Many of the products that come out are sometimes from the hackers out there on the edge doing things. We all made Wi-Fi hot spots years before it became common place and a biz. So from where I’m sitting, I think those of us out here in tinker-land might be able to propose some new products. I’m going to call these types of posts “Make this”. Here it goes…
I like my SPOT watch. I even made an app to get flight times on it awhile back– but it might be time for the SPOT technology to move off the wrist real estate and on to our music players. Here’s the plan, I am hoping some of the MS folks and OEMs get all Maker-like and cook this up. SPOT uses FM to receive news, stocks, weather, instant messages, calendar alerts, movie times, quotations, horoscopes, sport, lottery and likely something else I forgot. It’s smart enough to know what city you’re on and the PC side of it MSN Direct is pretty good- but, here’s the thing- it’s hard to make a tiny watch with a big display that polls FM all day and have great battery life (and you need to tell people they really need this too). The SPOT watches now are really good, at least I think so, but I think the form factor of a MP3 player with its bigger screen, bigger battery and in some cases built in FM is pretty much the perfect mash up. Imagine your MP3 player being “smart”. I play the dumb games and read ebooks on my iPod all the time- I’d love to get all my SPOT channels on it. Heck, add RSS via SPOT so I get even more. Send new “faces” to the players over the air. Through MSN Direct, add a new channel called Music and have it alert you when there’s a song you want and you can mark it, next sync it’ll grab it via MSN Music or Napster…If I had time, I’d try and hack this up- might be a rough prototype, but it would sizzle. So how about it? SPOT + the Creative Zen Micro. The first Swatch MP3 player? Maybe a Fossil one…Let’s try it. I even made a photoshoped mock up.
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