iTunes rules the world in terms of transferring music back and forth between hand held devices and the Internet. However, Dazzboard, is set to challenge that dominance with a service that will allow you to plug a wide range of mobile devices into your computer and easily transfer multimedia content like photos and videos in addition to music.
Dazzboard is being developed by Linkotec, a Finnish startup. Finland (or as fans of Spamalot would call it – Finland, Finland, Finland) has long been the world leader in adoption of hand held devices. Finland was an early adopter of mobile phones and was the first country where mobile phone density exceeded the fixed landline phone density. More simply, in the average one mile square region of Finland you’ll find more cell phone owners than land line phone owners. Many of those mobile devices now have the ability to store and display multimedia content.
Dazzboard is touting a browser-based solution that it says has all the goodness of iTunes but without the disadvantages of Apple’s closed environment. Dazzboard is not the first startup to challenge Apple and based on a look at the beta they probably won’t be the last. That said, I am impressed with Dazzboard as a beta product – the challenge will be to see what they can unleash before they launch and if they will have the funding to keep the innovation going.
Dazzboard is currently available by invitation-only, but the rumor is that the public beta is almost ready to roll. Testing the beta immediately identifies some of the current limitations. The Dazzboard web application currently requires Windows, although a Macintosh compatible version is in the works.
Using Dazzboard you can connect your computer to a wide range of mobile devices and transfer multimedia content like photos, videos and music via the web-based interface. Once you move your files from your mobile device to Dazzboard, it will also help you organize your files and share them out to all the popular social networking services.
File transferring goes both ways as with the ‘Dazz me’ bookmarklet you can download content from the Web to the media manager and to your mobile device.
Dazzboard supports any portable device that can be used in mass storage or media transfer mode. This is their big differentiation from iTunes. Dazzboard splits the portable media players and mobile phones it supports into two groups. The first are fully supported devices that are supported and maintained in the Dazzboard database, meaning it’s really easy to setup the device for file transfer.
Then you have generic devices which are not fully supported by Dazzboard but most devices can be setup via their generic media hub. Supporting ‘thousands of devices’ is one of the key value ads for Dazzboard but I hope they know what they are getting into. Having managed call centers I know the risk of of getting overburdened by support calls for device-specific support questions that you can’t easily address in an online FAQ. Support is one of the key reasons why closed platforms sometimes win out.
The device manager plugin appears to be the component that has Dazzboard limited to certain browsers and even in a supported browser it’s not intuitive to get the plugin downloaded and installed. Once installed it appears to work great – but setup is the Achilles heel at the moment.
The music selection skews European – but that’s largely based on the location of the company and the majority of the beta testers. When you are looking at a video, picture or song you can report explicit content (don’t click on it for a test – it’s a one click reporting process, no “are you sure” messages) and broken links. However, there is no reporting for “this is a stolen video, track or photo.”
Since these digital items appear to be on the Dazzboard servers, it looks like they will certainly be chatting with the Recording Industry or America Association (RIAA) and other bodies that support digital content rights. While Dazzboard includes links to sites that offer music, photos and videos with creative-commons or other free to use licenses – there does not appear to be any sort of effective controls in place. Though there privacy policy does note “Pursuant to section 22 of Laki tietoyhteiskunnan palvelujen tarjoamisesta, notifications of claimed copyright infringement should be sent to LinkoTec.”
Dazzboard wants to lead the new era of media managing and distribution where you can manage your portable device, media within and discover new content to play with. They have a good start and it’s worth a trial – especially if you have a non-iPod device (the tutorial is well worth a viewing before you get started). It’s the first service I have seen that really is multimedia – not just music focused. But with device support and digital property rights on the horizon – I won’t be deleting iTunes off my computer just yet.
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