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Doohh!! Had to turn off pop up controls. Thanks all... eom
Apple won't comment on any of this, and the nondisclosure agreements it has in place with its suppliers and collaborators are described as unusually restrictive.
Presumably this is because the company prefers the image of a product that sprang forth whole from the corporate godhead -- which was certainly the impression the iPod created when it seemed to appear out of nowhere two years ago. But the point here is not to undercut Apple's role: the iPod came together in somewhere between six and nine months, from concept to market, and its coherence as a product given the time frame and the number of variables is astonishing.
Jobs and company are still correct when they point to that coherence as key to the iPod's appeal; and the reality of technical innovation today is that assembling the right specialists is critical to speed, and speed is critical to success.
Still, in the world of technology products, guts have traditionally mattered quite a bit; the PC boom viewed from one angle was nothing but an endless series of announcements about bits and megahertz and RAM. That 1.8-inch hard disk, and the amount of data storage it offered in such a small space, isn't the only key to the iPod, but it's a big deal. Apple apparently cornered the market for the Toshiba disks for a while. But now there is, inevitably, an alternative. Hitachi now makes a disk that size, and it has at least one major buyer: Dell
HP confirmed reports that both the player and the music service will be in operation next month. The company is expected to use an established vider of Web music as its music source.
HP Joins The Online-Music Band
TechWeb News , 4-Dec-2003
Hewlett-Packard expects to have a portable music player to demo early next month at the Consumer Electronics Show, in the U.S. The company said it plans to unveil its Internet music store before it begins selling the player.
HP's entry into the combination Internet-music store cum high-end music player world marks the most recent foray into this market. While relatively inexpensive MP3 players have been around for years, the more recent success of Apple Computer's iPod--despite its high price--seems to have baited other big players to join the party.
HP confirmed reports that both the player and the music service will be in operation next month. The company is expected to use an established vider of Web music as its music source.
The field has suddenly become crowded, as Microsoft, Samsung, Wal-Mart, Sony and others have jumped into the field offering players, Internet-music service or both. The competitor catching HP's eye, however, was certainly archrival Dell which is offering a line of players starting at $199. Dell's online music store is operated by Musicmatch
The fault could be/is with Hitachi..... eom
B&O player still selling, still e.Digital inside, still revenues
for e.Digital per RP..................
http://www.bang-olufsen.com/sw1603.asp
In Southern California...that did not even raise a brow LOL
Part of the delay was due to Hitachi not being able to supply the HDD as needed.
Found them in Emits great DD Thanks emit! eom
These new? AMIS™ TWIRL™
AMIS™ - Audio Manager Interface Software - PC driver for interfacing portable devices to various PC-based song managers.
TWIRL™- Two-Way Infrared Link - Embedded firmware for bi-directional data transfer using high-speed infrared.
http://www.edigital.com/techp.php
First wave of digital home products to hit market in 2004
Friday 28th November 2003
[digitimes.com] 10:57
The first wave of digital home products conforming to the DHWG (Digital Home Working Group) guidelines is expected to hit the market in the second half of next year, according to Intel Taiwan.
Intel expects the world's IT makers to be able to complete development of digital home products in the first half of 2004 and then start deliveries to end-users in the second half, said the officials.
To help manufacturers bring their digital home solutions to market faster, Intel has developed the Intel Networked Media Product Requirements (NMPR) that define the conformance and interoperability of related devices, Intel Taiwan officials told local makers who participated in a meeting to organize Taiwan's Digital Home Special Interest Group (DHSIG) yesterday.
Members of the DHSIG include Acer, Tatung, BenQ, First International Computer (FIC) and VIA Technologies.
Based on the NMPR, Intel has suggested IT makers develop their digital home devices with standardized wireless interfaces, the officials said. For the first wave of digital home products to be introduced in early 2004, Intel suggests makers adopt the 802.11a/b/g standard, and then move into 802.11e/i technology in 2005.
Multimedia standards will be simplified mainly to JPEG-2K and MPEG-4 in 2005, instead of the current standards of GIF, TIFF, MP3, WMA9, AC-3, AAC, ATRAC3plus, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and WMV9, said the officials.
The first wave of digital home products will be mainly multimedia PCs, digital set-top boxes (STBs) and media adapters, according to the officials.
Charles Chou, Steve Shen
New site would not work for me on AOL, but does on Internet Explorer? LOL
Love it! Happy Thanksgiving to MOST of you.....eom
Sentinel I like my bong theory LOL eom
Delays of Gateway DMP-X20 20GB in part due to Hitachi NOT keeping up with HDD supply........
OT: Love the new EAG rally. up 40%+ in a day + eom
One more day until Gateway jukebox kickoff~ eom
gernb1
Been waiting for that unit since CES. Alpine is almost as fast to market as F10. LOL
http://www.alpine-usa.com/html/D2_n_1_n_n.html
Go to products Then hda-5460
Why don't you wait and see before mouthing off.......eom
Orient Power response to question about 0-1000 clone
Hi,
Your mentioned model is under our model plan but do not have a launch date yet.
Regards,
Nancy Chu
Original Message -----
From:
To: digitalbox@orientpower.com
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 7:31 AM
Subject:
OH My Goodness Not him again..........eom
costertag
e.Bay has the mxp-100 for $45.99 without memory. It uses either memory cards or Hitachi (IBM)microdrive.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3059690288&category=11024
bostonredsox
It means that a customer can reserve and use a digEplayer on two Alaska Airlines flights...from Seattle to Boston, and Boston to Seattle. First step......
NEW NAPSTER HAS MARKETING MUSCLE, ADVERTAINMENT MASCOT
Old Kitty Logo Developed Into Full-Blown Cartoon Character
November 17, 2003
QwikFIND ID: AAP15K
By Tobi Elkin
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- In move that appears likely to enhance and extend its already broad brand recognition and visibility, the new Roxio Napster 2.0 has launched its logo as a full-blown cartoon character.
The Napster Kitty is now the star of a new $20 million advertising campaign that includes a series of multiple TV spots that reprise the history of the outlaw online file swapping service that triggered a revolution in the way music products are consumed and marketed.
Napster mythology
"We restated the mythology of how Napster was seen for the last couple of years," said Scott Steinberg, vice president for strategic marketing at Roxio Napster. For instance, "Jailbreak," the first spot, shows the kitty character breaking out of jail, and in "EKG" the kitty is on life-support, a sendup of Napster's legal troubles and shutdown by authorities. Its rebirth is chronicled in a hilarious third vignette that harpoons record company executives.
Napster began as the personal peer-to-peer music-swapping Web project of a Northeastern University student and by 1999 had blossomed into a wildly popular world phenomenon attracting 60 million online users. In the summer of 2001, after a 19-month legal battle against a phalanx of avenging music industry attorneys, Napster was closed by a court injunction for copyright infringement. It made news for a while after that following several failed attempts to cobble together the finances and strategy needed to go legit.
Late last year, Roxio acquired the Napster name and intellectual property rights for $5 million and began the marketing challenge of transforming Napster's universal recognition as a colorful outlaw into a profitable music download business.
Toast
Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Roxio is a well-established music and graphics production software company whose best known product, "Toast," is to the world of CD- and DVD-burning what Microsoft Word is to the world of word processing. The company did $142 million in sales in 2002.
Roxio also acquired Pressplay, the music download business from Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, for $40 million in May of this year. Ironically, Pressplay was created to compete against Napster and similar rogue file-swapping services. Now, Pressplay has become the interior engine of the new Napster 2.0 brand.
One of the most obvious and interesting changes Roxio has made to its version of Napster -- aside from requiring payment for music downloads -- is to develop the kitty logo into a cartoon creature that not only stars in ads but clearly has the potential for a variety of high-profile advertainment tie-ins as well.
"The idea behind the series was to help us showcase and develop the character behind the brand. The Napster Kitty equals digital music," Mr. Steinberg said.
Flash animation
The new positioning of the Napster Kitty as a full character rather than merely a static logo began with an Internet campaign this summer that featured a few quirky episodes created as Flash animations. Now polished into commercials, the spots (by Venables, Bell & Partners, San Francisco) are, in their visual essence, the musical background and voiceless nature of the lead character, very much like the cartoon narratives of the "Peanuts" clan of Snoopy, Charlie Brown and Lucy.
Four Napster spots are now running on cable TV including Comedy Central, ESPN and ESPN2, FX, Sci-Fi Network and VH1. Print ads target two demographics, mass market publications such as Time, Men's Health, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly and edgier material like Blender, Filter, Flyer, Vice and Accelerator. MediaSmith of San Francisco handled media planning and buying.
The campaign's look -- purely Web animation -- is carried consistently through to the other media. Mekanism, San Francisco, worked with Venables to translate the original Web animations to a TV video format.
Integrated ad campaigns
"As a brand, it was born on the Web, so we started the campaign from a very Web-centric point of view," Mr. Steinbrg said. The campaign launched online; Web media preceded the TV spots by several months. A flurry of outdoor posters appeared in August in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle (Mini Coopers in those markets sped around bearing the Napster logo); electronic moving billboards heralded the brand in Los Angeles, where heavy radio promotion also drum-rolled to the Oct. 29 launch.
The crisply calculated, incremental marketing approach is strangely ironic for a brand that has never been marketed, Mr. Steinberg said. In the old days, Napster was "all about viral and passion branding. It had been the people's brand." Now, he said, Napster's brand essence is "all about letting people discover new music," whether it's reggae, hip-hop, metal or indie. "It's not just about selling the music, it's about knowing the music."
And it is also about knowing marketing and distribution, which Roxio clearly does.
Penn State deal
Earlier this month, Roxio signed a deal with Penn State University to offer Napster's 500,000-song library to more than 80,000 students.
"Napster wants to create a compelling enough legal alternative to the peer-to-peer networks," said Mike McGuire, research director at GartnerG2, a technology consultancy. "College students need to see a compelling legal alternative and this appears like it may be a step in that direction. It's a pure marketing opportunity. They're seeding the future market."
The Penn State deal offers unlimited streaming and tethered downloads for free. Analysts believe the university will move to incorporate the costs into student fees or bundle the benefit with other dormitory services such as cable TV and high-speed Internet. Students must pay 99 cents apiece to burn tracks onto CDs or transfer them to portable players. More deals with major universities could be in the offing.
Napster MP3 players
Apart from the campus, Samsung Electronics will market Napster-branded MP3 players, while Best Buy, CompUSA, the Kroger grocery chain and ExxonMobil service stations will stock pre-paid Napster gift cards. Tie-ins with radio stations are also expected. Napster executives declined to comment on the Penn State deal or discuss future marketing alliances, citing the competitive landscape.
Napster's new target, adults aged 25 to 44, is a far cry from its base of renegade Web cruisers. It remains to be seen whether Napster will be able to make a dent into the teen and college markets, particularly because peer-to-peer services like KaZaa, Grokster and Morpheus continue to hold sway.
To win them over, the Napster crew will have to make the brand stand for something other than "free" and underscore its genre-specific approach to music. The marketing approach, Mr. McGuire said, needs to be a "socio-political statement, it's not just about acquiring music."
digEplayer resevervation system seems ro be up and running. Two flights so far. Seattle to Boston and the return flight.......have to start somewhere!
Still there on e.Digital.com
IMO it is the best looking of the players
It's digEplayer.com not digiplayer. You of all people forgetting the e.Digital "E" in digEplayer? LOL
digEplayer site also has link back to Alaska Airline....now just waiting for link from Alaska to digEplayer! (as well as the other carriers!)
The first date that digEplayers will be available on selected flights is Nov. 17, 2003. If your flight isn't available or is before the 17th, we apologize for the inconvenience.
While the Gateway HDD jukebox product was talked about at the Gateway press conference and the subsequent pr, the big splash for this product will be around the 26 of this month. TV and other ads. Watch, see and enjoy....
gernb1 Bingo!
BTW Casandra was explained this months ago........
SSI
I am not disagreeing with your conclusion. Below, is an earlier post of mine on the subject. Also, after seeing the Gateway player even I could figure out it was an e.Digital based product.
Posted by: Tenderloin
In reply to: MaryinRed who wrote msg# 50679 Date:11/12/2003 10:50:39 AM
Post #of 50701
I do not believe RP EVER directly mentioned Gateway. He responded to questions about revenues/royalties, etc., by stating this is the first deal talked about in the Sept. PR outlining the new HDD player, and the Asian OEM........
Now having said that, I understand how any reasonable person could put 2 plus 2 together and get Gateway.....
SSI Many shareholders received the same or similar response. My comment was RP did not mention Gateway directly, and reading the response you received, he did not mention it directly to you. That is all I was saying....
I do not believe RP EVER directly mentioned Gateway. He responded to questions about revenues/royalties etc. by stating this is the first deal talked about in the Sept. PR outlining the new HDD player, and the Asian OEM........
Now having said that, I understand how any reasonable person could put 2 plus 2 together and get Gateway.....
This is in effect
(SAN DIEGO, CA - September 16, 2003) - e.Digital Corporation (OTC: EDIG) today announced that a multi-billion dollar Asian OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has signed a royalty-bearing license agreement to manufacture e.Digital’s Odyssey 1000 Personal Digital Jukebox platform for OEM branding. Products manufactured under this agreement are scheduled to reach consumers later this year. Because the Asian OEM manufactures products for many global brands under confidentiality agreements, the name of the licensee is subject to non-disclosure.
Through the agreement, the Asian OEM will provide manufacturing services of a 1.8” version of the Odyssey 1000 platform for specific OEM branding while e.Digital will supply the technology, software, firmware and upgrades to the Odyssey 1000 platform.
“This Asian company exemplifies quality, innovation and integrity,” said Fred Falk, president and chief executive officer of e.Digital. “We are very pleased to have them onboard as another OEM licensee of our Odyssey 1000 product platform. We expect to announce further details as this 1.8” version of our Odyssey 1000 platform is branded and introduced to consumers later this year.”
The Odyssey 1000 platform is the basis for a sophisticated, hard drive-based portable jukebox featuring VoiceNav® voice navigation, built in voice recorder, FM tuner, mass storage device status and a USB 2.0 connection.