Wi-Fi MP3 Player: Music Gremlin
March 5th, 2006 • Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology
So the last time I wrote about Podcast Ready, I went off on a side tangent of having an MP3 player with Wi-Fi built in. It made sense to me to marry these two technologies and it looks like I’m not the only one. Music Gremlin is exactly that - an MP3 player with Wi-Fi capability. The site seems a little weak on details of how it’ll work but I would hope that the integration goes beyond just your own MP3 collection and includes podcasts as well as purchased audio files. And I hope they don’t do something like try to lock you into their own music store or some such silliness.
One thing that is a little disconcerting/weird is the fact that their company overview page claims that the company was founded back in 2002. Really? It took 4 years to figure out how to combine a network interface with an audio player (and actually, the product isn’t even out yet so we’re still talking vaporware right now). If so, this will either be one rock star consumer electronics device or…. well, you know the rest. Looking at their domain name (musicgremlin.com), it looks like it was registered on April 4, 2003. Not sure why they would have waited an entire year to register a domain name if they were founded in 2002. Maybe they were founded on December 31, 2002 and they just waited a little over three months. Still, that strikes me as weird.
On the funding front, it looks like they did multiple batches but I don’t have full details. There is a story from Forbes that sheds some light on them (apparently they raised $5 million from Allen & Co.).
They do have a nice site I must say. Assuming they can legitimately use the images of those bands (Green Day, Kanye West, The Killers, Missy Elliott, and Coldplay) on their site and aren’t just ripping them off. The image does link to a beta login page but since I’m not a beta user, I can’t tell if there is something real behind it or not.
The founders of the company, Robert Khedouri and Jonathan Axelrod, are both ex-McKinsey consultants. Not sure if that qualifies them to run this company or not but at least they’ll be able to avoid hiring expensive consultants to help them with their “strategy”.
If you get one, just remember, don’t feed it after midnight and make sure you don’t get it wet.
