Yvonne pretty frequently has these great ideas that sound goofy when she has them but prescient about six months later… and here’s the latest one. A few weeks after the launch of Duke’s iPod project, and after seeing a bunch of Apple’s TV ads – you know, the ones with the silhouetted people dancing around with iPods on and those distinctive white cords flailing all over the place – Yvonne says something like: “Those cords are really awkward, so walkman-era. How cool would it be if Apple made an iPod with no cords, just earbuds? It would have to broadcast short-range, from the device to the earbuds… but then you’d get interference from other iPods nearby… but that could be a feature, iPods could have channels and everyone with an iPod who was standing near you could tune into what you were listening to. It would be like short-range radio stations. You could just stand in a subway car during rush hour and surf other commuters’ playlists.”
And now, about six months later, people are more or less doing exactly this, just with a slightly broader broadcast range:
Eastern Standard Tribe coming true?, from EST
Next step: someone has to invent a shorter-range broadcast device for the iPod. What kind of sound quality can you get with Bluetooth?