Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Owning Content...Obsolete?

Several days old but Outsell Now has an interesting musing on the nature of content and owning it. An excerpt: "Content is like the municipal water supply: we all own the water we buy from the city, but that doesn't mean we want to store it in barrels around the house. What we want is reliable and instant access to water, not possession [...]We've concluded that all parts of the content industry are lined up along a "rent vs. buy" spectrum, but that the concept of owning content is slowly losing ground to other models of access."

And from Moco.News, some info about how that content is going to move to portable/handheld devices "Nokia confidently predicted there will be 70 million 3G handsets in use by the end of 2005, up from 16 million at the end of last year (but still a drop in the mobile handset ocean)." 3G handsets are third generation cell phones--although the term cell phone is increasingly antiquated for what 3G devices can do with regard to sending and receiving mobile content. So, these cell phones thatt aren't cell phones make me think of Rene Magritte's painting of a tobacco pipe that includes the words (in French) "This is not a pipe."