Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, has made a somewhat bizarre entry on his Yuku blog my publishing what appears to be a short review of the Sonos wifi music distribution system.

Why is it bizarre? Well, Labatt’s Blog is entitled “what’s happening on yuku” and every other entry concerns that subject matter. So why would he suddenly post an off-topic item more akin to a personal blog entry?

Maybe it’s to show what blogging on Yuku will be like; after all, he recently posted that his developers had broken the blogging element in the new message boards system so that any blog-type Yuku boards (Labatt’s included) would remain using Yuku version 1.0 (sounds like a release, but it’s still late-alpha/early-beta) rather than go to version 2.0.

That doesn’t sound likely though.

Now let’s bear in mind that for Labatt and ezboard, online advertising is the great be-all and end-all. What does Labatt say led him to try Sonos?

“A few weeks ago I was at an evening event where they had the Sonos playing. I talked to the guy who was using it and he gave me a quick demo. The short story is that it looked like a really easy solution to my problems.”

Now a Sonos system isn’t exactly cheap so that quick demo must have been really something as Labatt says he then spent two weeks thinking about it before placing an order.

What else does he say?

“I did not mean for this to sound like an advertisement (now that I am proof reading it…it does sound a bit addy, sorry). I just wanted to share with our Yuku family what I have learned about solving my music listening problem.”

We’ll ignore for now the “family” bullshit – it’s the same crap he churned out when ezboard lost a year’s data from their ezboard system last year – and note that he’s conscious the ‘review’ sounds like an advert. Even though he claims to have ordered the system himself – note he doesn’t claim to have bought it, nor does he say which system he installed and how much it cost him.

And then my attention was drawn to this Internet marketing entry (watch for all the link spamming comments at the end).

“The deal also involves banner ads and calls for Sonos to give [the blogger] a demo unit.”

The blogger in question is Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist, rather than a music journo or someone from that industry. Sounds familiar? Labatt, after all, became CEO after his wife’s company provided venture capital to ezboard. Still, at least Wilson is up-front with the reason he has the Sonos system.

So that’s a one-off then, is it? Er… No.

Here’s another instance:

“The folks at Sonos offered to send me a [starter] set to try out to see for myself.  For those not familiar with the product, it is trying to be to the home stereo what the iPod was to the Discman.  So I got their shipment and following is my take, which largely mirrors Fred Wilson’s conclusion, which is that it rocks as a product even though it is pricey and has a few shortcomings…”

“Rags” is at least connected with digital media, though.

There’s another interesting post about Sonos that mentions something that Labatt curiously omits from his ‘review’: that the Sonos system will not play any DRM-protected music, i.e. it won’t allow you to play any tracks you downloaded from iTunes, Napster, etc. From the Sonos FAQ:

“Music downloaded from online music services such as iTunes, Napster, MusicMatch, SonyConnect, Rhapsody, WalMart, and MTV are copy protected using Digital Rights Management (DRM) or use proprietary audio formats which cannot be played back on a Sonos Digital Music System.”

As usual, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from all this.

And finally … I think I’ll be using this quote from Labatt from time to time in my “nastygrams”:

“Being a problem solving kinda guy…”

:)

Tags: