I didn't know what I was missing.

I recently got a new iPod Nano. Actually I won the darn thing in a drawing. A nice surprise, and the even better surprise was about all the Nano does. It's about half the size of my iPod Classic which I've had for a few years now. The "old" model has video, games, music etc and it stores over 3-thousand songs, several seasons of Entourage along with other videos and gobs of pictures. It works great and frankly, there was no urgent need to upgrade it. I know, all this stuff is also available on the iPhone, but until Verizon makes them available I'm living a non-iPhone life. I dislike dropped calls.

What I like about the iPod Nano:

1. Size. It fits comfortably in a shirt pocket.
2. Capabilities. Not only does it play music and videos, it also has a built in video camera, FM radio tuner (with pause functions) and even a pedometer!
   
3. Storage. While my iPod Classic has 160GB of storage, the Nano comes in 8 and 16GB models. The Nano can't store everything I have on the Classic, but more than enough for "on-the-go" usage and I can shoot a video of anything interesting I might come across.
   

This morning I hit the treadmill, tuned in a local sports-talk radio program and kept track of steps taken and calories burned. Pretty cool. Last week while visiting family, I shot several videos, plugged it into my laptop and uploaded everything to YouTube.

I'm old enough to remember the first Sony Walkman. It was amazing for its time when it came out in 1979. A portable device that played an entire audio cassette tape! Believe it or not, some of the devices are still around. On a flight recently, a gentleman across the aisle from me was listening merrily to music on his. Far out.

Today we take technology pretty much for granted. Not me. The challenge is simply keeping up with the next thing to come along. Which likely will be as early as this afternoon.

Recently I had lunch with a senior marketing executive for one of the nation's top television programmers. She told me they literally have a tech lab where they look at, and play with the latest digital toys to see what they do, and how her company can monetize results providing content for them. Employees take the devices home then come back with ideas.

It's a digital world changing almost, at the speed of light. The little Nano in my pocket is proof.

Brian Olson
Conversation Starters LLC
"We star the conversations about you"