Pandora

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On the SquawkBox conference call this morning we discussed the rumours of an iTunes unlimited offering. The folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog published a piece this morning suggesting that Apple might offer (for perhaps $130 year) a subscription “all-you-can-eat” iphone music service, with the option to buy tracks you’d really like to keep. It’s an intriguing idea, especially in the context of the conversation we had yesterday around piracy. At the same time, it seems like there might be some overlap with Satellite Radio, for example.

Consensus on the call: some form of cloud based music subscription / storage makes a ton of sense. Whether it’s Apple’s route, or a service like Pandora, it seems to be the future.

And second, there are a ton of blog postings hitting this morning about Blackberry Bold. The launch is imminent. We’ve got a number of Blackberry users as regulars. So we had a discussion about Citigroup’s report that Bold is strong but not a game changer, the 3G issues being reported and RIM‘s development platforms.

Most tellingly, it was difficult to keep the conversation focused on Blackberry. Our callers are clearly more excited about iPhone.

The most quotable quote of the call came from Bill Volk in relation to Sun Microsystems stewardship of the J2ME platform: “Sun has done the worst possible technical job possible with J2ME”.

On the conference call this morning: Dan Rockwell, Thomas Purves, Dan York, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Todd Spraggins, Sheryl Breuker, Frank Abrams.

Squawk Box August 21 [ 34:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The first topic we discussed today was yesterday’s news that Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom for $105 million.

Now, Ribbit is a pretty interesting platform, which many of us have been following for some time. But for anybody who HASN’T followed it, it’s a softswitch in the cloud with integration between IM systems, phone systems, VoIP systems (including Skype) and a nifty API, including flash based client APIs. They’ve got a slick softphone, and a nice deal with SalesForce all of which have been announced since last December when they came out of stealth.

The acquisition sparked some interesting commentary — Om Malik gave it a huge “yawn”, asking why it was significant given how few developers they had. At the other end of the spectrum, Thomas Howe thought it was enormously significant, and particularly meaningful to corporate developers.

We thought Ribbit was mostly for corporations and part of a strategy by BT to embed itself more deeply in the corporation. In our opinion, other views — such as the theory that Ribbit was acquired by BT to compete with Android and Skype — are off the mark.

We also talked about some of the restrictions that are emerging on iPhone. AT&T has said no to peer to peer, but what about Pandora and streaming audio? And how about the fact that there aren’t any VoIP applications allowed, except over WiFi?

Well, Pandora’s gone, but other streaming media and internet radio applications are still there. It seems likely that Pandora is gone for other reasons!

And we also digressed into a discussion of Hasbro’s decision to shut down Scrabulous. Strong feelings were expressed.

On the call: Adam Somer, Frank Abrams, Bill Volk, Jeanette Fisher, Jim Courtney, Ian Hood, Jeb Brilliant, Moshe Maeir