Really Smart Kid Takes On Apple’s iTunes
by Fred Roed on 23/10/06 at 8:19 pm
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These days, entrepreneurs seem to be getting smarter and smarter, younger and younger – and more and more daring.
Check out this kid who is making Apple’s Steve Jobs decidedly nervous. A Norwegian wonder child, Jon Lech Johansen, first made a name for himself at 17 when he wrote a program that removed the encryption that limits what DVD players can play DVD’s. He posted the code online, got an award from the ‘Electronic Frontier Foundation’, and promptly earned a visit from Norwegian police.
Johansen is now 22, and has started a company called DoubleTwist. This time he has figured out how to unlock the code that prevents digital music players other than the iPod from playing music purchased from Apple’s iTunes.
“Today’s reality is that there’s this iTunes-iPod ecosystem that excludes everyone else from the market,” says Johansen on Fortune.com. “I don’t like closed systems.”
Go boy. Napster would be proud.
[Read the Fortune.com article here]
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.
