So i know I’m a little late with talking about last week’s Dragons Den, but it’s been a hectic week and I’ve only just caught up with my Sky+ stuff as I was away for most of the week, and then we had the not that small affair of Ben’s christening, Jen’s 30th and our 5th Wedding anniversary. Consequently I only got round to watching it last night.
So amongst the usual line up of mad inventions, including the cucumber “saver” and yoga for children, there was one that really caught my attention. A patent lawyer and his friends had developed some software for seamlessly mixing dance mp3s.
He had set up a website designed to compete with iTunes by selling dance tracks and offering to mix them together. So, you select your favourite dance tunes, buy them from his site and they get mixed together in your own customised dance compilation. Cool? Of course it is cool, it’s what I’ve been waiting for!! All of those dance tunes I have with 30 seconds of beat at the end just waiting to be mixed!
And so he got two offers on the table. Firstly Theo Paphitis and Deborah Meaden offered to cover his £200k request, and Richard Farleigh offered to cover it himself, but with the intention of licensing the technology. Rather than go head to head with iTunes, he sought to sell the license to everyone. No risk, no development and marketing costs, kerchiing!
But the fella went with Theo and Deborah, much to my disappointment. Bang go my chances of having on-the-go mixing of dance tracks on my iPod. For the time being. Personally I think that the licensing approach was the financial winner - the USP of mixalbum.com isn’t enough to get people to move away from iTunes. Besides, lots of people are invested in iTunes thanks to the wonderful DRM. Surely there would be a lot more money in licensing the technology to the mp3 player manufacturers, and even getting it built in to Windows Media player, a royalty on every copy of windows would be a pretty decent income i’m sure!!
Still, you have to respect the chap’s conviction and belief in his product, even though it is a little poorly placed in my opinion. However, he is the one with £200k in his pocket, so perhaps he knows better than I. Head over to www.mixalbum.com to decide for yourself.
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