@ CES: Keynote Of Ed Zander, Motorola CEO — Yahoo And Music; WMG Deal

The keynote of Motorola CEO Ed Zander was mostly a sales pitch, but that’s to be expected and it’s mostly to find out what one of the biggest handset manufacturers has planned anyway. He said that the recent change in the tech world in focusing on mobility and content will be the main point of discussion for the next 10 years, but spent the first part of his speech apparently trying to convince people that the mobile content market was going to be big… 2 billion mobile subscribers, the fact that people living in the US can’t really understand what the mobile world is like globally because they haven’t experienced it, and the improvement of technology would make mobile content more viable — such as being able to download a full MP3 song in 10 seconds in the next year or two years. He described the content aim of Motorola as “moving from cool devices to cool experiences”.
–Marco Borreries, Yahoo SVP, came on stage to talk about the Yahoo Go service, which we’ve covered in detail. Yahoo and Motorola are on the same page in terms of mobile usability — a good drinking game would be based around the number of times the phrase “one button” was used in the keynote. Yahoo is looking at preloading the service onto some handsets and also trying to get in tight with the carriers, with Borreries claiming the company is “talking with every mobile operator around the world in working together”.
The Yahoo Go service includes a pretty easy to use search engine (with ads), news service with Yahoo and third party content, and so on. It also links to Flickr.
–Chris White, senior director of multimedia experiences at Motorola, spoke about mobile music. After a spiel about a bluetooth headset they started talking about a deal with Warner Music Group to return to the peripheral content of music…that is, album art, lyrics, information booklets and so on. This will be done both physically and digitally. Physically, Motorola will include content/advertising in the packaging of its mobile phones, including pictures of emerging artists, booklets with information about artists and so on. This is called MotoTracks. There was also talk of content inbedded into memory cards which consumers would buy, which sounded like it was included in the packaging but I wasn’t sure. On the digital side there was a lot of talk about music bundles, which WMG has been keen on for a while. As part of the Motorola deal this will be called MotoExperience (or something like it)…”this is a bundle that I’ve purchased, I can see ringtones, videos, songs, other cool information about the artist,” said White. I’m sure this will cost more than a simple 99c single download. This will be offered through Motorola’s music websites, over the air with carrier partners and also on removable memory cards. (press release).
There was also a description of the Moto RIZR V6, due out in the first half of this year, which looks like Moto’s next music phone effort. It is Linux/Java based but uses Microsoft DRM, and apparently works with 200 different music stores around the world (guess the exceptions). It has 2GB of memory, and much was made of the brand-new easy-to-use user interface, which is the biggest complaint about music phones.
–The rest of the keynote was on enterprise (not much content apart from a deal with Newsgator for RSS feeds) and the “connected home” (not much mobile, apart from saying “and it can get streamed to your mobile, too!”)
The video of the talk is available here.

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