The Engadget Interview: Jon Rubinstein and Steven McArthur talk webOS on PCs, 'Music Synergy,' competition, and more

We had a chance to sit down with HP's Jon Rubinstein and SVP of applications and services Steven McArthur just after the company's device-filled event yesterday, and the conversation was rather revealing. Besides being extremely upfront about some tough issues (timing, legacy support), both execs were more than willing to tackle questions about HP's current deficiencies in the consumer electronics space. We've put together a rough transcript of the chat below, and it touches on a lot of issues currently facing HP and its user base -- namely, developer support, future versions of webOS, where the company is headed with devices, and what the overarching strategy will be in the coming weeks and months. We highly suggest you take a look... after the break. Engadget: Your new CEO, Leo Apotheker, said recently in an interview with the BBC that the devices announced at this event would ship "within weeks" -- that clearly isn't the case. Can you explain?

Steven: I can't comment on that. I don't know the context. We're going to work on getting these products out as fast as we can.

Engadget: Okay, but you said summer. Early summer, late summer?

Steven: We are anxious to get a fantastic product into folks' hands as fast as possible.

Engadget: What are you doing on the developer front? [This was before the developer event]

Steven: We expect to have apps in the low tens of thousands by the launch of the Pre 3 and TouchPad. That's phase 1. We've got a massive footprint, we're committed to building the best tools for developers, and we're committed to putting in place the best marketing, and helping them drive their business programs.

Engadget: What about webOS on desktops? Is this going to be a skin on a Windows PC... or a standalone product?

Steven: We'll announce that in the next few months.

Engadget: But it's possible to create a netbook or a laptop that's pure webOS?

Steven: Architecturally it's entirely possible to have webOS have a keyboard and mouse input. Absolutely.

Engadget: On timing -- this feels a little like Palm at CES 2009. Hurry up and wait.

Jon: From a tablet perspective, we've got a home court advantage because of HP's distribution footprint.

Engadget: But how do you battle something like the iPad? Apple is basically the only show in town right now. We know the scale is here...

Jon: The marketing is going to be there. Steven is going to deliver the content, we're going to deliver the cloud services. Would I rather have it tomorrow? Of course!

Engadget: Okay, but what about the Veer? You believe in this market -- you feel there's a market for that kind of phone [Kin, Pixi -- tiny phones for tiny people]?

Jon: This is a high end device in a small package -- and if you own a WiFi tablet, why would you want a big device in your pocket? A good example is someone who travels with their TouchPad, and wants to also have a great little phone in their pocket. This can be their mobile hotspot -- so you have a big screen to work on, and the smaller one.

Engadget: On the Pre 3 -- the specs are competitive with what's on the market right now, but not really beyond that. Are you concerned about the fact that it's only competitive with what's on the market right now... people are moving on in terms of resolution, camera specs...

Jon: The reality is... we missed a product cycle last year, so we're now focused on bringing these to market, and we have a lot more in the pipeline. Whether something's got 50 more pixels on the screen...

Engadget: But there is a qualitative difference between the iPhone display and a 800 x 480 display...

Jon: Our goal was to bring a great webOS device to market. It's a workhorse, it has a very fast processor... Touch to Share. It's a great product.

Engadget: And what OS version is the TouchPad running?

Jon: It's webOS 3.0.

Engadget: What about the Pre 3?

Jon: We'll issue an OTA update at some point so it'll get 3.0.

Engadget: What about the older devices?

Jon: Not the older devices. We wanted to add lots of cool new capabilities, and frankly the older products aren't powerful enough.

Engadget: Pre 2?

Jon: Pre 2 is okay.

Engadget: So the original devices... they're not getting an update?

Jon: No. But we're going to do something special for those people.

Palm rep: We want to support our existing customer base.

Jon: We'll do something. The older devices simply don't have the horsepower.

Engadget: So getting back to developers -- are you going to be able to get the names you need? Both big houses and small?

Jon: Two years ago it was just Palm and the Pre -- even then we did pretty well on getting the apps that matter. My argument is that in the end -- yes apps matter, and we need to get a variety -- but we need to continue doing what we're doing, and that's the key apps. We don't put a Skype app on it -- it's built into the phone app. When you get your Pre 2 on Verizon, it supports Skype in the phone app. when you fire up Verizon Skype calls on your Pre 2, you don't have a separate app -- you're in the phone.

Engadget: Like the Twitter piece of the demo we saw at the event -- that wasn't a native app?

Jon: It was a plugin for Just Type. Look, we love developers, we're going to move to support them. What Todd said about "not locking up the tools in the garage" -- that's what we've been doing for the last couple of years. We're going to do a big app push, we get it, it's different now that HP could have a much broader product offering, and I think this isn't just about apps -- it's about content too. Why would you want 100,000 books when you can have Kindle and have 810,000 books? When you look at other app stores, a lot of it is just content. For all of the content providers, HP is a trusted and respected partner. When they go knock on doors, doors open. We've gotten a tremendous response.

Steven: Take Kindle for example, they've opened up APIs for us that they haven't opened for anyone else...

Jon: And it's not just because I'm on the board!

Engadget: So what is the storyline? Why should consumers choose this stuff over the competition? When they walk into a store, why are they going to leave with your product?

Jon: First of all, webOS is a better experience -- true multitasking, Synergy, Just Type, OTA updates, the list goes on and on. It's a fundamentally better experience. The whole vision of connected devices... this is just the beginning. Connected devices, web connectivity, delivering unified HP webOS experiences across a variety of devices.

Engadget: But right now, it's hard to see a point where you're in the market and competing on this stuff.

Jon: We have the home court advantage. Who's the biggest distributor of consumer electronics in the world? It's HP.

Steven: Like Best Buy -- look at someone like Best Buy. We have a very very deep relationship with Best Buy, and you'll see it in their stores.

Jon: But that's one piece of the puzzle... it's not just smartphones. It's smartphones, and tablets, and PCs, and printers, and it's a set of cloud services that HP provides.

Engadget: Speaking of the cloud stuff -- you had issues with this whole iTunes sync thing -- do you see an opportunity to get into partnerships with companies like Rdio [streaming / cloud services]?

Steven: Think about what Sonos has done in the home, integrating different services into a clean interface that allows you source the content irrespective of where it comes from. They're a little company -- think about what HP can do building that kind of client, those business relationships, and putting it on 100 million devices a year.

Engadget: So you see opportunity there? Do services like Pandora become less like an app and more like a component of something else?

Steven: What you're describing is Music Synergy.

Engadget: Does that exist?

Steven: Stay tuned.

Engadget: Okay, shifting gears -- how do you make HP into a brand that has resonance to consumers? You sell a lot of laptops, but people don't feel passionate about the HP brand like they do with Apple, Google, Microsoft...

Steven: What you're describing is an opportunity -- which is, if you look at the folks that Todd and Leo are bringing in... you have to assume that we figured that out. As we go to market against the consumer, and you think about not just leveraging the PC business, and a brand that stands for integrity and trust... if you do the brand analysis, does it have some of the softer features that an Apple has? No it doesn't. But we can invest a great deal to change that.

Jon: As soon as we have products. We have nothing to advertise now. Soon you'll see the "Everybody On" campaign.

Steven: It starts tomorrow -- watch the Grammys this weekend.

Jon: And as we start shipping these, you'll see a compelling marketing campaign around them.

Engadget: Leo said he wants the products to be cooler than Apple -- what do you think of that?

Jon: When I talk to Leo he is very supportive. He says, 'what can I do to make this happen faster'? Leo has completely embraced this. He's a software guy who understands the importance of software. He likes gadgets. He's really jazzed about all this. When he speaks inside the company, he's always hitting on how important webOS and connectivity across devices is.

Engadget: Did you have to switch to an HP laptop when you came over?

Jon: I use everything.

Engadget: Except for the iPhone.

Steven: And iPads...

Engadget: you've never used an iPad?

Jon: I've held one.

Engadget: C'mon. Really?

Jon: Look, your guys' job is to look at everyone's experience and compare them -- my job is to create new experiences, and I don't know how to do that if I'm being impacted and influenced by what other people are doing.

Engadget: I know you have an army of people who look at this stuff, but they're not you -- don't you ever want to look at these deeply and try and figure out why are people so delighted by the competition's products?

Jon: I read about it on Engadget and I see the videos. I've been doing this for a really long time. We have a UI team that looks at all these products, a competitive analysis team that looks at these products. I want a fresh look at everything we make, and I don't want it to be influenced by what anyone else is doing. So I don't use the other stuff. This didn't start off as a religious thing -- when the iPhone came out, I was getting the Centro out the door and I was testing it 24 hours a day. It got turned into a religious thing but the reality is that if I'm going to spend my time I want to spend it on our devices and on our experiences and thinking about how we make them even better.

Additional reporting by Nilay Patel

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Startup Lets Music Fans Request Radio Play via Facebook & Twitter

Remember the old days, when you used to call in to request that the DJs over at KXPY play “Kiss From a Rose” on the “Phat 5 at 9?? Well, you no longer need to dial to request, as startup Spins.FM has made the process super simple via a new web service.

The service, which launches in public beta today, is pretty easy to use. Simply visit the Spins.FM site, search for the song you want, choose your location from a map, and the service is able to find a list of local stations. Choose a station, and either post a request to that station’s Twitter or Facebook Wall — all from within Spins.FM.

According to David Baker, founder of Spins.FM, the service has already enlisted artists like Mike Posner, Bryan J, Mann and Travis Porter to test out the service with customized artist pages. Spins.FM will also soon be working with Jive Records artists –including Britney Spears (the service had received more than 1,400 requests for “Hold It Against Me” before Spears’s page had even gone live).

Baker cites Posner as a particular success story — his page went live back in April, at which time his song “Cooler Than Me” hadn’t been picked up by any stations. Three months later, the page had 14,692 unique visitors, and the song was ranking quite well on the Billboard U.S. pop radio charts.

Baker realizes that Spins.FM was not the sole reason for the song’s success, but he does think that it helped the jam get early spins on the radio.

Starting today, any artist can attempt to mimic Posner’s success by signing onto the service for free — features like custom design and metrics will come with a fee, though. Request pages can also be embedded on websites and featured as a tab on Facebook.

At this juncture, you may be wondering: “Who the hell even listens to the radio? What good does that even do for artists?”

According to Baker, “Despite the popularity of Internet radio among fans, from a business perspective, terrestrial radio is still the driving force behind paid iTunes downloads and demand for nationwide shows and appearances. With Spins.FM artists and labels now have the ability to use social media to drastically increase radio play at a fraction of the cost of traditional radio promotion.”

Adam Farrell, VP of Marketing at Beggars Group, would tend to agree. “In general, I’d say that no matter how much we think all music discovery happens online these days and is what everyone talks about, the silent majority out there still listens to the radio.”

Still, while we can see this service being a boon to established musicians and those on major labels — and we like that any artists can add themselves to the roster — we wonder if it will be of any use to those artists who don’t generally get radio play.

Kip Berman, lead singer of the band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, says that it’s hard for indie bands like his (which is signed to Slumberland Records) to get on the radio. “It’s actually a really big deal for a band like ours that doesn’t normally get on those kinds of playlists,” he adds, joking that his grandma habitually lobbies for the band to get on the radio. “So if a DJ gets a Comic Sans e-mail from someone named Kaye requesting Pains,” he says, “well, her grandson says ‘Thank you!’”

We wonder what effect Spin.FM will have on the careers of bands not yet in the Britney Spears firmament, or if it will be a more useful marketing tool for established musicians alone.

Photo courtesy of Flickr, João Pedro, uai!

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Sonos Android App Controls Wireless Music Systems [PICS]

This free Android control software for Sonos wireless multi-room music systems includes unique features that aren’t available on the iPhone version.

If you’re not familiar with Sonos S5 wireless speakers, you can place them in any room in your house, or pair two of them together. They use Wi-Fi to tap into your network and find all of your digital music for instant playback, and can also play almost any Internet music service.

You can control Sonos wireless speakers ($400 apiece) from a Mac or PC, but it’s a lot easier to use an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android phone to do the controlling. The iPhone/Touch and iPad apps for Sonos has been available for months, but until this Android app is released next month, the only choices for Android have been third-party apps that in my opinion are sluggish and don’t work as well as the Sonos control app I’ve been using on iPhone.

I’m hoping the Android version will match the quality of the iOS versions. Sonos reps told me today the Android version will be better, able to do some things the iOS version can’t. For instance, the physical volume controls on Android phones will be capable of raising and lowering the volume of the Sonos speakers, which must be done using the touchscreen on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Another unique feature of this Android version is speech recognition, where in addition to typing the name of the song, you can speak the name of the tune you’re looking for. Sonos and said this works when the music is playing loudly, which I’d like to verify with my own testing. This could be a significant convenience over the iPhone version, which can be cumbersome if you want to find a single track in a large collection.

Mashable‘s Brenna Ehrlich used Sonos’s multi-room system, controlled with iOS devices, recently in a demo of music subscription service Rdio. You can view some of the Android app screenshots and products stills in the gallery below.

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Music Video Made on Microsoft Kinect Is Ghostly and Lovely

Hacks of the uber-popular Microsoft Kinect have become an art form of late, and a recent music video created for the band Echo Lake is no different.

Reminiscent of Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video, the above vid — created by filmmaker Dan Nixon — has a tech-flavored spin.

Nixon says in a blog post on the band’s Tumblr: “As far as I know (and I’m scared of checking) this is the first music video to be made with the Microsoft Kinect camera. The footage was shot on that piece of £130 equipment and recorded to custom software running on a laptop. The depth data was then manipulated to get the whole band in one ’space’ and then the fun started.”

The single in the video, “Young Silence,” comes from the band’s upcoming disc by the same name, which debuts on Valentine’s Day.

From choose-your-own adventure formats, to crowdsourcing, to HTML5, to 360-degree mobile apps — music videos are getting more and more creative these days, especially as technology continues to flourish and change.

What do you think is on the horizon when it comes to aural and visual storytelling?

[ht: Ooh, Brilliant]

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Artist Heat Map Makes Music Discovery Visual

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Hitlantis

Quick Pitch: Hitlantis turns music discovery and promotion into a game with a playable heat map.

Genius Idea: While the web has rendered this one of the most democratic times for music, it has also rendered it one of the most crowded. Furthermore, there are countless services, blogs and apps designed to help you cut through the clutter and find music that you dig, adding another layer to that nesting doll called music discovery: How do you decide what service to use to decide what music to listen to? Anyone else’s head hurt?

Well, Helsinki-based startup Hitlantis aims to give music fans a new, more visual way to find music.

“The entire content industry was launching new services almost every month [when we came up with Hitlantis],” says co-founder Timo Poijärvi. “They all looked the same and had the same horrible content discovery problem: If your band is number 253,998 out of 1,325,998 search results, it is 100% impossible to be found in that digital swamp.”

“We wanted to change that and bring in visual browsing,” says Poijärvi. “It was the basic idea of normal human behavior: If you are walking down the street and see a record store (they still exist), you do not stop by the door and shout some odd letters into the letterbox. No, you would step into the store and start browsing visually.”

Hitlantis, which is free for all music lovers, is a rather beautiful service. It features a circular heat map including genres like punk, indie, electro and pop, all of which are made up of circles that denote different unsigned, up-and-coming bands.

Users can create profiles, and then click on circles to listen to full tracks from the bands in question, become fans of said bands and buy their music along the way. You can also share songs to a variety of social networks.

Bands, for their part, can also join for free to get in on the action. Upon signup, a band is positioned on the outside of the music heat map, but as they gather more fans and song purchases, they move toward the center.

To optimize the promotional experience, bands can also pay a monthly subscription of 5€ (which lets bands set up an online store) or 10€ (which includes record company pitching and software features). Bands can also win opportunities like gigs and studio time.

“We have several partners offering these things locally, territory by territory,” says Poijärvi. “For example our biggest partner is Universal Music, whose A&R department is already using Hitlantis as a source of great new music. In Scandinavia we are running monthly competitions where three to five of the most successful Hitlantis bands are being pitched to Universal A&R (they give us written feedback of the bands, every month).”

Those fees make up the bulk of the site’s monetization plan, (it has yet to secure VC funding) as well as fees bands can pay for further promotion, and a 10% cut of bands’ music sales. Bands take 90% of the cash, obtained using Click & Buy and Moneybookers.

Currently, 65% of the bands on the site are from Finland (seeing as how it launched there seven months ago), but it also boasts bands from more than 30 countries and fans from more than 100 — that’s 10,000 registered users and 2,700 bands.

In all honesty, Hitlantis is not the easiest site to casually navigate when looking for new music. Clicking on colored dots renders music discovery a gamble. However, Poijärvi says that navigation will improve in the future.

“The action map of Hitlantis will show many amazing things like what the other users are doing right now,” he says. “We will add several kinds of filters to the map so that the user may choose what he/she sees, etc. Additionally we will introduce some data-handling intelligence into the system making the sea of bubbles even more appealing with even stronger information visualisation.”

Mobile apps are also in the works, with an iPhone version slated for February, and Android apps on the horizon. Check out the video below for a sneak peek.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, PhotoEuphoria

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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Is Google Planning Its Own Android Music Store?

Rumors of an Android-fused Google music service have been building for more than six months; if a new leaked screenshot is to be believed, that rumor just might become reality with the next Android OS release.

The website GizmoFusion has posted the data and synchronization panel from what is purported to be a build of Gingerbread. This is the standard Android settings panel, except alongside the options for syncing contacts, Gmail and Picasa Web Albums is a new designation: Sync Music. Could this be a sign that Google is planning on rolling out its own music service, a la iTunes?

Google has reportedly been working on a cloud-based music service — subscription or a la carte — for quite some time. In a marketplace that is already crowded with options, having solid integration at a device level with Android could give Google an edge.

Of course, even without a specific music store, over the air synchronization could still be a compelling feature. At Google I/O back in May, Google showed off some technology that would allow Android users to stream music from their desktop computers directly to their phone. Presumably, this sort of feature could also double as a way to sync music and playlists.

That could mean, for instance, that rather than relying on third-party apps like DoubleTwist or manually managing a device’s memory card for adding/updating music, transfers could take place over the air. (Add a new song to a playlist on the desktop, get that new song instantly on your smartphone.)

GizmoFusion surmises that this is a feature that other versions of Android (including Froyo) could get as well. If this is something that is tied directly to a Google-hosted offering, we’re inclined to agree. Of course, it could also end up being one of the features planned for Android 2.4, codenamed Ice Cream.

Assuming the screenshot is real, are you interested in either a Google-based music store or the ability to sync music wirelessly? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: GizmoFusion

[via Engadget]

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Android getting Google Music sync in Gingerbread?

By Chris Ziegler posted Jan 14th 2011 2:04PM Google's been teasing cloud-based music features in Android since its I/O conference last year, and the recent leak of a revamped first-party Music app suggests that the plans haven't evaporated into thin air. Here's the latest tidbit: GizmoFusion claims that this screen shot comes from a device running Gingerbread, clearly showing "Music" as one of the accounts configured in Android's settings, which suggests that the system will be pretty deeply-integrated to sync your tracks just as it would your Twitter updates, your Facebook friends, or your calendar entries. Note that we don't have any new evidence beyond this one shot -- and we need to take GizmoFusion's word that this is a Gingerbread device -- but we're wondering if maybe this isn't one of the new features in that Android 2.4 build we've been hearing a lot about lately.

[Thanks, Bryan]

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More music videos now playing on Android YouTube app, more pre-roll commercials, too

By Tim Stevens posted Jan 14th 2011 11:01AM Let's get the bad news out of the way first: pre-roll ads are coming to YouTube on Android in a big way. Big G is adding the digital speed bumps to "tens of thousands of YouTube partner videos" starting now, but it's for a sort of good reason: Katy Perry. Well, her and a bunch of other music videos, all appearing in the YouTube 2.0 app on Android, with the initial batch provided by VEVO. Music videos will be identified by a note icon and, while you're watching one, you can get artist info and quickly view other tracks that are available. Right now this is a feature only available on Android but, with Google happily extolling that it drove a 300 percent growth in mobile video viewership in 2010, we're guessing it'll be coming to other platforms soon enough.

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Interactive Music Video Turns Song Into Coloring Book

Here’s something to keep you occupied this pre-holiday Monday morning: a new video from Brooklyn-based indie band Au Revoir Simone that functions as an interactive coloring book.

The video for “Knight of Wands” — off of the band’s third album, Still Night, Still Light — premiered today on a dedicated Flash website. The in-browser experience is quite similar to Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown,” but doesn’t utilize HTML5 as that project did.

Once you click “Play,” you are taken to a coloring book page featuring band members Heather D’Angelo, Erika Forster and Annie Hart standing in what appears to be a haunted house. A palette of colors to the left allow you to fill in the world they inhabit, and, as you paint, a phantom flits through the frame, adding to the eerie atmosphere created by a song drenched in keyboards, dreamy vocals and periodic handclaps.

The video, directed by Eli Stonberg (who has worked with bands like Passion Pit and Nada Surf) and illustrated by Chris Sanchez is a creative effort that asks audience members to directly interact with the music and the world the band has spun via melody.

Videos like this — and those created by musicians like Arcade Fire and Andy Grammer — demonstrate how the oeuvre of the music video is changing as the web continues to become a destination for music and entertainment.

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iOS 4.2 Update Wipe Out Your iPhone Music? Try This.

As you’re probably well aware by now, iOS 4.2 (technically, iOS 4.2.1) has been released by Apple today. The update unifies iOS across the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for the first time. But it also comes with an annoying bug that some users are seeing.

After you update to the new OS, if you load the iPod (Music) app, you may see a message stating that your currently have “No Content” on the device. The problem is that many people do. For example, I have 7.8 gigabytes of audio on my iPhone, but after the update, none of it could be located. Luckily, there’s an easy fix.

As you can see in this Apple Discussion forum, others are having the same issue. The way to fix it is apparently to plug your iPhone back into your computer, play a song from the iPhone on your computer, and then sync. The process is very quick because it doesn’t actually have to transfer all that music again, it just makes it recognize that it’s already there. Sure enough, my content is now back.

Oddly, it looks as if this issue may only affect the iPhone 4. I updated an iPhone 3GS earlier and see all my music just fine. Likewise with the iPad.

Update: A few people have since said that the problem affects iPod touches as well.

Update 2: And yet more people are saying it’s affecting their iPhone 3GS as well. Again, my 3GS updated just fine. Weird.

[via Dwight Silverman]

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