Patrick de Laive

This is the first post of 2 on Zing.

Zing is a Mountain View based start-up, co-founded by a Dutch guy (Arthur van Hoff) with a lot of experience in the tech industry (Arthur –very nice guy btw- was teamleader of the group that invented Java! Founded Marimba and Strangeberry –sold to tivo-).
Zing is a company that makes connected media products in the music scene. They partner with big brands to bring connected media products to the market.

Their first product is the Sirius Stiletto 100 (launched last month), it’s a portable satellite radio with recording capacity (It can store up to 100 hours of tunes in MP3 or WMA format). So? You would probably think, what’s the deal? 1. Who’s listening to satellite radio? 2. What is satellite radio in the first place? 3. And what use does it have anyways to bring it with you when satellite radio doesn’t have any coverage inside? The answer is (before the meeting I couldn’t answer them myself): 1. More and more people are listening to satellite radio (from 3 million subscriptions -14.99 per month- last year to 10 million people this year). 2. Satellite radio enables to listen to the same content wherever you are in the states. Dutch people would think… so, what’s different with normal radio? Well the American radio market is sooo different, if you turn on your radio and drive for 1 mile the station is gone, the frequency of a station differs from place to place! 3. It has a wifi mode as well, so you can switch from satellite to internet in seconds (80% of the satellite content is also available on the web and in America 40% of the households have a wifi connection, and growing fast..).

Howard Stern took a 500 million offer for 5 years to broadcast only on satellite radio! This must be a big market!

In a fast growing market (already 150 million dollar per month, excluding the sales of the devices itself) with Howard stern on their side, you would say Zing has a good chance of becoming successful.

The Sirius stiletto 100 is in stores now (among them Best Buy).

I wish Arthur all the best with Zing.
More to come about Zing. They’ve got a really cool new product coming up!