Synergy

Poets know all about synergy; it's how many poems get born. You start with the seed of a poem, which you might walk around with for a few days, and it becomes infused with other events and experiences in your life. This helps to germinate the seed and add layers of meaning to the original idea, as well as give ideas for imagery. Such synergy is why the Internet is such a great place for poetry. But the Internet is also, itself, a kind of synergy--bringing people and ideas together that perhaps wouldn't always have otherwise found each other.

The synergy I found today was born in yesterday's post about the future for Apple. One of the other things that people have been predicting Apple will come out with is a mobile phone. They have already teamed up with Motorola with the ROKR phone, which supports iTunes and has 512 Mb of memory (to hold 100 songs). By pretty much all accounts, however, the ROKR is a weak effort. I never thought Apple would move into the mobile phone market in the first place. There's already so much competition and Apple would have to spend a ton of money to gain any kind of market share.

But then two things I read/heard today got me thinking that maybe I'm wrong. First was the speculation by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster that Apple would release an "iPhone" within the next 12-24 months. And then there was a really intriguing interview on NerdTV of Anina the "Queen of WAP". In it, she talks about the fact that "nobody [i.e., mobile phone companies] understands anything about how this story [i.e., the various high-end needs of moblie users] needs to work."

And it's true. I don't even own a mobile phone and even I can see that while the technology to do amazing things is there, many times it is far too difficult to implement for the average user. As with computers, people want things to "just work." Imagine being able to travel anywhere in the world and access the Internet, post to and update your blog, create a podcast etc. from your mobile phone, and do it easily, i.e., the Apple way. Granted, you can do much if not all of this now, but, if Anina's interview is anything to go by, things can get complicated and expensive. So maybe there is a market for Apple in the mobile phone industry after all.