I love lis­ten­ing to pod­casts on my phone, and iOS5’s PC-​free approach inspired me to try using a pod­catcher that down­loads episodes directly — no iTunes synch­ing required. Since I had to man­u­ally migrate all my pod­cast sub­scrip­tions from iTunes to the new app, I had the oppor­tu­nity to unsub­scribe from shows I don’t really care for and find some new ones.

One new pod­cast I sub­scribed to is Crit­i­cal Path from the 5 by 5 net­work. The show fea­tures 5 by 5’s Dan Ben­jamin along with Horace Dediu, ana­lyst and con­sul­tant to the tele­com indus­try. Each week, they look at the telecom/​mobile indus­try through the lens of Apple, which is undoubt­edly one of the most pow­er­ful and influ­en­tial com­pa­nies in that space.

But if the show were just about Apple, it would be incred­i­bly bor­ing and would, no doubt, be lost in the sea of Apple-​related pod­casts jock­ey­ing for lis­ten­ers’ atten­tion. Instead, the show some­times looks at other big play­ers in the tech indus­try, and the mobile space in par­tic­u­lar, to give a deeper sense of what ideals and past invest­ments might have made a com­pany choose option B instead of A. Episode 5, for exam­ple, looks at the last ten years at HP to put their aban­don­ing their PC busi­ness and Touch­pad device into context.

This sort of con­text is impor­tant, as noth­ing really hap­pens in a vac­uum. It’s con­text that wel­comes com­par­isons between his­tory and an exquis­ite tapes­try, and it’s con­text that helps us under­stand why seem­ingly bad ideas some­times work out in the end.

Con­text was the inspi­ra­tion for the relaunched csixty4.com, and I love see­ing some­one else embrac­ing it. Check out their show, espe­cially episode #5 and let me know what you think.