Before Steve Jobs had even passed away, people had already started playing the “who is the next Steve Jobs” game — trying to come up with names of technology and design visionaries who might be able to don the mantle of the Apple co-founder and CEO. Jeff Bezos of Amazon? Napster co-founder and Spotify investor Sean Parker? Those names and others have been floated by industry watchers, but listening to Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on Thursday made me think that he is at least as strong a contender for that mantle (if such a thing even exists) as any of them. Could Dorsey change the way we interact with technology and the world around us in as profound a way as Jobs?

Why do we even need an heir to Steve Jobs? The obvious answer is that we don’t. Jobs was unique, in both positive and negative ways, and the precise combination of those features made him who he was — and thus made Apple what it was. No one is going to be “the next Steve Jobs” because they will have a different combination of strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be as smart (or as lucky) in specific ways. But when it comes to the role that Jobs played in technology — the role of visionary designer, creator, instigator and disruptor — it’s a different story. We need those people more than ever, because visionaries inspire others, and they change the way we look at the world in fundamental ways.

Not just technology, but how it changes us as human beings

I haven’t spent a lot of time around Jack Dorsey, but based on his conversation with Om at RoadMap, he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about the big picture behind the technology that he is involved in. So it’s not just about Twitter and how it works — or what it looks like or even how to monetize it — but how it connects us to our own “humanness” as he put it, and enables us to experience things and see through the eyes of others. He described how he found this an incredibly powerful thing during the protests in Iran, and I think others have had a similar response to the events of the Arab Spring and the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti.

And when it comes to Square — the other company that Dorsey is helping shape and create — it’s not just making payments easier or more efficient that interests him, but how making that easier can help artisans and individuals more easily become fully functioning businesses, and how that could help change society.

Dorsey’s roles with two very different companies have also sparked some comparisons to Jobs, who helped revolutionize animated films with Pixar while also changing the personal electronics industry at Apple (the differences between Square and Twitter are arguably even more dramatic than Pixar and Apple, since Square is device-based and Twitter is an information network). And Dorsey was also forced out of the company he founded, much like Jobs was — after a dispute with former CEO Evan Williams, who funded the company in its early years — and then returned to become the product visionary.

The way Twitter has evolved as a service is also very different from the way things worked at Apple. The company excelled at product design during Jobs’ reign as CEO, but it was notoriously inept at anything service related: iTunes, to take just one example, is a total mess when it comes to usability and design despite years of evolution, and efforts like Ping have effectively been stillborn. One of the most powerful things about Twitter, however, is the way in which the service was transformed by its users, with additions like the @ mention and the retweet — features that were never even imagined by its creators. Steve Jobs, by contrast, wouldn’t even let people replace the battery in his products.

Steve Jobs’ replacement or not, vision is in short supply

From what I can tell, Dorsey also seems to be missing what could charitably be called the “difficult” elements of Jobs’ personality (other people have more blunt terms for it), which are detailed in Walter Isaacson’s biography: the shouting, the merciless humiliation, the ruthlessness even with friends, the crying in meetings, and so on. One of the questions that this description of Jobs raises is whether those things were a necessary part of his success, or simply character flaws. Would Apple products have been the same, or been as revolutionary, if he were a different kind of person?

So is Jack Dorsey the new Steve Jobs? Probably not (although even some early Apple employees think he could be). But he clearly has a vision about two fairly significant areas of the technology sphere — the way in which even a simple service like Twitter can change the way we interact with each other and distribute information in a digital and connected world, and the way a simple payment service like Square can potentially transform entrepreneurialism and small business. And he is thoughtful about the implications of those things in a way that many product or business-focused technology executives are not (he even has a fascination with Zen Buddhist design principles, as Steve Jobs did).

Dorsey has already altered the media landscape with Twitter, whether he knew that’s what he was doing or not, and he is also trying to alter the payment landscape with Square. Either of those would be a substantial undertaking for any technology CEO. Whether those changes turn out to be as massive and transformational as the ones Jobs unleashed remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure — we could definitely use more visionaries.

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For lazy Sunday reading, I poured over Forbes fascinating article about Sean Parker, the ultimate of the web entrepreneur disruptors turned investor, of Napster, Facebook, Spotify and The Social Network fame (he was played by Justin Timberlake in the Aaron Sorkin movie). Last time I remember reading about Parker was late last year, when he told the New York Times: “It is not clear anyone will make money on their green-tech investing. It looks like it was a bubble.” Parker’s Forbes profile and his statement on greentech last year got me thinking: does the energy industry need more of these disruption-focused web-style innovators like Parker?

While the world needs more Parkers in general (for innovation and interestingness sake), I don’t think the energy industry will be disrupted as easily by these types of folks. Energy has fundamentally different parameters than web, and also often times needs to be built on top of the infrastructure already in place. The Forbes article points out how Parker excels at generating and propagating ideas that tend to dissolve the existing industries from which they emerge (think Napster and the music industry).

That’s one reason why Parker has so far been right in his statement last year that it’s not clear Silicon Valley will make any money from greentech investing. Here’s some of the reasons it’ll be a lot harder to disrupt energy:

Energy: Commoditization & science

Energy is a commodity: The same electricity emanates from your and your neighbor’s light bulbs regardless of if you are buying electricity from your utility, and your neighbor has shiny new solar panels on his roof. Electrons are electrons. Clean power will have to be commoditized to compete with fossil fuels, and solar panels themselves are quickly becoming a commodity product. You can see the coming solar commoditzation via the fall of Solyndra, which tried to innovate on solar panel design and manufacturing, as well as through the rapidly dropping price of solar cells in recent months.

Likewise liquid fuels are also mostly a commodity, too. Vehicle owners are looking for the cheapest price possible. Biofuels have so far failed to compete with the oil industry because of sheer cost and scale alone.

It’s very difficult to disrupt an industry that’s fundamentally built around a race to the bottom, and green companies are selling replacement products that are more expensive than their fossil fuel equivalents. Despite the IPOs of recent next-gen biofuel companies, none of these players are yet competing with oil companies in any way.

Green needs the help of the incumbents: In fact, it will be the traditional power companies and oil companies that could actually get the green products commercialized. Biofuel makers need the pipelines and economies of scale of the oil giants to reach low prices, and some have investments and support from BP, Chevron, Exxon, and refiner Valero. Even for clean power this is true — Total bought the majority of SunPower.

It’ll be about evolution, not revolution: Energy is too fundamental to society and economy to face such rapid change that happened for the Internet. Instead it will happen on the pace of decades, not months, and macroeconomic changes will be more disruptive than small startups. A spike in the price of oil and energy prices will do far more to promote green technologies than likely a Valley-backed startup.

Science needed: Major disruptions in cost will likely come from science breakthroughs, whether that’s for clean power, biofuels, or batteries that power electric cars or store energy for the power grid. A significant amount of this science R&D will come out of university labs, and government supported programs like ARPA-E. Not necessarily the stomping ground for web-hacker disruptors like Parker.

Exceptions: Cleanweb, Electric cars:

Yes, there are places were more hacker-style web disruption could be really useful — namely where the web meets energy. Longtime entrepreneur Sunil Paul calls this the CleanWeb — using mobile, social networks and web tools to deal with resource constraint. Because it actually is the web, the same web-rules about disruption and innovation apply. And that’s something Silicon Valley “gets” and can invest in.

Former web entrepreneurs like Match.com founder Gary Kremen (another Parker-style web serial founder) founded Clean Power Finance, which has found some success with its solar software and financing. Companies building analytics around big data and energy, like Opower, also seem to be doing well. Sean Parker actually has his own philanthropy-focused web project called Causes. VCs are increasingly focused on energy efficiency plays.

Another area that could provide more of an entrance for disruption could be electric cars. That’s because electric cars, if they catch on, aren’t necessarily commodity products (though, yes, their batteries are). Car buyers are willing to pay on a scale of prices for cars, depending on a variety of things like brand, style, size, and need. Former Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk has been tackling electric cars with Tesla, while former SAP exec Shai Agassi has been focused on a business around electric car infrastructure, Better Place.

Image courtesy of Magerleagues.

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Earlier this week, Pandora announced that it would finally be dropping its longtime support for Flash in favor of HTML5. The move is one piece of a big redesign for the site, one which will begin rolling out to Pandora One (the / year premium version) subscribers in pieces, as part of a limited testing period before being made available to the service’s entire massive user base.

The timing could have been more ideal, of course. A day after the announcement, Spotify quickly grabbed the attention of those following the online music industry by formally launching in the US. It’s important to note right off the bat, however, that these two services are not really direct competitors, in spite of how some might spin it. Spotify is an all-you-can eat subscription service, making it more akin to the likes of a Rhapsody and Napster. Pandora, on the other hand, is built largely around passive music discovery. You log-in, you enter an artist, and you let the music come to you. This redesign takes that ease of use to a whole new level. Check out our impressions below.

Continue reading Pandora Radio’s HTML5 redesign hands-on

Pandora Radio’s HTML5 redesign hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s been so much chatter about Apple iCloud that you’d think the streaming music service had already been announced and the deals inked. But it’s still just a rumor until an Apple executive takes the stage and unleashes the Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music competitor in a spate of superlatives. That hasn’t stopped Businessweek from stepping up with a good summary of all that is “known” thus far, while giving us some insight into the particulars of how the service will work and the motivations to make it happen. One revelation, sourced from three people in the know, claims that Apple will scan customers’ iTunes libraries (hello, LaLa) and quickly mirror the contents on Apple’s own servers — no massive DSL-choking upload required. And Apple will do you the solid of “replacing” any low bit-rate tracks with high-quality versions stored in the Apple music locker for streaming to your connected devices. Of course, this value-add won’t come free and will certainly require a subscription fee. The cost to the consumer, though, is still very much unclear as is the service’s integration with Apple’s per year MobileMe sham. But it’s this subscription model that has the major labels so enthusiastic as it will finally allow them to extort fees for all that pirated audio you may have stumbled upon since Napster was loosed on an unprepared music industry a decade ago. All signs point to WWDC for this to get official but we’re sure to hear more — much more — before the event kicks off on June 6th.

Apple’s iCloud music service will automatically mirror your iTunes library, augment with ‘high-quality’ tracks? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 May 2011 03:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook is becoming more and more like MySpace, and that’s not a good thing for the media business.

But don’t worry — I’m not gonna predict that millions and millions of people are ready to abandon Facebook for the next hot thing. In fact, this isn’t even about anything that Facebook, or its users are doing. Instead, it’s about the perception that Facebook can help to sell media products that no one wants to buy.

You see, when MySpace was still on top of its game, there was a moment when people thought it could help save the entertainment industry. Countless bands were on MySpace, and many of them found it to be an invaluable tool for communicating with their fans. That’s when folks in the music industry got the idea to use MySpace not only for promotion, but actual distribution as well.

First up was Snocap, the music startup founded by Napster’s Shawn Fanning. Snocap wanted to sell MP3s directly on musician’s MySpace profiles, complete with a widget and a rather complicated backend. Snocap’s pitch was that indie bands would be able to avoid the middle man and directly sell to consumers, and reputable online music platforms like CD Baby joined to give their 200,000 musicians a chance at raking in the dough.

Only, the money never came. CD Baby founder Derek Sivers wrote an eye-opening account of his dealings with Snocap in 2007, detailing how he hired six people to exclusively work on the cooperation — only to receive a measly ,000 check for eight months of music sales on MySpace. Snocap eventually closed shop when its assets were acquired by Imeem in early 2008.

Imeem itself got acquired by Myspace in late 2009, only to be folded into MySpace Music, a service the social network launched in cooperation and co-ownership with the four major record labels. The primary goal of MySpace Music wasn’t to sell tracks like Snocap, but to make money through advertising. And guess what: That didn’t work either. MySpace Music burned through “a lot of money,” observed Greg Sandoval from CNet last summer, reporting that MySpace was thinking about switching to a subscription model.

What does Facebook have to do with all of this? Both sites are obviously quite different, but the similarities are striking if you look at the way folks in the media business are projecting all of their hopes on them. Case in point: I got a pitch for a startup last week that wants to sell VOD rentals from independent filmmakers on Facebook, much in the same way that Snocap wanted to sell music downloads.

The startup in question, Berkeley-based FlickLaunch, actually has a pretty neat feature: Film makers can decide to give any number of views of their movie away for free, only asking users to press the Like button if they want access to the title. That way, 1,000 free views become 1,000 promotional messages in people’s Facebook news feeds, which could potentially reach a huge crowd for free. FlickLaunch also has the benefit of launching at a time when major studios are looking to Facebook as well to boost their online VOD sales. Warner Bros. has been experimenting with renting The Dark Knight and Harry Potter on Facebook, allowing users to pay for the movies with Facebook credits.

However, none of that matters if the product isn’t right. Internet users have for the most part rejected one-off VOD rentals, and opted for Netflix-like subscription plans instead. Netflix has captured 61 percent of the digital movie market, according to recent data from the NPD Group. Apple’s iTunes store, which is the biggest online platform for VOD rentals and sales, only has four percent of the market.

Of course, you can convince yourself that all you need is a better social media strategy to make online VOD take off and put all your bets on Facebook. Or you can face the facts: Facebook may be a great platform that has much to offer for the media business. But it won’t help you sell things no one wants to buy, much like MySpace didn’t help the record labels to preserve a failing business model.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Denis Dervisevic.

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Today, the online world provides unprecedented opportunities for independent music to discover a crowd. Unsigned bands and solo singers is now able to develop a fan base that will not only pay attention to their music, but to buy MP3 downloads.

The Internet’s Grassroots Movement

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