Ina Fried
There were plenty of companies on the show floor at Macworld pitching their latest iPod accessories, but one tiny company used its booth to try to get some new ideas.
Mophie, which makes a line of iPod cases, used a good chunk of its booth to solicit attendees' designs. The company got 150 ideas in about four hours. A quick round of online voting helped Mophie choose three finalists and by Friday, the last day of Macworld, the company had marketing pitches and rough, but working, implementations of all three finalists.
"These were just ideas on Tuesday," Mophie's director of operations, Tom Pasley, said on Friday. "We made them into prototypes today."
Now the five-person company is looking to go to the next step and create actual shippable products.
The first idea is a case that holds Apple's diminutive iPod Shuffle and also has a built-in keyring. When the music player is removed, the case/keyring can also act as a bottle opener. Mophie has tentatively dubbed it 'Bevy' and says it should be ready for the market by March. "Function is 'key'," the company says in its preliminary marketing materials for Bevy.
A second idea, now called 'Schlep', is a durable wallet that holds credit cards, money and either the video iPod or the just-announced iPhone. The company expects to have the iPod version ready in April and the iPhone one in time for the device's US launch in June.
The third product, called 'Montage', is a combination digital photo frame and iPod dock. Mophie hasn't set a release date for that one, which would be its first move into electronics.
The winners won't get a cut of the profits or other royalties, but will get credit on all of the product marketing materials, including retail packaging and signs. Mophie said winners also will get a "special gift", but hasn't said what that will be.
Pasley said the company gets calls and emails all the time from people who have ideas for the next killer iPod accessory.
"We thought, let's give it a try in real time," he said.
There is always a race to be the first to accessorise the latest Apple gear. That means being nimble and, in some cases, trying to predict what Cupertino is up to.
At its booth at Macworld, accessory maker Speck was showing a case that nearly matches up to Apple's iPhone.
It's not that Speck employees had any inside information on what Steve Jobs and his team were up to, but they read the rumour sites like everyone else, and it seemed a widescreen iPod might be in the offing. So they mocked up a variant on its existing ToughSkin case and had it ready for display in the booth.
"Obviously they are not final designs," said Speck's marketing manager, Andrea Lim. But the company wanted to let people know that their iPhone would not have to be naked for long. "It's $500 (£255)," Lim said. "They are going to need some protection."
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