After the new baby is born, I find myself very busy. Since the mother is not willing to leave the baby alone at all, it’s my task to get all the stuff that is needed for the newborn.

I have been hanging around in different malls and shops in the last few days and I had the opportunity to discover something interesting on mobile phone usage. (Yes, I know. I cannot really stay away from my job).

I was standind in the queue at the cash register. The cash register was not far away from the consumer electronics area of the mall. All of the radios of the shop were tuned on the same station that was broadcasting one of the latest hits.

My attention was directed to two teens that were using their phone in front of one of the store’s radio. I started looking at what they were doing and I discovered that they were recording the song from the radio using the phone voice recorder.

That’s really something that amazed me!

There are really some amazing things to be noticed.

• It remembered myself taping songs from radio broadcast in the early 80s. This basically shows the difference from who has migrated from analog to digital with who is born digital.
• I don’t know what kind of plan the two teens subscribed to but, since I live in Italy, they can only choose between 3, Vodafone, TIM and Wind. Each one of this operators have music services on their mobile portal where you can buy ringtones and songs. Actually with these two teens they were not getting a cent.
• These two guys does not seem to pay much attention to quality. A lot of noise was around theme and, probably, the quality of the recording was bad. Moreover, the quality of codecs used by voice recorders in mobile phone cannot be compared to the codecs used in the media player application.
• The song they have digitalized is not DRM protected in any way so they can share it with their friends.

This is only an example that I had the opportunity to observe directly. They same may happen in different market areas.

The main point here is that you can try to square consumer behavior in some model but, at the end of the day, your customer will always find a way to use your product or service that you were not able to imagine and, probably, that way is not bringing money in your pocket.

Why do I blog this? To remind me that innovation does not come only from inside your company but, also, from your customers.