. He is the host of the “Recode Media wit

Estimates vary, but the consensus seems to be that we’ll see a meaningful number of self-driving cars replacing the human-powered ones by 2020, less than four years hence. Personally, I think that’s a bit optimistic, but I have no doubt that the future of cars is a self-powered one. While we fret about the future of radio in fast-changing conventional dashboards, we’re missing the much bigger worry: What happens when all the tech sacrifices made to cater to the driver’s atten

You’ve heard of Voltair, that’s the audio technology that presumably allows PPM devices to more effectively pick up that all-important encoded signal that says a radio station is near. Every day it’s in the radio biz news headlines, and I don’t know why. If it works, then you should buy one, shouldn’t you? Everyone should, right? It’s not an unfair advantage if it’s available to all, is it? Just go buy one and wring every last bit of credit out of those encoded signals. What

Disney chief Bob Iger is on the cover of the new issue of Fortune, pictured in front of Star Wars’ legendary Millennium Falcon. I can’t imagine a picture that could speak more loudly about content and branding and distribution and the role of fan passion in powering a media behemoth. Highlights of the piece in The Wrap indicate three lessons that should be heard loud and clear by radio broadcasters: 1. Iger focuses on both content and technology “There are a lot of companies

Never let it be said that the automakers don’t listen to feedback, because when it comes to Ford’s clunky Sync platform, they got an earful. And guess what? Ford responded. This week the automaker introduced the latest and greatest version of its Sync infotainment system, and it looks great. It will make its debut on at least some Ford 2016 models, meaning it will be in the showroom in the fall of 2015, just months from now. The primary value proposition of the platform has l

Worried about technology crowding out your radio brand? Freaked out about the car dashboard and the latest mobile gadget? Maybe you should worry more about the content you bake into your radio brand that makes it desirable in the first place. Especially when your industry has invested 100 years in content expertise, not flashy technology. Leave it to storyteller extraordinaire Malcolm Gladwell to sum up this point. In a recent speaking gig at the Inbound 2014 conference, Glad

It’s virtually taken on faith in the radio industry: This idea that when all other technologies fail, there’s still radio in an emergency. But open your eyes and you’ll see that radio’s role in emergencies is under threat, thanks to technology. Sure, there are times when all the power goes out, but in those times our technology is powered by batteries. Take the recent Napa earthquake as an example. From CBS San Francisco: Power outages were mostly irrelevant when it came to h

There’s nothing less “cool” than a room full of 50-year-olds preaching the importance of making something “cool.” And that happens all the time in the upper echelons of the radio industry, a place where the air must be thin enough to imagine that “cool” can be manufactured rather than earned. I’m reminded of a brainstorming meeting many years ago: The client had a station mascot, a character in their logo. Management was obsessed with making that character more “cool” to the

You know the radio spots that give you an 800-number – and repeat it four times? Don’t you just love that? Or the ones that ask you to call a number and leave your email on the answering machine? Sounds efficient, doesn’t it? Have you ever wished for an audio advertising experience that was more direct, more interactive, and didn’t require new chips in your mobile phone or a pad and pen at the ready 24/7/365? XAPPmedia is one company looking to provide that interactive experi

“All for one” and “one for all.” The traditional radio model is neither “all for one” nor “one for all.” It’s really “all for all,” the idea that, however we define “all,” it’s the same “all” for everyone in the same linear sequence. It has to be that way because the traditional model is a slave to “reach,” and being enslaved to reach in a linear platform like radio means you must make most of the people happy most of the time, assuming their options for greater satisfaction

All right, let’s just say it. Radio is really bad at technology. Sure, we can mess with Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but your five-year-old has mastered these. Being able to function in the presence of technology with something less than the capacity of a pre-teen is not the same as being good at technology from the perspective of a brand. Technology today is helping to broaden the definition of brands and transform them into experiences. In fact, the future of brands is

There remains a drumbeat among some broadcasters to install FM radio into mobile phones, but what happens when some new technology kills off those mobile devices? From Business Insider: There is a line of thinking that the smartphone era will perish almost as quickly as it began.This is, after all, the natural way of technology. It’s defined by creative destruction. Just as the smartphone killed the flip phone, and the iPad is killing the traditional PC, something is going to

Here are some stats from a brand new eMarketer report on U.S. digital media usage changes from now to 2013. I’ll focus on some highlights relevant to broadcasters: Facebook users:  147 million, up 4% Twitter users: 36 million, up 14% Smartphone users: 138 million, up 19% Mobile Internet users: 144 million, up 18% Mobile video viewers: 23% of the population, up 20% Smartphone video viewers: 22% of the population (and more than half of smartphone users): up 22% Online movie vie

“Social media is for conversations, not broadcasting.” That’s a common bromide among social media gurus.  But is it true? This matters to traditional broadcasters, because so much of what we do is built for broadcasting – it’s built for “one-to-many.”  Should we shoot for more conversation or more distribution? Hubspot’s Dan Zarella took a closer look at this question: For blogs, “conversation” means “comments.”  But Zarella found no significant correlation between the number

Will FM radio ever end up pre-installed in mobile phones in the US? I doubt it, because consumers aren’t asking for radio to be built into their mobile phones (and here’s a full overview of the issue). But what’s more interesting to me is that radio industry leaders keep driving for this, obsessively wishing and hoping and planning for it. Why is that more interesting to me?  Because it’s not only deaf to what consumers are asking for, it’s blind to the direction of consumer

One of the lasting gifts of technology in general and Steve Jobs and Apple in particular is not the technology itself but what that technology allows us to do. I don’t just mean what “problems” the technology can solve.  Nor do I only mean what tasks that technology allows us to complete – its function in the world. While technology does put the proverbial power in the hands of the people to unsettle and disrupt one mature and profitable mega-industry after another, it does s

There’s no doubt that technology is bringing new choices to an auto dashboard near you.  Nor is there any doubt that consumers will embrace and even demand those choices. It’s customary for broadcasters to freak out about this, as we stand by and watch radio’s hegemony over the dashboard under attack. The natural response is to fight technology with technology – to assume that your FM station must have all the doo-dads and whistles that Pandora has. What is the truth about ra