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Apple 4th-Generation iPod
July 28, 2004
The iPod is a strangely magical thing. It's one of those devices, like TiVos and Game Boys, whose use rapidly leads to dependence, and each generation promises something new and exciting. The latest one is, without being contradictory, both a modest hop forward and a complete overhaul.
The most publicized enhancement (besides a $100 price drop) is longer battery life. The iPod now has juice for least 12 hours, up from 8. In fact, in my test, it lasted just over 13 hours though, like a car's gas gauge, the battery meter showed "empty" long before it had run dry. Still, you should charge your iPod when you're not using it, because it uses a small amount of power just sitting there.
The other major new feature is the Click Wheel, borrowed from the highly coveted iPod Mini. The Click Wheel repositions the control buttons to more or less their original spots (Menu on top, Play/Pause on bottom and Fwd and Back on their respective sides). Also, its center button is once again something that you push instead of just touching. While these changes may seem cosmetic, they do reduce the chance you'll accidentally hit the wrong button.
My favorite evolution is in On-The-Go playlists, which you can now save. Until you rename them on the computer, they show up as New Playlist 1, 2, 3, etc. You can also now remove individual tracks from your current On-The-Go list. I'm still waiting for the day when I can delete iPod's tracks and playlists using the device itself, because once I've returned to my computer, I can no longer remember which songs I don't ever want to hear again.
To me, the new "Shuffle" feature runs both hot and cold. Apple says "shuffle songs in the main menu" and it's true, though it might not be what you imagine. Once you tap the command, it starts shuffling through your whole library. Certain people I know are fans of this kind of potluck playing, and I am capable of enjoying the serendipity. Still, I would prefer that the real Shuffle option, from Settings, be placed in the main menu. That way you could toggle between your shuffled and ordered experiences — genres versus albums, for instance — without seven extra button taps. (Also, the Shuffle algorithm is still less than satisfying: while shuffling through 1,643 songs, two of the first eight tracks it pulled were from the Beastie Boys.)
These are all smallish issues, ones that probably shouldn't plague you if you bought an iPod two weeks before this one came out. But you should know that internally the new iPod is a ground-up reconstruction, and its really compelling applications — the ones that very well might get the goat of anyone unable or unwilling to upgrade — are still secret. All that Apple is saying is that there's more to this than what's being publicized.
If you're thinking about finally getting an iPod, now's your chance. If you're thinking about handing down your current iPod and getting a new one with a bigger hard drive, now's your chance. But don't feel pressured into upgrading, because no major bragging rights will go to the possessors of these latest iPods. That is, not yet
New Creative MP3 player with 32 hour battery life
July 2004
Not to be outdone by Apple’s new generation of iPods, Creative has launched the latest in its line of Zen portable music players. The Zen Touch boasts 36 hours battery time, almost three times that of the newest iPods.
The Zen Touch has a 20GB hard drive, which can store up to 10,000 songs in the WMA format or 5000 in MP3. The new player will retail for $499, which includes a FM wired remote control which normally retails for $150.
The Zen Touch also has a new “Touch Pad” control, where users simply press up (for fast scrolling), middle or down to go through song selections. The face of the player also features a dedicated “Random” button for spontaneous music playback of any combination of songs.
Equally as cool-looking as it is feature-rich, the metallic graphite and white gloss-coloured Zen Touch displays track and menu information on its large, brilliant blue backlit LCD screen and boasts a handy “Find” feature so that you get to your favourite music in no time. In addition to its groundbreaking battery life and super-intuitive user interface, the Zen Touch provides industry-leading audio quality and broad compatibility with the legal download music services supporting the secure WMA music format. Crystal-clear high fidelity playback can be customized with a four-band graphic equalizer with eight equalization presets. USB 2.0 connectivity enables fast music transfer from a PC as quickly as a song per second.
Zen Touch incorporates a patented technology that significantly extends its battery life up to 32 hours with WMA format files. Even on more power-hungry high-quality MP3 format, its battery life is still impressively over 24 hours.
Hitachi plans 6GB slim-drives
By Macworld staff
Hitachi will unveil a 6GB slim-type drive, suitable for use in an iPod mini, in autumn this year.
Interviewed by DigiTimes, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies vice president and general manager for the Asia-Pacific region Pete Andreyev revealed the plan.
On the market for music players, he said: "MP3 players should offer a real growth potential, starting from the second half of this year". Hitachi manufactures the drives used in Apple's phenomenally successful iPod mini.
With the recent news that Motorola will ship a mobile phone capable of supporting the iTunes Music Store, Andreyev's next words may presage new opportunities, he said: "Market applications in the smartphone and digital video system markets will likely take over the mainstream spot in 2005".
He anticipates that "slim-type drive shipments" will rise 500 per cent year-on-year to 5 million units in 2004. "Hitachi expects it will ship four million units this year, including slim-type drives for MP3 players, which should reach around three million units by year-end," he said.
Addonics Announces MFR -- Multi Function Recorder -- with DVD+/-R/RW -- 25-in-1 Digital Media Storage Appliance
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 29, 2004--Addonics Technologies today announced a portable digital media appliance that can perform 25 different functions for a wide range of applications.
The new Addonics MFR (Multi Function Recorder) with a DVD+/-R/RW is a stand alone flash media backup system, DVD, digital photo and MP3 player as well as an external USB 2.0 DVD burner and flash memory reader/writer -- all combined into one powerful portable peripheral that can be used for businesses, home, or even inside a vehicle.
The Addonics MFR DVD+/-R/RW can be used as a stand alone storage appliance (no computer is required) to do following:
-- Direct back up of data from 10 different flash memory cards onto DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, CD-R or CD-RW discs
-- Connect to TV to use as a regular DVD player
-- Use as a stand alone MP3 player
-- Direct play back of the digital image in flash memory, DVD+/-R/RW and CDRW media onto TV or Projector
The Addonics MFR DVD+/-R/RW can also become an external storage device to any computer via the fast USB 2.0 connection. Once attached to the computer, the MFR DVD+/-R/RW instantly becomes an external DVD+/-R/RW burner, CDRW burner, and an external 11-in-1 Flash memory reader/writer to perform the following functions:
-- Play DVD movie or access DVD material
-- Play audio CD or install software
-- Convert digital video to DVD or CD disc with bundled Sonic MyDVD authoring software
The 25 functions supported by the Addonics MFR include: read/write and backup to DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, CD-R or CD-RW with 11 different types of flash memory media -- for CF-1, CF-II, Smart Media, Secure Digital card, Multi-Media card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Memory Stick DUO, Memory Stick Pro DUO, Micro Dive and xD Card. Eight playback media functions include DVD to TV, DVD to PC, CD, VCD, still photo on TV, still photo via projector, S-Video, and MP3. Six recording media supported includes DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-R/RW, CD-R, and CDRW.
The complete package (Model # AEMFR842D) includes the Addonics MFR with DVD+/-R/RW unit, remote control unit, rechargeable battery, 110/220v power adapter, three-foot USB cable, combo A/V cable, S-video cable, Sonic MyDVD authoring software, PowerDVD MPEGII Playback software, and Nero Express (Windows version) software, 2 blank CD-R media, user guide, and carrying bag. The MSRP is $319.99.
The unit measures 6.6x5.4x1.3 inches and weighs just under 1.5 pounds with the battery installed.
When used as an external peripheral, the minimum system requirements include USB 2.0/1.1 port; 350 MHz or greater Pentium II or Macintosh-equivalent CPU; minimum hard disk space of 50 MB; minimum 64 MB RAM; and one of the following operating systems, Windows 98SE, Me, 2000, XP, or Mac OS 10 and above.
Addonics products are available through the company online store www.shopaddonics.com, major catalog companies, resellers, VARs and distributors, including StorageUSA.com, Newegg.com, Amazon.com, PC Connection, CDW, Buy.com, Provantage.com, Insight, Ingram Micro, and Ma Labs.
Addonics Technologies Inc. designs, manufactures, and markets a broad line of external storage products. Addonics is headquartered at 2466 Kruse Drive, San Jose, CA 95131, Phone: 408-433-3899. Visit Addonics at www.addonics.com.
All products/company names are either trademarks or trade names of their respective holders.
Enhance Your Travel Adventures With Three New Southwest Audio Guides From Waypoint Tours and Audible.com!
Thursday July 29, 9:04 am ET
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., July 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Savvy travelers can enjoy a new, one-of-a-kind travel experience, thanks to the growing use of digital audio technology. Waypoint Tours, a provider of premium CD and downloadable travel tours for major travel destinations, is introducing three new self-guided audio travel tours for the Grand Canyon and Sedona, AZ. The innovative audio CD and MP3 tours help travelers of all ages plan their travel adventures, enhance their travel experience, and cherish their travel memories. One audio travel tour guides listeners through the fascinating history, geology and beauty of Sedona, while two additional park-approved tours guide visitors through the majesty of the Grand Canyon. Each Waypoint Tour is produced with professional travel writers, editors, voice talents, sound effects, orchestrated music, and full-color maps.
"Gone are the days of Dad refusing to stop for directions while Mom fumbles through piles of brochures looking for the best sights or trying to figure out what landmark is in front of them," says Waypoint Tours President Jeff Strom. "Waypoint Tours combine the best travel information with the best technology to entertain, inform, and help everyone enjoy their vacation travels anytime and at any pace."
Beth Anderson, Vice President & Publisher of Audible.com, says, "We're thrilled to add Waypoint Tours to the Audible service! People who will be traveling to the Grand Canyon and Sedona area will find that these programs will help them to plan their trips. People who have already made the trips will find that these recordings conjure wonderful recollections of some of the country's most beautiful scenery. It's a great way to take a 'mental vacation'."
Audio CD Waypoint Tours are available at www.waypointtours.com, www.amazon.com, Sedona bookstores, Grand Canyon Association bookstores and many other retailers. Downloadable Waypoint Tours are available at www.audible.com. A portion of the proceeds supports Grand Canyon National Park and Sedona through local non-profit organizations.
Founded in 2003, Waypoint Tours combines the growing popularity of travel tours with the rapid acceptance of CD, MP3, PDA and GPS technologies. In the future, imagine your own handheld, GPS-enabled, multimedia tour guide describing your current travel waypoint automatically. For more information, visit www.waypointtours.com.
Apple's real problem
Refusing to license its FairPlay system has cost Apple control. That may be a good thing.
July 28, 2004: 3:21 PM EDT
By Eric Hellweg, CNN/Money contributing columnist
BOSTON (CNN/Money) - What do you get when one company aligns with another company, against the second company's will?
You get a situation resembling the story that broke Monday, when Real Networks debuted its Harmony software, which lets users of Real's digital-music service play their downloads on a number of new devices, most notably Apple's iPod.
Apple intended the iPod and iTunes to be a closed system, allowing no other company to sell iPod-compatible downloads. To be sure, eMusic offers MP3 downloads that play on iPods, but eMusic's subscriber numbers amount to a rounding error in the digital-music world.
An Apple spokesperson wouldn't comment on Real's software or how the company would react.
"There's probably a certain amount of broken furniture at Apple headquarters," says Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "I think they're trying to figure out what to do."
Interesting consequences
I spoke with Real chief strategy officer Richard Wolpert just after he premiered the technology at Jupiter Media's PlugIn conference Tuesday in New York. When I noted that Apple had canceled its keynote at the conference, reportedly due to illness, he joked, "That was the first time a demo I gave got someone sick."
To create Harmony, Real reverse-engineered Apple's proprietary AAC format, and created a way for Real's downloads to appear in AAC format when loaded onto an iPod. Industrious hackers have attempted such a feat but have been spooked by legal threats.
Apple may yet decide to challenge Harmony in court, but it should carefully think through the consequences: Harmony may actually prove beneficial to Apple and the industry as a whole.
As for Real, it gets some great press and momentum heading into the fall, when Microsoft is expected to launch its long-rumored digital-music offering.
New markets, and a challenge
For Apple, it opens up another market for the iPod. Real's subscriber numbers are still relatively small, but they're growing.
"Harmony could help iPod sales," says Charlie Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co. "It could also take some sales away from the iTunes store, but it's the iPod that makes the money." Wolf owns Apple shares and has a "buy" rating on the stock. Needham & Co. has no banking business with Apple.
Obviously, this isn't the way Apple wanted to let people into its iPod system, and it forces the company to face a crossroads that wasn't in Steve Jobs's master plan.
The question the company now must answer is, Is it strategically more important to preserve its closed system, or is the iPod the future profit machine for the company? In the latter case, it should pump up sales numbers at any reasonable cost. It's quite a pickle.
"They need [an answer] that doesn't sound anti-consumer and yet preserves the system they've built for themselves," Bernoff says. "I can't think of a response that satisfies both of those requirements."
I don't know the answer either. But I do know that in most cases -- especially when it comes to consumer electronics -- open standards and consumer choice usually win. Giving consumers the ability to choose which store they want to purchase music from instead of locking them into one store is sound policy.
Yesterday, Jobs again showed he's not averse to partnering when it comes to music, pairing with Motorola to allow new Motorola cell phones to carry a limited number of iTunes-based songs. My advice to Steve Jobs, then, would probably not be taken: Ignore Real and take your partnering efforts one step further, licensing your FairPlay technology so Apple, not Real, controls the relationship with the other stores.
Licensing isn't a word often found in Apple's playbook, however, and now its choice has been made for it. Apple will need to respond to Real's Harmony fairly quickly, as the other digital-music download stores will likely want to add the "iPod Compatible" sticker to their sites and Real seems ready to license it.
"We haven't announced [Harmony licensing plans], but we're in discussions and happy to be in discussions with people," says Real's Wolpert. "Let's grow the industry."
iPod 4G Audio Problems?
In extended testing of Apple's new fourth-generation iPods, iPodlounge has discovered and reported to Apple an apparent manufacturing defect affecting the headphone jacks of certain new iPod hardware. The defect manifests as audible static and noise interference in the earphones that is most prominent whenever a new iPod's hard disk is accessed. Similar interference was not detectable through line out (Dock Connector) output.
Users of affected iPods will be able to hear a hard disk-like whirring sound in their earphones, coupled with several seconds of light static at the start of a song that has just been loaded. This should not be confused with the quiet hard disk loading sounds that an iPod makes, which sounds are not audible through earphones, or with normal static-like compression artifacts in your audio.
To test your iPod while eliminating the possibility that static from your music or headphones may be responsible, use iTunes to encode several three- to five-minute compact disc tracks using Apple's Lossless Audio encoder, transfer them to your iPod, then connect the earbuds packaged with your new iPod. Find the directory or create a playlist with only the Lossless tracks, and skip back and forth between them. Hold your iPod at a distance or cover it up so that you can't hear its normal internal hard disk sounds. If your iPod has a problem, at the start of each loaded song, you should hear a loading pause, then a whirring sound and light static in your ears at a normal volume level. If it does not have a problem, the song should load and play without audio interference.
iPodlounge has confirmed that this interference does not affect all new iPod hardware. Of the three units we purchased for evaluation, both of the 40GB iPods exhibit the same problem, but the 20GB iPod does not. Unfortunately, some new iPod users have reported that the problem exists in their new 20GB iPods, as well. The units we know to be affected were manufactured in China, shipped from Shanghai, and ordered directly from Apple.
An Apple representative is currently looking into the report, and the company has had no further comment. Please report your findings using the Comments link below.
More info
Song downloads to hit a high note
By Dinesh C. Sharma, Special to CNETAsia
Tuesday, July 27 2004 10:05 AM
Music downloads could be on an upswing this year.
Sales of digital tunes in 2004 in the United States will reach US$270 million, more than double the takings from the previous year, according to a report released by JupiterResearch on Monday.
That revenue will rise to US$1.7 billion, or 12 percent of total consumer spending on music, by 2009, the research firm projected.
While healthy sales of digital downloads have brought cheer to the U.S. music industry, which has seen four years of sliding sales for compact discs, the growth in the niche is not enough to make up for the shortfall, JupiterResearch said.
In the short term, downloading will continue to be used by consumers as a way to check out music before buying a CD, the report's authors said. In the longer term, they predict, revenue from digital subscription services will outgrow revenue from digital downloads.
"The so-called celestial jukebox is in sight," David Card, a senior analyst at JupiterResearch, said in a statement. "But for now, it will appeal to music aficionados. The U.S. music industry must manage digital music as one of a series of incremental revenue streams, one that is in the same scale as licensing (like ring tones, games and advertising)."
Shipments of MP3 players in the United States will more than double this year to more than 5 million and will continue to rise at that rate for the next several years, JupiterResearch said. Hard drive-based, low-end devices will drive the growth, as 77 percent of buyers of portable music players surveyed by the research firm said they would want no more than 1,000 songs on a player at any given time.
The digital music market is dominated by Apple Computer's iPod player, which is linked to an online music store, iTunes. On Monday, RealNetworks released software, named Harmony, that enables people to play music from its downloads store on iPods. The move gets around Apple's refusal in the past to provide licenses to companies looking to make their software compatible with Apple's device.
Latest Salvo on Digital Music Battlefield Very Real
By Blane Warrene
MacNewsWorld
07/26/04 12:24 PM PT
Creative Strategies senior analyst Tim Bajarin said he believes this is a critical play for Real Networks survival. "If they can survive the legal challenges that are sure to arise from this, they could profit from bridging the gap of interoperability between the two dominant formats, Apple and Microsoft, to media devices," Bajarin said.
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Real Networks announcement of its new Harmony Technology, which allows music files to be played on more than 70 MP3 players, including Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPod, may be the first salvo in the digital rights management (DRM) wars.
A live test of Harmony Technology is slated for tomorrow at the Jupiter Plugin Conference in New York City. The company then also will release a beta of Real Player 10.5 with Harmony Technology support.
Real's other music property, Rhapsody, is slated to deliver Harmony Technology later this year to its 550,000 subscribers.
Apple utilizes the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which is an open standard, but wraps its own FairPlay DRM around it so it can be used only on the iPod. Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser said he approached Apple about licensing to enable music purchased from its RealPlayer Music Store but received no response.
Creative Strategies senior analyst Tim Bajarin said he believes this is a critical play for Real Networks survival.
"If they can survive the legal challenges that are sure to arise from this, they could profit from bridging the gap of interoperability between the two dominant formats, Apple and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) , to media devices," Bajarin said.
Test of Two Business Models
Today's digital music offerings come in many shapes and sizes, including a la carte buying, like Apple's iTunes Music Store (iTMS), where consumers pay 99 cents per song and on average $9.99 per album. Subscription based streaming is offered at Rhapsody, where users must be connected to the Internet to listen to music at a cost of $10 per month. Those who wish to use songs offline pay an additional 79 cents per song.
Phil Leigh, president of Inside Digital Media, suggested this is only the first inning in the game of digital media and that it is too early to guess where the market is going.
"The market is so young, there will be substantial evolutions in these services before we start to see where stores and formats are headed," Leigh said.
Format Wars
Balkanization of formats is not going to fly, Leigh contends. A common standard just like in the offline world of buying CD's will be required, he said.
"In the offline world, people go to record stores and buy a CD and it works in any CD player, regardless of where they bought it," Leigh said. "This is really how it will need to work universally in the digital world as well."
Leigh also cautions that this is a story Apple knows well, having tried this once before.
"Apple tried this with computers early on, and while they did have substantial share at one time, they were reduced to a niche player. The question to ask is, will this happen to them again?" He added.
Bajarin expressed concern about the impact on consumers from the DRM battles among technology providers.
"I have great concern [that] over the next three to five years that DRM tied to specific platforms could slow the adoption rate of next generation digital media," Bajarin said.
Apple as a Monopolist?
Urs Gasser, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, recently coauthored a case study on Apple's iTunes and how copyright, contract and technology are shaping the business of digital media.
In the study, he wrote, "Apple's Online Music Store, iTunes, takes advantage of its DRM system, FairPlay, and legal provisions such as those set forth in the DMCA (the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to prevent music piracy on one hand, and to limit interoperability -- thus controlling the secondary markets -- on the other hand."
Bajarin and Leigh see this as Apple's strategy, with the company on record stating the iTMS was not expected to be a profit engine, while driving iPod adoption will impact Apple's bottom line.
"For example, Hollywood is lining up behind Microsoft's Windows Media platform, even with their dislike of the company," Bajarin said. "And [Apple CEO] Steve Jobs is beating the bushes to maintain leadership in digital media in Hollywood and drive adoption of its platform," he said.
For his part, Leigh sees Apple as encouraging licensing of the iTMS engine, like its deal with Hewlett-Packard to go online this fall selling music and iPods under the HP (NYSE: HPQ) brand, rather than ever giving up DRM access to the iPod from competing online music stores.
"Steve Jobs wants to guarantee the user experience of the iPod to his consumers, and he cannot do so if music from non-iTunes stores is ported to the iPod," Leigh said. "The iPod changes the way people listen to music, and I would guess he wants to maintain control of that experience," he said.
Ot:These Days, Tech Firms Would Rather Merge Than Go Public
Companies are deciding that stock offerings, once a rite of passage, are more trouble than they're worth. And eager buyers abound.
By Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer
Forget IPOs. Technology entrepreneurs who once looked to the public markets to cash in are hoping to sell out.
Consider James Currier. The 36-year-old founder of San Francisco-based Tickle Inc. this year decided against taking the online matchmaker public in favor of selling to Monster Worldwide for close to $100 million.
A rite of passage for hot tech companies in the 1990s, initial public offerings are now considered "just a lot of work," said Currier, citing sluggish markets and tighter regulations for a boom in Silicon Valley mergers and acquisitions.
In the first half of this year, 119 U.S. tech companies worth $7.2 billion were sold or merged, according to research firm VentureOne. At the same time, six venture-backed tech companies raised $505 million through public offerings — down sharply from the 176 that raised $13.8 billion going public during the first six months of 1999.
"Right now, we're in the most robust mergers and acquisitions markets we've seen for a number of years," said Jason Ghassemi, analyst with FactSet Mergerstat, a Santa Monica research firm. "The sheer number of tech deals is fueling the M&A revival."
Before the tech boom, selling a start-up to a larger, better-financed company was by far the preferred method for cashing out. But as investors lavished money and attention on companies with names that sounded even vaguely tech-related, the IPO became a sort of financial holy grail.
Even at the height of the frenzy in 1999, mergers and acquisitions made up 55% of all tech deals, according to a survey by VentureOne of venture-capital-backed tech companies. The rest were IPOs. Under normal circumstances, IPOs make up less than one-fifth of all transactions.
In 2001, though, the number of IPOs dropped dramatically as the tech bubble burst. And in 2002, IPOs accounted for a mere 2% of all tech deals. Companies that didn't run out of cash were swept by a wave of mergers and acquisitions, said Jonathan Silver, founder of Core Capital Partners in Washington.
A second wave of acquisitions began in 2003 as small, healthy companies that survived the downturn sought to consolidate and grow. This time around, stock prices generally are lower and companies healthier than during the boom.
"Five years ago, there were companies of little quality garnering high valuations," said Henri Isenberg, vice president of business development for Symantec Corp. "Now, you're seeing companies on the market with mature technologies, good revenues and profits."
Among the deals this year: Symantec, of Cupertino, Calif., bought Bright mail Inc. in a deal worth $370 million; CNet Networks Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., snapped up Webshots Inc. of Redwood City for $70 million; and IBM Corp. this month purchased Alphablox Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., for an undisclosed sum.
Brightmail, a San Francisco company that makes anti-spam software, had been on the IPO path — it selected an investment banker in February and filed its intent to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March.
But in May, Symantec, which owned 11% of Brightmail, offered to buy the rest of it in a deal worth 14 times Brightmail's 2003 sales of $26 million.
It was a generous offer, comparable to what the company probably would have gotten by going public, said Brightmail Chief Executive Enrique Salem. Meanwhile, the prospect of being a public company began to weigh on Salem.
Chief among his concerns was Sarbanes-Oxley, the 2002 law meant to curb corporate abuses by requiring greater disclosures and encouraging the appointment of more independent board directors.
Complying with those regulations would cost several million dollars a year. For a small company like Brightmail, the expense would have been significant, said Stephen O'Leary, managing director of Broadview International, a New York-based corporate finance firm.
In addition, Brightmail, which had 35 salespeople, wanted to expand into Asia and Europe. The deal would give it instant access to Symantec's 600-person international sales force. The deal closed in June.
"The glamour and mystique of going public is highly overrated," said Salem, who worked at Ask Jeeves Inc. when the Emeryville, Calif., company went public in 1999.
Companies are shying away from the IPO for another reason: Few that have gone public this year have fared well, O'Leary said. More than 60% of companies that went public this year ended June with share prices below their IPO price.
Staktek Holdings Inc., a memory chip company in Austin, Texas, debuted in February at $14.50 on Nasdaq but fell to $5.25 by the end of June. AlphaSmart Inc. of Los Gatos, Calif., opened at $6.15 in February and closed at $5.63 on June 30.
"Being public is not necessarily attractive right now," O'Leary said.
At the same time, eager buyers abound. After three years of belt-tightening, large companies are again thinking about building sales, either by filling gaps in their product lineups or by amassing market share.
IBM has been beefing up its ability to analyze vast amounts of business data, a specialty of Alphablox. Symantec had been seeking entree into the fast-growing anti-spam market, where Brightmail had a solid reputation. And Monster, which runs a resume-posting site, had been looking for ways to pull more revenue from the casual Web surfers who formed the core of Tickle's business.
"All of our revenue had come from employers," said Monster Chief Executive and Chairman Andrew McKelvey. "What we and every other Web company were looking for was revenue from the consumer. That's what James had."
Currier also got what he wanted. Having founded the company in 1999 and nurtured it through the boom-and-bust years, Currier wanted Tickle to tap into corporate customers.
Hooking up with Monster gave him instant access to its roster of corporate clients, he said.
"Everything we have, they wanted," said Currier, who is now Monster's senior vice president of consumer services. "And things we wanted to build, they had."
America Online Licenses aacPlus v2 Audio Codec from Coding Technologies; aacPlus v2 Provides AOL with Enhanced Audio Quality at Very Low Bit-rates for the NSV Video Format
NEW YORK --(Business Wire)-- July 26, 2004 -- Coding Technologies, a leading provider of audio compression software for broadcast, mobile, and Internet, announced today that America Online has licensed its aacPlus v2 audio codec for use with its media delivery platform and the NSV file format. aacPlus v2 will enable AOL to efficiently deliver high-quality audio and audio-visual services at low bit rates to AOL members.
"We are focused on offering the very best media experience to our members and web users, in order to showcase the world class content available on AOL and AOL for Broadband, and throughout our various Web Properties," said Scott Brown, Director of Media Systems Development for America Online. "aacPlus v2 audio from Coding Technologies will help us to deliver the highest quality streaming audio and video via our efficient media platform."
"AOL has the largest online audience and the leading media infrastructure to support their vast array of content," said David Frerichs, Vice President and US General Manager for Coding Technologies. "Their adoption of aacPlus v2 will further accelerate the codec as the common denominator for distribution of audio content across Internet, mobile, and broadcast."
aacPlus is AAC coupled with Coding Technologies' SBR (Spectral Band Replication) and Parametric Stereo technologies. SBR is a unique bandwidth extension technique, which enables audio codecs to deliver the same quality at half the bit rate. Parametric Stereo enhances the codec efficiency a second time for low-bit-rate stereo signals. Both SBR and Parametric Stereo are backward and forward compatible methods to enhance the efficiency of any audio codec. As a result, aacPlus delivers streaming and downloadable 5.1 multichannel audio at 128 Kbps, near CD-quality stereo at 32 Kbps, excellent quality stereo at 24 Kbps, and great quality for mixed content down to 16 Kbps mono and below. This level of efficiency fundamentally enables new applications in the markets of mobile and digital broadcast.
About Coding Technologies
Coding Technologies provides the best audio compression for mobile, broadcasting, and Internet. SBR(TM) (Spectral Band Replication) from Coding Technologies is a backward and forward compatible method to enhance the efficiency of any audio codec; putting the "PRO" in mp3PRO and the "Plus" in aacPlus. Parametric Stereo from Coding Technologies and Philips again nearly doubles the efficiency of audio codecs for stereo signals at low bit rates. Products from Coding Technologies are fundamental enablers of open standards such as MPEG, Digital Radio Mondiale, HD Radio, and the DVD Forum.
Coding Technologies is a privately held company with offices in Sweden, Germany, and Silicon Valley. Founded in 1997 in Stockholm, the company later merged with a spin-off of the renowned Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, the inventor of MP3. Coding Technologies' customers include America Online, iBiquity Digital, mmO2, Nokia, Real Networks, SK Telecom, Thomson, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, and XM Satellite Radio.
For more info visit http://www.codingtechnologies.com.
Music Industry Taking Cues From File Sharing
Online businesses are adding features such as peer-to-peer networks to boost song lists while protecting copyrights.
By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer
Having condemned file-sharing for five years, the music industry is now trying to co-opt it.
Online music businesses are adding features once found only in file-sharing networks, such as the ability to send free songs to friends and to listen to them on a variety of portable players. And a handful of companies are developing hybrid peer-to-peer networks that encourage sharing but prevent users from violating copyright law.
One example is Mercora Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., a fast-growing start-up that lets people listen to songs from other users' computers. Mercora's software turns each user's computer into an Internet radio station that any other Mercora user can tune in, enabling them to hear — but not download — a wide array of tracks.
Meanwhile, one of the leading peer-to-peer networks has agreed to transform itself from a hotbed for piracy into a haven for legal file-sharing. IMesh.com Inc., which struck a truce with the major record companies last week, pledged to revamp its network by the end of the year.
It remains to be seen whether any of these efforts can compete effectively with popular file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and EDonkey, which are used by millions of people around the world.
"You can't displace piracy with legal services by being as good as a pirate service, because pirate services have no restrictions," analyst Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research said. Instead, Bernoff said, legitimate outlets should compete by providing more innovative, reliable and easy-to-use services.
Unlike the songs offered by legitimate outlets, which are wrapped in electronic locks to deter piracy, the music on file-sharing networks can be shared freely and played on any device without regard to copyright law.
Some legal services are hoping to win over customers by offering the same features — to the extent they can.
MusicMatch Inc. of San Diego, which operates a downloadable music store and an online radio service, is planning a $10-a-month offering that will let subscribers play as many songs as they wish from the company's online jukebox. They will also be able to make songs available to their friends for free.
There's a catch, of course — non-subscribing friends can only play each track three times. If they want to hear a song again, they'll be invited to subscribe to the monthly service.
For Mercora, sharing songs is fundamental to the business.
Like Kazaa and EDonkey, the start-up relies on users to provide the free songs that are the lifeblood of its network. As more users sign on, more songs become available, attracting more music fans.
To keep everyone on the right side of the law, Mercora doesn't let users copy songs from each other. Instead, they merely listen to tracks from other users' collections. The tracks are chosen by Mercora's software, which tailors playlists to meet restrictions that Congress imposed on Internet radio stations. That way, the service qualifies automatically for a broadcasting license.
"Our whole premise was based on the fact that the reason people went to peer-to-peer networks was the unlimited discovery of music," said founder Srivats Sampath, who previously served as chief executive of computer security software maker McAfee.com.
The 2-month-old Mercora service is free today, but the company may decide to charge its most active users a small monthly fee to cover the royalties it pays to labels, artists and music publishers. Sampath said the company also planned to generate fees by selling advertisements and running an online marketplace for Mercora members to buy and sell music-related goods.
Bridgemar Services Ltd., which owns IMesh, could bring the music industry even closer to embracing peer-to-peer technology. But it has yet to reveal how its users will find and share songs legally, and the major record companies have not said how they will support the new service.
The most likely approach for IMesh, according to music-industry executives, is to use technology that manages what users share and download to prevent them from copying songs without permission. That sort of technology is being pitched by several companies, including Audible Magic Corp. of Los Gatos, Calif., Kokopelli Networks Inc. of Ottawa and Snocap Inc. of San Francisco, which was launched by former Napster creator Shawn Fanning.
Of course, clamping down on what users can share would rob IMesh of one of the most compelling features of today's file-sharing networks: the virtually unlimited selection of songs, including bootlegged and homemade versions of songs that were never officially released.
Nevertheless, Audible Magic Chief Executive Vance Ikezoye said he was encouraged by the labels' and IMesh's stated wish to blaze a trail to new business models.
"The industry I think has gotten some criticism for not supporting digital media and new models," he said, "and I think this is a positive direction."
In the meantime, RealNetworks Inc. is trying to chip away at another advantage of the pirate networks by making it easier to play legally downloaded songs on any device the consumer chooses, provided it uses anti-piracy technology from Real, Apple Computer Inc. or Microsoft Corp.
On Tuesday, the Seattle company is expected to unveil software that can transfer songs bought from Real's store to any MP3 player or other gadget. Other stores support only one kind of anti-piracy technology; for example, Apple's iTunes Music Store works only with Apple's iPods.
Real's "Harmony" technology will give people who buy music the same flexibility as those who download it illegally, said Richard Wolpert, Real's chief strategy officer.
Harmony will initially be available only with RealPlayer software, and the company is hoping to persuade rivals to use it with their music services as well, Wolpert said.
In the short term, analyst Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research said, the primary beneficiary of the new technology is Real, whose store lags far behind Apple's.
"It solves a huge problem for Real, which is the fact that there simply aren't that many devices on the market that support Real's music store," he said, adding that the success of Apple store has been driven by the popularity of the iPod.
Musicmatch and at least three other online music outlets — Roxio Inc.'s Napster, MusicNet Inc. and Circuit City Stores Inc.'s MusicNow — also plan to add more flexibility to their subscription services. Starting this year, their subscribers will be able to take hundreds of songs with them wherever they go for about the price of one CD a month.
The key is new software from Microsoft that enables subscribers to move the songs they rent to portable music players. Microsoft found a way to satisfy the major record companies, which insisted that portable players be able to disable songs if the user's subscription lapsed.
RealNetworks breaks Apple's hold on iPod
Last modified: July 25, 2004, 7:50 PM PDT
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
RealNetworks is expected to announce Monday that it has unlocked some of Apple Computer's most tightly held technology secrets, giving its music a way onto the popular iPod digital music player.
The announcement is part of a broader release of RealNetworks software, which will let songs sold from the company's online store play on a variety of portable devices, including the iPod and Microsoft-compatible rivals. RealNetworks has been selling songs from its digital song store since January, but the files could previously be played only on a few portable devices.
The new Harmony software, which RealNetworks said mimics the proprietary copy protection used in Apple's iTunes store, is sure to be controversial. Apple has previously refused to provide licenses to companies seeking iPod compatibility, and RealNetworks did not seek permission before releasing its own version of iPod-friendly software.
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Bottom line:
Apple has previously refused to provide licenses to companies seeking iPod compatibility, and RealNetworks did not seek permission before releasing the software. The move could trigger intense legal scrutiny.
"This is actually a natural extension to a decision we made two years ago with respect to different formats," said RealNetworks Chief Strategy Officer Richard Wolpert. "We think consumer choice is going to win out over proprietary formats."
RealNetworks' move marks a step away from what had been an increasingly confusing world of incompatible digital music formats and devices.
Record companies and consumer groups have been deeply critical of technology companies' decision to tie certain devices to specific music formats. Traditionally, CDs and DVDs have worked on any manufacturers' players, they note, while music downloads have been tied to specific brands of devices.
Indeed, several record company executives praised RealNetworks' independent steps to achieve compatibility with the iPod, even without Apple's consent.
"Up to now, the world of downloads has been far too close to a world where the CD you buy in one store wouldn't play on the CD player you bought in another," Larry Kenswil, president of Universal Music's eLabs division, said in a statement. "We applaud RealNetworks' efforts to help correct this situation and appeal to all people and companies in this area to work toward a world of universal interoperability."
Apple did not return requests for comment.
Apple maintains a dominant market share in the music download business, and RealNetworks hopes that the new compatibility with the iPod will help drive customers to its online store.
Dangerous ground?
RealNetworks has previously thumbed its nose at rivals in a similar way. Its 2002 Helix server, which sends media files out over the Internet, included the ability to stream Microsoft-formatted files--a capability only Microsoft servers previously had.
Last January, RealNetworks also announced that it had figured out how to let its PC software play songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store and save them onto the iPod.
The new Harmony software's ability to work with Microsoft devices is fairly straightforward. When a customer buys a song from RealNetworks' online store, the software will check what kind of portable device is attached to the computer and change the song into Microsoft's format if necessary. Microsoft has provided licenses to its Windows Media technology to many companies.
Harmony also will automatically change songs into an iPod-compatible format. But because Apple has not licensed its FairPlay copy-protection software to anyone, RealNetworks executives said its engineers had to re-create their own version in their labs in order to make the device play them back.
Although the company said this action wasn't technically "reverse engineering," the software could trigger intense legal scrutiny.
The license accompanying Apple's iPod says purchasers cannot "copy, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, (or) attempt to derive the source code of" the software.
Boston patent attorney Bruce Sunstein said courts have issued mixed opinions on how much reverse engineering is allowed for purposes such as making compatible products.
"The law is unsettled," Sunstein said. "We might find some litigation if Apple wanted to be aggressive."
Indeed, lawsuits have been sparked by similar previous cases. In one famous example, Atari Games subsidiary Tengen created cartridges that worked with Nintendo's NES game machine in the late 1980s, when Nintendo was barring any other company from doing so.
Nintendo sued and won when it was discovered that Tengen had obtained part of Nintendo's software code from the U.S. Copyright Office and used it to make its games compatible.
RealNetworks has staunchly maintained that it has not illegally used any of Apple's copyrighted software code, however.
"We certainly feel we have all the licenses and rights to do what we've done or we wouldn't have done it," RealNetworks' Wolpert said.
Analysts welcomed the move as a good step for consumers, who would be able to buy music from RealNetworks' store and not worry about having to stay permanently with one brand of player to use music purchased online.
"Right now if you're a consumer, you have to pick sides," said Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff. "With every track you buy you're going further down the path of incompatibility...This is going to create some pressure on Microsoft and Apple to provide similar levels of interoperability."
The Harmony software will be available in test form on RealNetworks' site Monday, and will ultimately find its way into a variety of products, the company said.
The helmet houses a driver-passenger intercom system designed by Bang & Olufsen, while the in-car entertainment takes the form of a digital MP3 player. Apart from the electronics, B&O will also supply the aluminium interior for the car.
http://business-times.asia1.com.sg/story/0,4567,123487,00.html
Flight 93 Pilot Had Intrusion Warning
Passengers on Plane Eventually Thwarted Hijackers
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times
WASHINGTON (July 22) — The idea of a hijacking on Sept. 11, 2001, was unbelievable, even to many of the people who could have responded in time to change the course of events. One of those was Capt. Jason Dahl of United Flight 93, which had taken off from Newark on a flight to San Francisco.
Flight 93 became part of American lore when passengers banded together to try to storm the cockpit of the hijacked airliner, which crashed in Pennsylvania. New details of the hijacking and the passenger uprising were made public in the report released today by the 9/11 commission.
A United Airlines dispatcher near Chicago who knew that Flight 175 had been hijacked and crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center sent a message to the other planes he was following that morning, one of them United 93. In a text message, the dispatcher, Ed Ballinger, told Flight 93 at 9:23 a.m.: "Beware any cockpit intrusion two a/c hit World Trade Center."
At 9:26, Captain Dahl sent a message back, in quick, abbreviated and slightly mistyped language: "Ed, confirm latest mssg plz Jason."
Two minutes later, the hijackers attacked Captain Dahl and his first officer.
Unlike the three other hijackings, Flight 93 continued transmitting over the radio during the struggle in the cockpit. The captain or first officer declared "Mayday," and 35 seconds later, one of them shouted, "Hey, get out of here get out of here get out of here." Later, passengers reported seeing two bodies outside the cockpit, injured or dead, probably the pilots.
Once the hijackers were in control, they knew that passengers were using cell phones and seat-back phones to call the ground "but did not seem to care," according to the report. Yet clearly what the passengers learned in those phone calls inspired their counterattack on the cockpit.
The report said it was "quite possible" that the hijacker flying the plane, Ziad Jarrah, knew that the attack on the World Trade Center had succeeded; he could, for example, have read the text messages intended for Captain Dahl.
"It might not have occurred to him that they were certain to learn what had happened in New York, thereby defeating his attempts at deception," the report said.
"Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye."
-Flight 93 Passenger
Of the 33 passengers on the plane who were not hijackers, at least 10, and two crew members, spoke to people on the ground. At least five of the calls included discussion of the World Trade Center. At 9:57, about seven minutes before the end, one of the passengers ended her conversation saying: "Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye."
The report indicates that Mr. Jarrah, at the controls of United 93, did what many airline pilots have fantasized about since the hijackings: tried to maneuver the plane sharply, rolling and pitching, to keep control of the cockpit. It apparently did not work; the plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania.
The report does not clarify whether the hijackers' goal for Flight 93 was the White House or the Capitol, but indicates that the hijackers tuned a cockpit radio to the frequency of a navigation beacon at National Airport, just across the Potomac River from the capital, erasing any doubt about the region of their intended destination.
At three seconds after 10 a.m., Mr. Jarrah is heard on the cockpit voice recorder saying: "Is that it? Shall we finish it off?"
But another hijacker responds: "No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off."
The voice recorder captured sounds of continued fighting, and Mr. Jarrah pitched the plane up and then down. A passenger is heard to say, "In the cockpit. If we don't we'll die!"
Then a passenger yelled "Roll it!" Some aviation experts have speculated that this was a reference to a food cart, being used as a battering ram.
Mr. Jarrah "stopped the violent maneuvers" at 10:01:00, according to the report, and said, "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!"
"He then asked another hijacker in the cockpit, `Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?' to which the other replied, `Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.' "
Eighty seconds later, a hijacker is heard to say, "Pull it down! Pull it down!"
"The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them," according to the report, which seems to indicate that the hijackers themselves crashed the plane. "With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington, D.C," according to the report.
Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company.
OT: MP3 creator returns with 3D sound
Last modified: July 23, 2004, 4:00 AM PDT
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
One of the inventors of the MP3 format is back with a new technology that he hopes will revolutionize audio, creating superrealistic sound for theaters, theme parks and eventually even living rooms.
Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology, along with a team of co-developers, is in Los Angeles this week showing off his new "Iosono" technology to representatives of Hollywood studios and giants including Disney. Brandenburg is credited with much of the work leading to the MP3 format, also developed at Fraunhofer.
What's new:
Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the inventors of the MP3 format and the director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology, has served up new superrealistic audio technology called Iosono that he hopes will revolutionize sound in theaters, theme parks, and eventually the home.
Bottom line:
The product, which is being touted as true "three dimensional" audio, marks a substantial break from the way recorded sound has been replicated since Edison first began experimenting with recorded audio.
He and his team are touting their new product as true "three dimensional" audio, which can give the impression of, for example, a horse galloping through the center aisle of a movie theater, or pinpoint a noise so that it sounds exactly like a person shouting from outside theater walls. The best existing surround sound speakers can approximate this only for a small "sweet spot," perhaps a few feet wide, while the Ionsono system would create the same realistic illusion for everyone in the room.
"It was an old dream to do something like that...to do something for immersive audio, where people would feel they were in a different place," Brandenburg said in an interview. "PCs have now become fast enough that you can do the (necessary) processing in real time. It was not realistic to do that 10 years ago."
The project marks a substantial break from the way recorded sound has been replicated since Thomas Edison first began experimenting with recorded audio in the late 1870s. Just as video is being wholly transformed by digital cameras and computer processors, audio production and reproduction, too, is being transformed by the latest generation of PCs and processors.
Sound amplification has worked in much the same way for years. A sound wave is turned into an electric impulse, which is turned back into sound as it hits speakers. In the early 1930s, stereo or "binaural" sound was first patented, which used two sound sources to create the illusion that the sound was coming from a wider space.
This technique developed over time into the sophisticated audio systems of today. Sound is split between speakers into "channels," and recording tricks such as hints of echo or reverberations are added to create the increasingly realistic impression of sound coming from all around a listener.
But most of this analysis worked on the principle of a perfect listener positioned at exactly the right midpoint between the speakers, where the sound waves would meet and interact to create exactly the right illusion.
"Many of the developments in this area have been about fine-tuning frequency response and brute horsepower," said David Stump, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer and visual effects artist who has seen demonstrations of the Iosono technology. "The thing that's different about Iosono is that it just takes the approach of intelligent analysis of what sound really is and how it shows up to your ears and applies that in a different way."
Ripple effect
Sound travels in waves, much as the waves in a pond ripple outward when a pebble is thrown in. The sounds of a busy street corner are complicated and confusing, the same way the surface of a pond would be if a handful of pebbles were thrown in at the same time.
Brandenberg's team aims to create the audio version of that pond surface being pelted by a shower of pebbles.
To do this, they use an array of small speakers, sometimes as many as 300 or 400. A complicated algorithm works out exactly what the sound waves all through a room would be if, say, the horse were galloping through the center aisle.
Each little speaker then emits whatever little piece of sound wave is necessary to create--in the 300-strong aggregate--the full virtual "picture" of the sound throughout the room.
"It's pretty amazing," said Stanley Johnston, a recording engineer for postproduction company Todd-AO, who was brought in to help with Iosono's Los Angeles demos. "It enables a sound mixer and sound designer to have the entire room to play with on a level that we've never had before."
This kind of sound is relatively easy to mix. The developers have created a console that uses a light pen to let a sound engineer specify exactly where he or she wants the sound to seem to be coming from, and the software makes the calculations on the back end. A decoder in the theater or other final venue would translate this into sounds that worked for the specific size and shape of the room.
None of this is cheap, and it isn't likely to find its way into a local multiplex soon. Fraunhofer is providing licenses to the technology itself for between $10,000 and $15,000. But it also needs powerful computing hardware and the--for today--extremely expensive array of speakers that can ring the production space.
Brandenberg and his team see the technology being adopted by theme parks and other dedicated-use spaces first, and later by movie theaters and home theater aficionados.
"At the moment, it's only for those people who can afford a home theater system that costs as much as other people's homes," Brandenberg said. "But I assume this technology will end up everywhere where you can afford to have more than a few loudspeakers."
For now, there will be a chicken-and-egg problem, however. Until there are venues that support the technology, there is little reason for sound producers to buy and work with it. And until there are movies being produced in this form, there's not much reason for theaters to do expensive upgrades--particularly when they're already facing pricy upgrades to digital projection systems.
But industry insiders who have listened to it say it might just be a matter of time.
"If technology proves itself worthwhile, issues of practicality and affordability eventually solve themselves somehow," Stump said.
MP3 players recalled
Reigncom, the No. 4 MP3 player manufacturer worldwide, has agreed to allow consumers to exchange malfunctioning iFP 700, 800 and 1000 players. The company has confirmed that the players can emit white noise, although the problem occurs only in a fraction of the devices. Reigncom posted a video of CEO Yang Duck Jun apologizing for the problem. The Korean company, mostly known for the iRiver line of players, holds a 7 percent market share worldwide, according to NPD Group, and is ranked fourth in shipments.
July 22, 2004
CE firms drawn to magnets for wireless MP3 players
By Tony Smith
Published Thursday 22nd July 2004 15:24 GMT
Exclusive Creative Technologies is preparing a wireless digital music player, the company behind the technology has revealed.
We're not talking Bluetooth or Wi-Fi here, but a short-range personal area system that doesn't use radio and is as near free from interference as makes no odds.
Instead of the 2.4GHz radio spectrum, fabless system-on-a-chip designer Aura Communications' LibertyLink system uses a technique called near-field communications. Essentially, that means transmitting inducting changes in one magnetic field into another.
Think earphones. Changing levels of current in the wires of an electric coil wrapped around a magnetic generate fluctuations in the magnetic field. But instead of using those fluctuations to drive a speaker cone, Aura uses them to induce the same fluctuation the field of another, nearby magnet, in turn generating small changes in the current within a wire wrapped around the second magnet.
The two magnets can be up to 2m apart, yet Aura's ASIC into which coil, along with amplification and signal processing circuitry are built, can be used to transmit stereo sound from, say, MP3 player to wireless earphones. Aura holds four US patents covering the technique's use in short-range communications.
Aura claims its technology offers better sound reproduction, considerably lower power operation - 5000 times lower than Bluetooth, for example - and longer operating times - 20 hours' continuous talk time, the company reckons - than competing radio-frequency technologies.
Big-name CE vendors sign up
Hence, Creative's interest and other consumer electronics manufacturers, Aura sales chief Dan Cui told The Register this week. "We expect a number of companies to have products that use our technology on show at next January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES)," he said.
Creative may well be one of them. CUI claimed the company is working on a device that connects player to 'phones using Aura's chip. And Creative recently invested in Aura's latest round of funding, which brought in $11m in total. Motorola is also an investor in the company. Aura is using TSMC to produce its chips, which are fabbed at 250nm.
Aura plans to use that money to develop the next generation of LibertyLink, which will support stereo audio, something Bluetooth as yet does not. Cui said Aura believes audio will be short-range wireless' 'killer app'. He reckons near-field can give other PAN technology a real run for their money from both a usability perspective.
Cui pledged the magnetic technology was safe to use alongside sensitive magnetic storage systems, such as hard drives. And with such a short range, it's effectively secure, operating within a "communications bubble", as Cui calls it. That said, we can't help but wonder at the prospect of nearby wireless MP3 player owners listening in on each others' playlists - and potentially digitising what they hear.
Aura is already selling a mono audio and voice system, LibertyLink Voice, which is currently being sold in the UK by European Telecom and in the US by FoneGear. ®
Bootnote
Long-time hardware watchers and Reg readers may remember Aureal Semiconductor, the audio chip developer which was Creative Technologies' (then called Creative Labs) key competitor and which battled long and hard with its rival over mutual patent infringement allegations.
Aureal eventually collapsed. Creative then acquired its erstwhile rival's assets for $32m.
Aureal's CEO was one Kenneth 'Kip' Kokinakis. Kip now finds himself President and CEO of Aura. And who is now one of Aura's investors? Why his old sparring partner, Creative Technologies... Who'd have thought it?
Is iPod the new Betamax?
(Filed: 22/07/2004)
Neil McCormick reports on the battle over MP3 standards
Where have all the record companies gone? Twenty years ago, in 1984, there were more than a dozen internationally significant record companies (such as EMI, Warners, Atlantic, CBS, MCA, RCA, Polydor, Phonogram, A&M, Island, Virgin, Chrysalis and Asylum).
The iPod: are these expensive gadgets destined to wind up in car boot sales?
Next year, following the European Commission's approval of the proposed merger between Sony and BMG, there will be just four. And I wouldn't be surprised if, soon, that number were reduced further. With the new Sony/BMG and Universal Music Group controlling two thirds of new release sales between them, the remaining smaller majors (EMI and Warner Music Group) must be getting nervous about their future.
Ordinary music consumers might wonder how this affects them. After all, the music industry tends to be artist- rather than label-driven. And for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about a crisis in the music business, there still seems to be as much music about as ever.
It is undoubtedly true that some of the most interesting music is forced to operate on survival budgets with the support of a beleaguered independent sector, without access to the marketing power of major labels. Yet, as long as creative people are compelled to express themselves through music, the discerning consumer can continue to seek out gems in the dust left behind by stampeding majors.
There is, however, another agenda in this new merger that could affect consumers quite significantly. There is currently no industry standard for downloadable MP3s. This means that, for instance, MP3s downloaded from Sony's Connect service can only be played on Sony's MP3 Walkman, and not on the more popular iPod (and vice versa).
Behind the scenes, the battle waging for commercial dominance is reminiscent of the early 1980s cut-throat competition to establish video standards between VHS and Betamax. And lest we forget, VHS won despite being technically inferior.
Although Apple has been the pioneer in the MP3 market, with Sony/BMG controlling 25 per cent of the music market it will be interesting to see whose digital distribution platforms will survive. Will all those expensive iPods we have been rushing out to buy wind up piled high in car-boot sales alongside Betamax video players and 8-track cassette machines?
OT: Ford Renames Taurus Replacement 'Fusion'
United Press International - July 21, 2004
LOL
Motor Trend
Ford Motor Co. has quietly told dealers about plans to reintroduce the midsize Ford Futura with a new name -- the Ford Fusion, the Detroit News said.
The five-seater intended the replace the Ford Taurus was announced at the New York Auto Show last year, but the Futura name, which had been used for a previous Ford car, prompted a lawsuit from Pep Boys. The auto parts and vehicle maintenance chain said it owned a copyright on Futura.
DigiFusion MP3 player The O-1000 LIVES!
http://www.fusiondigitec.com/files/newsite/consumer_prods/portables/mp3/mp3.htm
Courtesy daboss and others
Rio plans new MP3 players
News Story posted on July 21 2004 4:59 PM GMT by Stuart Miles
Rio has announced that at that the start of August it will be announcing a number of new products to the MP3 market.
The last release Rio made about a new products was November last year, showing it’s about time either new models came out or its current models were updated -a lot lack support for USB2 for starters.
Rumours circulating on Rio fan sites including riorevolution.com imply more variants of the current models, an updated Karma and possible wireless connectivity for some of the models.
We’ll find out when we interview Clive Hudson, the head of Europe for Rio Audio in the next couple of weeks – so stay tuned for all the latest news.
MANUFACTURER WEBSITE
http://www.rioaudio.com
Cornice adding space at HQ
Deal nearly doubles company's Longmont home
By Matt Branaugh, Camera Business Writer
July 21, 2004
LONGMONT — Cornice Inc., a storage device startup based in Longmont, recently signed a deal to nearly double the size of its headquarters.
The company, which occupies 22,106 square feet on the first floor of a building owned by Xilinx Inc. at 1951 S. Fordham St., agreed to fill up another 17,137 square feet on the building's second floor.
"We outgrew this space," said Kevin Magenis, the company's founder and chairman. "It was natural for us to expand upstairs."
Since its founding in 2000, the startup has raised $81 million in funding, including a $51 million round completed during first quarter of this year. It now employs 120 people.
Cornice's 1-inch-square storage products, which can hold between 1 and 2 gigabytes of data, are geared for consumer electronics gadgets, such as MP3 players and portable USB storage units for computers.
The privately held business declines to disclose shipment volumes or sales figures, but says it continues to win over the original equipment manufacturers that need storage features inside their products. Customers include RCA, Garmin, Samsung and iRiver.
Last month, competitors Seagate Technology and Western Digital filed separate lawsuits accusing Cornice of copying patents. Cornice won't comment on ongoing litigation.
The Colorado Group's Gary Aboussie represented Xilinx in the real estate deal. Nelson Miner with Prime Real Estate in Longmont represented Cornice.
Three years ago, Xilinx moved into a $32 million, 133,000-square-foot building directly south of the 200,000-square-foot building where Cornice operates.
After moving out, Xilinx listed a large portion of the building as available for lease, but the programmable chipmaker recently decided to remove all but 14,000 square feet from the market as it eyes its own future expansion, Aboussie said. With Cornice's commitment, only the 14,000 square feet remains empty, he said.
Contact Camera Business Writer Matt Branaugh at (303) 473-1363 or branaughm@dailycamera.com.
Seagate Reports $33 Million Loss in Fourth Quarter
By Mark Hachman
July 20, 2004
Seagate stumbled in its fiscal fourth quarter, but design wins with Creative Technology Ltd. and a raft of new products portend greater sales in the second half, the company said.
Seagate Technology Inc., of Scotts Valley, Calif., reported a loss of $33 million on revenue of $1.34 billion, including $39 million in a one-time restructuring charge. Net income and revenue fell compared with a year ago, when the company reported net income of $160 million on revenue of $1.55 billion.
For fiscal year 2004, Seagate reported net income of $529 million on revenue of $6.22 billion, compared with $641 million on sales of $6.49 billion for fiscal year 2003.
Seagate's unit shipments were a mixed bag. Overall, the company shipped 18.3 million desktop drives, a slight increase from the 18.0 million drives it shipped during the previous quarter. The company shipped 13,356 desktop drives and 460,000 mobile drives, a decrease in both categories. Enterprise drive shipments, however, increased to 1.9 million units.
But even more telling was the company's performance in the CE (consumer electronics) space, a market Seagate had largely passed by in prior quarters. There, Seagate shipped 1.93 million units, a sharp jump from the 1.06 million drives it shipped the quarter before. Seagate's CE drives are a key part of the company's 2004 roadmap.
Seagate's CE presence stands to increase further through a contract the company signed with Creative Technologies Ltd. The Singapore sound giant will use Seagate's previously announced 1-inch, 5-gigabyte ST1 drive as part of its forthcoming MP3 player lineup. The drive will begin shipping this quarter, executives said.
"Seagate's business model is built for long-term performance," Steven Luczo, Seagate's chairman, said in a conference call with analysts Tuesday afternoon.
Seagate executives professed themselves happy with the rate of sell-through in the reseller channel, which will leave the company with a relatively slim five weeks of inventory heading into the third calendar quarter. Inventory levels are a key metric analysts have used to gauge the financial performance of companies such as Intel Corp., as they worried about the sudden emergence of a pricing war.
But competitive pricing is a fact of life in the disk-drive industry. "Every quarter prices drop, and the only question is how much and who to blame," Luczo said.
Enterprise drive pricing continued to be pinched, executives said, although the overall decline in pricing was lower than in prior quarters, according to Brian Dexheimer, executive vice president of global sales and marketing at Seagate.
According to one analyst on the call, a major storage vendor recently complained of a shortage of 15,000-RPM drives. Neither Dexheimer nor the analyst named the customer; for his part, Dexheimer said Seagate "felt good" about 15,000-RPM drive prices for the third quarter.
The big plus for Seagate, however, could be within the CE market. In addition to the Creative deal, Seagate has begun to court PVR (Personal Video Recorder) makers, who use hard disk drives to store recorded video. Seagate has an "aggressive" build plan in the CE space, Dexheimer said.
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Bluetoothful Loser
Content by Technology Review Magazine
What’s this? Bluetooth a success? As Rummy would say, Heavens to Betsy, yes. According to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, two million devices equipped with the short-range wireless technology were shipping every week during the month of May, double the rate nine months before. Allied Business Intelligence predicts that 300 million Bluetooth products will ship this year, up from 80 million in 2003. Bluetooth still hasn’t made much of a dent in the U.S. cell-phone market and it never caught on as a cable replacement for PCs, but it’s now fairly standard on PDAs and outside of the Americas it’s a mainstay on smart phones. Bluetooth owns the red-hot market in wireless headsets.
It’s even gaining sex appeal: the latest fad in Europe is “Toothing” for mates by broadcasting personal information and photos.Soon, Bluetooth will boast improvements in its own vital stats: Bluetooth SIG recently announced a faster version called Bluetooth EDR (for Enhanced Data Rate), which should arrive sometime in 2005. EDR will blast data at up to 2.1 megabits per second, triple the current rate. That’s enough bandwidth to quickly transfer photos from your digital camera phone to your laptop and to zap files to laser printers. Because batteries drain quickly during transfers, EDR’s shorter transfer sessions reduce power consumption.
With success like this, could it be that the time-honored tradition of Bluetooth-bashing has run its course? There has always been a xenophobic undercurrent to the gripes, as with any technology not born in Armonk, Sunnyvale, or Redmond; Bluetooth’s Swedish origins and its popularity throughout uppity Old Europe make it suspect to Yankee eyes. Still, a growing number of respected analysts are giving Bluetooth a thumb’s up. IDC's Alex Slawsby, for example, predicts that “we’re going to see a lot of Bluetooth products coming to market toward the end of the year.”
That may be true, but a year from now we’re also likely to see the arrival of ultrawideband technology that addresses the same applications at much faster data rates. In fact, Bluetooth’s recent success may be partially due to the delays in bringing ultrawideband to market. Ultrawideband uses low-power, short-pulse radio signals to deliver up to 480 megabits per second at a range of 2 meters, and 110 megabits per second at 10 meters—the current maximum range for both ultrawideband and Bluetooth. Designed as a PC cable replacement and as a way to distribute video throughout households, ultrawideband could also be cheaply implemented into mobile devices. Yet, it continues to suffer from a standards feud between Motorola and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); and Slawsby says it will be at least a year before ultrawideband products arrive.
Despite the turf wars, ultrawideband's advantages are such that former Bluetooth booster Intel withdrew its support for Bluetooth earlier this year, and is instead pushing an IEEE version of ultrawideband. Intel and others are also pushing WiFi, which is riding a wave of popularity that makes Bluetooth’s winning streak look modest by comparison. Unlike ultrawideband, WiFi is not a direct competitor with Bluetooth (it’s more of a wireless networking technology than a device-to-device transfer technology), but it can be used for many Bluetooth-like applications. Today's version of WiFi, known as 802.11b, is up to five times faster than Bluetooth EDR; newer WiFi technology is as much as 25 times faster. What’s more, the competition among technologies for placement in consumer electronics is fierce. WiFi is far more common on laptops than is Bluetooth, and next year when Bluetooth EDR arrives we’ll see smart phones with built-in WiFi, too.
“By the time EDR comes out, it won’t have much of a runway to take off on before it runs into competition from WiFi and ultrawideband,” says Tod Kort, an analyst at Gartner. “There’s a window here in which Bluetooth really needs to get its act together because otherwise UWB will replace it. EDR’s bandwidth is still not competitive, so I don’t think it’s going to tip the balance.”
IDC's Slawsby argues that bandwidth is beside the point. He expects that the existing Bluetooth will outsell the souped-up EDR for several years, especially in the hot market for wireless headsets. “We don’t believe EDR will cause a radical change in Bluetooth’s acceptance,” he says. Chipsets are coming out that combine WiFi and Bluetooth, he says, and the latter will succeed because ultrawideband is still “very immature.”
The greater problem for Bluetooth, says Kort, is its complexity. Much of Bluetooth’s reputation for being difficult to use, he says, is really due to poor compatibility. “There are too many [Bluetooth] devices that still don’t work with each other,” he explains. While data transfers between products made by the same company work fine, cross-vendor transmissions often require the tweaking of settings—or simply refuse to work at all, he says. “Cellular providers have delayed implementing Bluetooth because they don’t want to deal with the support hassles.”
Even when Bluetooth works, the ability to swap files between devices lacks the marketing sizzle of MP3 or digital photography; that's why cell-phone carriers and vendors keep postponing it until next year. More bad news: although Bluetooth is well established in the U.S. PDA market, PDA sales have been sliding. Meanwhile, European cell phone users may be tempted to e-mail their files via faster new 3G data services rather than wait for a direct Bluetooth transfer to a laptop.
So is Bluetooth a success? You betcha. Will it be a year from now? Can’t say. How about two years? Goodness gracious, no. After all, consumer electronics can be a very messy business indeed.
MPee3.com Revolutionizes Music Searching and Downloading, Making P2P Services Like Napster and Kazaa Obsolete
Tuesday July 20, 10:01 am ET
LAS VEGAS, July 20 /PRNewswire/ -- The MPee3 Corporation (www.MPee3.com), today announced the launch of its new search engine dedicated exclusively to MP3 music files. MPee3(TM) allows users to search and download MP3-format music files simply and efficiently, and without the legal ramifications of P2P (peer-to-peer) services like Napster or Kazaa.
(Logo: http://www.send2press.com/photoSP/MPee3-01.jpg )
MPee3.com takes the most basic Internet service, a search engine, and applies it to MP3 (MPEG2-Layer3 Audio) files. The result is a search engine dedicated exclusively to searching MP3 files, allowing end users to locate and download MP3s quickly and efficiently.
The site also has directories of MP3-related content such as bands, shopping sites, online radio, tutorials, portable media players, encoders, and software for every major operating system. However, the engine prohibits listings for hacking, porn and gambling sites, which are commonly found on many "underground" MP3 download directories.
"Our search engine draws from a database of millions of legally downloadable MP3 files," says Stephen M. Noton, President of the MPee3 Corporation.
"Unlike many other MP3 services that charge a membership fee and collect personal information which could be used to trace your online activity, at the MPee3.com MP3 Search you can download MP3 files without providing any personal details, preserving your privacy."
Noton believes this unique feature averts many of the legal concerns involved with the use of peer-to-peer (P-2-P) services, and ensures total user privacy.
Optional membership programs allow users access to the MPee3.com forum, newsletter, and the ability to add MP3 sites to the search engine. The basic membership is free, while the premium membership is about $20 per year.
Featured site sponsored listing programs are an ideal way for new bands, independent labels, and Internet radio stations to increase traffic and visibility.
MPee3.com appears in the College Music Scene edition of the Rolling Stone Magazine and will be in the Digital Music Spotlight section of Billboard. For more information please visit: http://www.MPee3.com
All trademarks acknowledged.
Emirates places further orders at Farnborough in excess of USD1.13 billion
On the second day of Farnborough International Air Show 2004, Emirates signed a host of agreements worth more than USD1.13 billion, ranging from systems and suites to simulators, on the heels of the first day's order for 13 Boeing aircraft worth USD2.96 billion.
The contracts were signed in Farnborough by His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, Emirates' Chairman, in the presence of the airline's senior management including Maurice Flanagan, Vice Chairman and Group President; Tim Clark, President Emirates Airline; and Ghaith Al Ghaith, Executive Vice President Commercial Operations Worldwide.
The airline has signed an agreement with Matsushita Avionics Systems Corporation (MAS) for the eX2 inflight entertainment system, which includes interactive audio, video, games, communication and connectivity support, for the airline's new Airbus fleet including A380-800 double-deckers and A340-600HGWs.
The agreement also includes new systems for existing and other new aircraft on order, making MAS the sole supplier of inflight entertainment systems to the Emirates fleet which will total 169 by 2012. The majority of the airline's fleet already offer MAS' inflight entertainment systems, including the brand-new A340-500 aircraft. Emirates' 43 passenger A380s are expected to start entering the fleet from October 2006 and the 20 A340-600s from June 2007.
The overall value of the order is approximately US$1 billion of which up to 30 per cent will be invested in manufacturing and digital media facilities in Dubai.
Dolby adds High-Efficiency AAC to MPEG 4 patent pool
By Tony Smith
Published Tuesday 20th July 2004 08:53 GMT
Dolby's licensing division is to make it easier for manufacturers to licence the more advanced form of the Apple iPod-friendly audio format, AAC.
Via Licensing yesterday said it had partnered with the MPEG 4 Audio Licensing Committee to simplify access to key intellectual property behind High-Efficiency AAC - aka AAC Plus. HE AAC-related patents will be added to the broader MPEG 4 audio patent pool to provide one-off licensing.
The move, they claim, will make it easier and - crucially - cheaper for companies to ship products that support HE AAC.
That's not an indication of the iPod-led popularity of AAC. Rather it's the result of the DVD Forum's decision to mandate the use of HE AAC as the audio format for DVD 'ROM zones' - a new area that can be added to DVDs that provides computer-compatible content. HE AAC is also being deployed as the basis for audio streaming across 3G mobile phone networks.
By contrast, Apple uses Low-Complexity AAC files. And in any case, its proprietary FairPlay DRM technology is not (yet) available for licensing, so the Via/MPEG 4 ALC's move isn't going to open the floodgates to true iPod clones.
HE AAC uses a technique called Spectral Band Replication (SBR), which essentially provides room for higher levels of compression without losing sound quality. HE AAC encodes high-frequency sounds with SBR and low frequencies with regular AAC. HE AAC was developed by Dolby, Coding Technologies, AT&T, Sony, Philips, NEC and the Fraunhofer Institute, one of the co-developers of MP3. ®
Will consumers tune in to portable video?
By Richard Shim
CNET News.com
July 20, 2004, 4:00 AM PT
Manufacturers are set to release portable digital media players, but there’s little expectation they will transform the market overnight in the way that MP3 players such as the iPod changed the music industry.
Portable video players will let consumers download, store and view television shows, movies, music, photos and other digital content on the players' big hard drives and small color screens.
Manufacturers Samsung, Creative Labs and Archos will promote the portability and ease of use, allowing consumers to record a late-night TV show, for example, and watch it on the subway during the morning commute. The device makers see the strong sales of Apple Computer's iPod as an indication of mobile video's potential.
But there are significant potholes on the road to iPod-level success, which may be why two key arbiters of hip portable devices--Apple Computer and Sony Electronics--aren't rushing their own video devices to store shelves.
"Initially, this is an early-adopter product, but down the road, we're hoping, we've set ourselves up for a hit," said James Bernard, product manager of Microsoft's Portable Media Center, the company's upcoming software for video devices. "It's the early adopters that people turn to for (buying) advice.”
In the short term, few services have been created to deliver content, and consumers will have to get used to the idea of carrying video around to watch while waiting in airports or commuting on trains and buses. By contrast, millions of consumers were already accustomed to using music devices such as the Walkman or a portable CD player prior to the emergence of MP3.
"The total demand from people who need to take their video with them is smaller than those who have time in their day to listen to music, which is a more passive activity," said Ross Rubin, an analyst with NPD Techworld. "It's tough to watch video while you're jogging."
Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said pretty much the same thing in late April when asked whether video was on the near horizon for the iPod, which recorded sales of 860,000 units in the last quarter alone.
"You can't drive a car when you are watching a movie," he noted. "It's really hard, anyway."
He said music is often a background activity, played while doing something else. For that reason, he said, Apple is focusing on audio.
On the sidelines
Sony is also sitting out the initial wave of video devices. The company recently introduced a hard-drive-based portable player, the Vaio Pocket, but it doesn't play video. Instead, the 2.2-inch color screen on the device is meant to display photos and album covers. Sony's reasons for hesitation seem to have less to do with how people will use video devices than with the current lack of content.
"I tend to think it's premature to get into this market in the United States right now, because of a lack of video services," said Mike Abary, Sony Electronics' general manager of Vaio marketing.
Sony's native Japan is another story. That gadget-happy market will soon have a video player Sony has code-named "Opera." It will download video from PCs or televisions. Sony has voiced no plans for a U.S. version.
Getting content delivery services in place won't be as easy as setting up a Web site. Among the most significant obstacles are copyright and piracy. The technology and entertainment industries have yet to develop a copy protection standard to ensure that copyrighted material isn't pirated on a massive scale, though they took a first step last week.
On July 14, several technology companies and movie studios--including IBM, Intel, Warner Bros., Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba--announced an alliance that will create a new copy protection standard for DVDs that would provide for some sharing among devices, but the fruits of those labors are probably years away.
While there won't be a wide range of easily deliverable content soon, IDC research analyst Josh Martin notes that some consumers have already collected enough visual content to find the devices useful. Apart from their own digital photos and home video, digital video recorders let many consumers grab their own video content from broadcast television.
"For some early adopters, it's already worth buying these devices, because they have enough digital content from such products as their DVRs," Martin said.
The squint factor
Another problem is making it work for users on the move--and on a screen the size of a credit card.
"There are two obvious sources of video for these devices--TV shows and movies," said Ross Rubin, an analyst with NPD Techworld. "But I don't see consumers having long sessions with these devices."
So service providers will have to be creative to offer video content in a way that is appetizing to potential users.
Sports highlights could be among the first offerings. Earlier this month, Microsoft said content from the Major League Baseball site will be downloadable to devices using Portable Media Center software. Full and condensed games will be available, plus other clips, such as extended highlights and bloopers.
Music videos are another natural fit, Rubin said, considering that the devices can also play standard music files.
Ready to play
Despite the question marks, the players are coming. This month, online retailer Amazon.com began taking orders for devices from Creative Labs and Samsung, which will use Microsoft's Portable Media Center software. Due this summer, the devices will sell for $500, with 20GB hard drives and screens of about 3.5 inches. iRiver, Sanyo and ViewSonic will also make players that will use Portable Media Center. Archos will have a similar product available this month--its AV400 devices, which will be made compatible with Microsoft's software when it's available, according to Archos executives.
Portable Media Center will transfer video from PCs running Windows XP. Using a USB 2.0 connection, a two-hour movie can be downloaded in about three minutes, according to Microsoft's Bernard. Video playback is at the TV standard of 30 frames per second.
Compatible devices will have color displays of 3.5 inches or 3.8 inches, and minimum battery life should allow three hours of video playback or 12 hours of audio. The hard drives will be 20GB or 40GB, storing up to 160 hours of video or 10,000 songs.
Manufacturers will be looking to use the popularity of audio players as a springboard to attract consumers to video, according to analysts. Video-enabled devices may cost more, and the hard drives in early video players won't be as capacious as in some audio players, but consumers will be getting video with their audio.
"Consumers will get less storage for comparably priced devices, but these devices offer protection for the future," Martin said, noting that if video becomes popular, people with these early devices will already be in the game. "The question is, how much of an advantage that is now?"
Another question: Will that advantage be enough to get consumers to embrace something they haven't accepted so far? Portable analog audio devices, such as Sony's Walkman, helped to establish a market for audio players. With video players, consumers will have to be trained nearly from scratch.
Previous generations of portable video products have never enjoyed the success of audio devices, IDC's Martin noted.
"There have been portable video devices, such as DVD players and televisions," he said. "Ultimately, they became products in niche categories."
OT: First Single-Chip Bluetooth Platform Capable of CD-Quality Sound Announced by Zeevo
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 20, 2004--
Device Manufacturers Plan Wireless Stereo Headphones, Headsets, Speakers for Fall Market Based on Zeevo's New ZV4301 ARM7-based "Open" Bluetooth Audio Processor
Zeevo, Inc., a leading provider of single-chip Bluetooth communications solutions, announced today its third-generation, high performance Bluetooth microcontroller solution that is the first in the world to permit the transmission of CD-quality sound over wireless Bluetooth links. The company's ARM7-based Bluetooth controller and accompanying software form a complete, low-cost embedded design solution for quality audio over Bluetooth, as well as for other performance-sensitive Bluetooth applications.
Today's announcement means that Bluetooth -- the increasingly available wireless standard for connecting personal use devices with their peripherals -- can finally be applied to portable MP3 players, MP3-capable cell phones or PDAs, and even consumer stereo systems, to provide wireless connections to stereo headphones, headsets, or speakers without any sacrifice in audio quality. Previous implementations of Bluetooth -- used primarily for wireless keyboards, mice, or mono cell phone headsets -- have not been able to attain CD-quality level that consumers have come to expect with their wired audio appliances, due to technical limitations.
Those limitations have now been overcome, said Zeevo co-founder and marketing vice president Anil Aggarwal. "We recognized several years ago that notwithstanding the rapidly expanding use of Bluetooth for the elimination of wires between cell phones and mono headsets, or between keyboards, mice, or PDAs and a PC, one of the most exciting applications for Bluetooth was going to be personal audio and consumer electronic devices -- including enhanced cell phones -- that provide stereo audio without wires. But the challenge this brings is to provide quality audio -- CD-quality audio, in fact -- and that is not easy to do over Bluetooth."
According to Aggarwal, Zeevo embarked upon a multi-year research and development program to achieve an audio-quality benchmark that it today calls "Sound Design for Bluetooth." "We focused extensive resources on the issues of quality, robustness in mixed wireless environments, and user friendliness, and that led us to the unique architecture of our new transceiver/microcontroller chip, and the third-generation of software that makes CD-quality audio over Bluetooth possible. Together, they represent the first available embedded Bluetooth design platform for original device manufacturers (ODMs) that addresses this exciting market."
Joyce Putscher, director, converging markets & technologies of market analyst Instat/MDR agrees with Aggarwal's assessment of the potential for this market, and Zeevo's contribution: "Thanks to the marketing of Apple's extremely popular iPod, the image of a jammin' consumer -- with headphones conspicuously tethered to an MP3 player in her hand -- has become a status symbol. But when consumers catch wind that they can listen to all their tunes, only without the wires, a new "wireless freedom" wave in personal audio -- and a compelling application for Bluetooth, will quickly take shape. The fact that Zeevo has overcome the significant technical challenges with a designer-friendly solution makes it, in essence, an enabling technology for this new, emerging market segment."
The ZV4301 Single-chip Bluetooth Platform and ZSound(TM) Software
Zeevo's new Bluetooth audio design solution, targeted at original device manufacturers, is made up of the new ZV4301 Bluetooth processor, Zeevo's ZSound(TM) software, as well as reference designs for a range of representative audio projects, and a development environment that enables designers to achieve a very fast time to market.
The new ZV4301 processor consists of a high-performance, 48 megahertz (MHz) ARM7 microcontroller combined with RF (radio frequency) processing, digital signal processing, communications processing, and algorithmic and control processing, on a single, low-cost transceiver (transmitter-receiver) chip. Included in the solution is Zeevo's unique ZSound software that implements the technically-challenging, highly-optimized audio processing and Quality of Service (QoS) algorithms. Together, they represent a complete "sound design solution" for embedding quality audio over Bluetooth capability into cost- and performance-competitive consumer products.
In addition to its unique capability to support CD-quality sound, the ZV4301 is the only Bluetooth embedded microcontroller available today that uses an industry-standard RISC processor architecture -- the popular 32-BIT ARM7TDMI 32-bit "core" -- in an open platform configuration. This means that not only can ODMs customize a ZV4301-based solution to their specific needs, using a widely-understood programming environment, but also they can take advantage of available and emerging software written for the ARM7 that can extend or augment the performance of their products. Code written for Zeevo's ZV4301 is binary-compatible with other members of the ARM7 family, and forward compatible with the ARM9, ARM9E, and ARM10 families.
High Performance, Low Cost, Low Power, Broad Range of Applications
Zeevo's new Bluetooth audio design solution supports CD-quality sound, with the standard CD sampling rate of 44.1 KHz (kilohertz). Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is better than 82 dB. Audio output power is 30 mW (milliwatts) RMS. Power consumption is extremely low, enabling a minimum of 14 hours of play time with two AAA batteries. RF sensitivity is better than -85 dBm, which aids in prolonging battery life, and improves audio quality. The total bill of materials (BOM) for both ends of a wireless stereo headphone solution -- including two Zeevo chips -- is expected to be less than $25 in high-volume production.
Typical audio applications for the ZV4301 include wireless stereo headphones, stereo cell phone headsets, MP3-enabled feature phones, audio-visual (A/V) equipment such as MP3 players, personal stereos, or televisions, smart phones, and personal digital assistants. The ZV4301 platform, and the accompanying ZSound(TM) software, are extremely design friendly, and offer a number of user-oriented features such as seamless mode switching -- for example, between mono cell calls and MP3 stereo on a converged MP3 cell phone -- or fail-soft roll-off of audio levels as users wander outside the range of their Bluetooth-enabled players.
The ZV4301 is also ideal for non-audio, Bluetooth 1.2-compliant applications, such as printers, cellular peripherals, access points, or industrial controls. The ZV4301 platform supports all required and optional Bluetooth 1.2 features.
Price and Availability
The ZV4301 is in production, and is available today directly from Zeevo or its sales representatives. The processor -- which includes the ZSound software -- is priced at $8.95 in quantities of 10,000. The evaluation and development system, as well as reference designs for stereo headphones, mono and stereo headsets, audio line-out adapters, and USB plug-and play adapters are additionally offered.
"The immediate availability of our new Bluetooth audio processor platform means that ODMs can have products well into production in time to meet their `high season' -- the `back-to-school' and Christmas markets worldwide," explained Aggarwal. According to him, the ZV4301 is actively being designed into numerous consumer products that will be broadly available at that time.
About Zeevo
Zeevo is a leading-edge semiconductor provider that designs and markets "system-on-a-chip" (SoC) mobility wireless products for use in portable and handheld devices ranging from cellular phones to MP3 players to personal computers. Zeevo's latest wave of products uniquely solve the problem of high quality audio over Bluetooth -- increasingly in demand as the wireless movement floods over in to headsets, stereo headphones, and speakers. The company pioneered the concept of "Sound Design for Bluetooth(TM)," a quality, reliability and convenience benchmark for Bluetooth audio that includes high-quality audio, interference-free co-existence with 802.11 wireless, dynamic mode switching for convergence applications, and fail-soft out-of-range behavior.
Zeevo Bluetooth platforms integrate analog, digital, and radio-frequency (RF) circuitry, as well as memory and a programmable ARM7 processor, on a single-chip built using highly cost-effective, standard CMOS technology. Zeevo's chips are delivered in design- and manufacturing-friendly packages that incorporate all RF components, and are accompanied by Zeevo's advanced ZSound(TM) algorithms, CODEC interfaces, and operating software. This results in quality Bluetooth audio solutions that are distinguished by small size, low cost, low power consumption and ease of integration by OEMs and ODMs into market-leading end products.
Zeevo supports open, industry-standard development tools, and an easy-to-use application program interface (API) and development environment on its Bluetooth platforms, which enable customers to easily customize their solutions and deliver differentiated products.
Zeevo was founded September 1999 in Silicon Valley by industry veterans. Investors in the privately-held company include Sequoia Capital, Raza Venture, Focus Ventures, WK Technology Fund, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), CDIB, Winbond, and Capital Group Companies. Company URL is www.zeevo.com.
Editors' Note: All trademarks and registered trademarks are those of their respective companies and organizations.
"Ipod" in the context of this release is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., and it is used as exemplary of a class of consumer audio products. Endorsement of Zeevo or its products by Apple is not to be construed.
Additional background information is available at www.roeder-johnson.com.
iPod 3G closeouts begin; $249-$399 inc. $50 Amazon GC
Been waiting for the best deal on an iPod? Amazon.com's sweetest offer just became even sweeter thanks to the release of the 4G iPods. Free shipping, $50 gift certificates, and no tax in most states.
15GB iPod (3G): $249 - add $1 worth of additional items to get a free $50 Amazon gift certificate.
20GB iPod (3G): $299 with free $50 Amazon gift certificate.
40GB iPod (3G): $399 with free $50 Amazon gift certificate.
And remember, Apple's online store typically begins a gradual evolution of closeout deals following the discontinuation of earlier models, ending in stronger (but very limited quantity) discounts several months later. Tax and shipping will be extra.
More info
By Jeremy Horwitz on Jul 19, 04 3:08 pm /
Apple's Joswiak: "We're Winning"; No 60GB or Older iPod Software
by Brad Gibson, 3:15 PM CDT, July 19th, 2004
Apple has no immediate plans to release a 60 gigabyte, fourth-generation iPod and there are no plans for a software update to enhance older iPods, an Apple executive told the Mac Observer Monday.
In the aftermath of Monday's announcement of the fourth-generation iPod, Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, told TMO the company never had plans to release a 60GB model.
"We have no plans in regard to announcing a 60 gigabyte model of the iPod any time soon," Mr. Joswiak said.
In early June, a Toshiba spokesperson reportedly told the IDG News Service it would soon ship a 1.8-inch, 60GB hard drive and that Apple would be buying the drive for use in a future iPod.
"The unfortunate thing was that it obviously wasn't true," Mr. Joswiak commented. "Some person at Toshiba who didn't know the facts spoke out of order and made it look like we were about to do a 60GB (iPod) when we knew we weren't."
Mr. Joswiak said Apple would not rule out a 60GB version in the future, but as is customary for Apple, it would not comment on future products.
Mr. Joswiak said Monday's announcement of a new, slimmer iPod should be a further indication that Apple is going to do everything to protect it's 50% marketshare of portable music players, as reported by NPD.
"We decided a long time ago that we were going to stay very aggressive with updating the iPod," he said. "And the reason for that of course is that we're winning. We want our competitors to aim and where we've been, not where we're at. So, if we're out front and we continue to move faster than them, we're going to get further out in front. And the market sure seems to be indicative of that. We entered the year at about 30% market share in the US as measured by NPD and we're now over 50%. We want to continue to turn up the heat and provide a better product with a better feature set."
Mr. Joswiak reacted to a number of other issues regarding the iPod. Here is a sample of some of the Q&A from the interview..."
The Mac Observer: Are you releasing a software update for older iPods to add features like Shuffle Play and re-organizing of menus like what are now find on the new iPod?
Steve Joswiak: No, we're not. The fourth-generation iPod isn't just different on the outside, it's different on the inside too. It's got a different hardware platform underneath and that's what we developed this software for. We're not holding it back, it's just a new design to take advantage of this hardware that we have here. We could have added these additional features to older iPods, but it would be another product effort. It would require us to create a new set of software on the old platform that we haven't decided we're going to do. We haven't ruled it out, but right now there's not an effort underway to do that.
TMO: Does the 40GB come with a dock, remote and case? It's sort of unclear because the tech specs page on your Web site gives the impression that it does, while the Online Apple Store says it only has dock.
SJ: Let me clear up any confusion. The 40GB version of the (G4) iPod only has the dock.
TMO: As for the 50% better battery life, is this due to hardware or software enhancements or both?
SJ: Both. The battery as a slightly larger capacity, but we've also done a lot of work on both the hardware and software fronts to be as efficient as possible on our use of power.
TMO: Could an update not be released for older iPods to have them more efficiently use the battery?
SJ: No, because it's specific to the different hardware architectures that are part of the new fourth-generation (iPod). Some of the new hardware enable things we can do in software.
TMO: Some people are wondering about other features that didn't make it in the new fourth-generation iPod. Why wasn't there a built-in AM/FM radio added?
SJ: Most of the product I've seen who have attempted adding an AM/FM radio have terrible reception. They also take up power and space as well. We've found that our customers are more interested in listening to their music.
TMO: Another feature not included is Wi-Fi support, Why not?
SJ: There just hasn't been much demand for it. The syncing over USB and FireWire is so easy to do and you just don't have to do it that often. There has been a lot of customer drive for that, but I think it's one of those things that we could do, but there hasn't been great demand.
OT: Microsoft Buys Lindows.com For $20 Million
2004-07-19
In an unexpected move Microsoft has agreed to buy the Lindows.com domain and associated use of the word Lindows for $20 million. This will end 3 years of litigation by Microsoft against Lindows which claimed trademark infringement.
This is an amazing about face for Microsoft since it spent many millions of dollars suing Lindows in jurisdictions around the world. However, this is consistent with Microsoft's recent string of legal settlements.
"This case was centered on the fundamentals of international trademark law and our necessary efforts to protect the Windows® trademark against infringement," said Tom Burt, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for Microsoft. "This settlement addresses those concerns, and we are pleased that Lindows will now compete in the marketplace with a name distinctly its own."
"We are pleased to resolve this litigation on terms that make business sense for all parties," said Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows, Inc. "Over the next few months Lindows will cease using the term Lindows and transition to Linspire globally as our company name and primary identifier for our operating system product."
Michael Robertson made much of his wealth when he founded and later sold MP3.com in the midst of a jungle of music industry lawsuits. He jumped into the Web game early with several sites including a popular download site founded in 1996 called Filez.com.
The settlement agreement resolves all claims in this litigation, both in the United States and internationally.
"Puck" shows up again.....
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/337/C3025/
Apple officially introduces the new 4G iPod; HP iPod coming in September
Monday, July 19, 2004 - 08:55 AM EDT
Apple today introduced the new iPod, the fourth generation of the world’s number one portable digital music player, featuring Apple’s patent pending Click Wheel, which combines the smooth and continuous scrolling of a touch-sensitive wheel with five push buttons for superior one handed navigation. The new iPod also features up to 12 hours battery life and Shuffle Songs, a new command in the main menu which gives users instant access to one of the most exciting new ways to listen to their music library. All iPods work effortlessly with Apple’s iTunes, providing music fans with the best digital jukebox on either a Mac or Windows computer and access to the iTunes Music Store, the number one digital music service in the world. The new iPod is available immediately in a 20GB model for $299 and a 40GB model for $399.
"The best digital music player just got better," said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO in the press release. "The fourth generation iPod features Apple’s amazing Click Wheel for superb one handed control, 12 hour battery life and the new Shuffle Songs command in the main menu—all in an even smaller design that puts up to 10,000 songs in your pocket."
"HP has chosen iPod and iTunes as the best products to integrate in to our digital entertainment strategy," said Carly Fiorina, chairman and chief executive officer at HP in the press release. "We decided to wait for this amazing new fourth generation iPod, as it will offer our customers an even better experience. HP’s version of the new iPod will be available in September."
iPod features Apple’s patent pending Auto-Sync technology that automatically downloads an entire digital music library onto iPod and keeps it up-to-date whenever it is plugged into a Mac or Windows computer using FireWire or USB. Users can transfer two songs per second from their Mac or Windows computer and can now conveniently charge iPod with either the included FireWire or USB cable.*
The new 20GB and 40GB iPods are available immediately for a suggested retail price of just $299 (US) for the 20GB iPod and $399 (US) for the 40GB iPod through the Apple Store , Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. Both iPods include earbud headphones, 1.2m 30-pin to FireWire cable, a 1.2m 30-pin to USB cable, and a CD with iTunes 4.6 for Mac and Windows computers. The 40GB model also includes an iPod dock.
Optional accessories with the following suggested retail prices include the iPod Dock for $39 (US) and in-ear headphones for $39 (US). Laser engraving is available for iPod for $19 (US) and can include two lines of text with up to 27 characters per line.
iPod requires a Mac with a FireWire port and Mac OS® X version 10.1.5 or later (Mac OS X v10.2 or later recommended); or a Windows PC with a FireWire or USB port, or a Windows-certified FireWire or USB card and Windows 2000, XP Home or Professional.
* Rechargeable batteries have a limited number of charge cycles and may eventually need to be replaced. Battery life and number of charge cycles vary by use and settings. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information.
See the new iPod on Apple's website here.http://www.apple.com/ipod/
MacDailyNews Take: The 60 GB iPod watch begins...
Virgin Electronics to Launch New Digital Music Products; Relocates to Silicon Valley with New Management Team
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 19, 2004--Virgin Electronics (formerly Virgin Pulse) opened its new Silicon Valley doors today with an invigorated focus on personal, portable, simple and connected digital products for consumers. Funded by The Virgin Group of Richard Branson fame, the company combines Virgin's people-friendly brand with the expertise of new Silicon Valley veteran management who will focus initially on digital music products. Leading the new venture are Chief Executive Officer Greg Woock, a former executive at Handspring and Creative Labs, and Senior Vice President of Marketing Joe Sipher, a consumer product and marketing expert formerly of Palm and Handspring.
The company has relocated from New York to the heart of Silicon Valley at 97 South Second Street in downtown San Jose. Virgin Electronics made the move to attract talent to build creative digital products with an emphasis on ease of use and customer value.
"The digital music market is in its infancy and there's plenty of room for innovation -- especially from a strong, branded alternative," said Woock. "The Virgin brand is famous for bringing customer value, quality, innovation and fun to every category we enter, and we aim to bring it to this one."
In a separate release today, the company unveiled a glimpse of the future with its new silver-dollar size Virgin Electronics Wearable 128 Megabyte MP3 Player. Weighing just half an ounce, the $99.99 MP3 player is ideal for people who want a stylish and compact device for listening to their music while on the move.
Virgin Electronics Team
Before taking the helm at Virgin Electronics, Greg Woock was an executive at Creative Labs and Handspring and was responsible for the sale of more than 100 million consumer electronics products under the SoundBlaster, Visor and Treo brands. In addition, Greg helped create the SoundBlaster brand and worked to market it into multiple categories including speakers, graphics cards and analog modems. While at Handspring, Greg forged partnerships with wireless operators around the world for today's popular line of Treo smartphones.
At Handspring, Joe Sipher helped drive the company's transition from organizers to wireless phones culminating in the award-winning Treo 600 smartphone. As the first product manager at Palm Computing, Joe helped define and launch Graffiti, HotSync, PalmPilot, the Palm VII -- the first handheld to offer instant access to the Internet -- and the Palm.Net service.
Other Virgin Electronics team members herald from consumer electronics leaders including Creative Labs, Iomega and Rio.
About Virgin Electronics
Virgin, one of the most respected brands in the world, is involved in planes, trains, mobile phones, soft drinks, music, and more. Virgin Electronics is the electronics arm within the Virgin Group focused on creating world-class personal, portable, simple and connected digital products for consumers. For more information, visit www.virginelectronics.com or www.virgin.com.
New iPod Due On Monday
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5457434/site/newsweek/
July 26 issue - Veteran Podsters understand that at least once a year Apple performs a feat that at once infuses them with dread and delight: an iPod upgrade. The delight comes from a new look and new capabilities. The dread comes from the realization that you're a step behind the cutting edge and must consider whether to buy your way back on it.
And here it goes again. The considerably tweaked fourth-generation iPod will roll out this week, and NEWSWEEK got an advance peek. It looks a bit different, operates more efficiently, has a few more features and costs less. Here are the highlights.
The click wheel. The iPod keeps getting slimmer and more streamlined. While the initial version had a relatively boxy feel, subsequent versions have been curvier and smaller. This one is about a millimeter thinner and, more significantly, eliminates the control buttons that sat under the display screen. Instead, it uses a "click wheel," where the controls are placed on the compass points of the circular touchpad that lets you scroll through menus. This is an innovation carried over from the diminutive iPod Mini. "It was developed out of necessity for the Mini, because there wasn't enough room [for the buttons]," says Steve Jobs. "But the minute we experienced it we just thought, 'My God, why didn't we think of this sooner?' "
More efficient menus. There's less thumbing required to get to your favorite stuff. "Music" is a first-level entry, and now a single click initiates the popular technique of shuffling your library for playback.
To three million plus owners, iPods not only give constant access to their entire collection of songs and CDs, but membership into an implicit society that's transforming the way music will be consumed in the future. Join Steven Levy for a Live Talk on the iPod revolution on Friday, July 23, at noon ET.
New features. You can create multiple on-the-go playlists and delete songs from those ad hoc mixes. And audiobooks are not only easier to find, you can listen to them at normal speed, slower or 25 percent faster, without its sounding like a Munchkin.
Longer play. Coast-to-coasters rejoice: the new iPods are rated for 12 hours of rockin' between charges—a 50 percent boost in battery life. This is accomplished, Apple says, not by a heavier battery but diligent conservation of power.
Lower price. The top-of-the-line iPod, holding 10,000 songs (40 gigs, as geeks will tell you), now costs $399. The lower-capacity model, with room for 5,000 songs (20 gigs), costs $299. That's a $100 price reduction for each. (There's no more 15-gig model.)
Color. Fuggedaboutit. Despite rumors to the contrary, the wide-bodies are still as pure as the driven snow.
Bottom line: If you have yet to jump on the iPod bandwagon, it's cheaper and more attractive to do so. If you're already plugged in, the question is whether you should engage in the "iPod Bump," where you snap up the spiffy new version and pass Old Reliable to a grateful friend or family member (or the highest eBay bidder). If your music collection has exceeded your iPod's storage space, or your listening binges exceed your current
iPod's battery life—or if you want to hear Bill Clinton's abridged book in 4-1/2 hours rather than six—consider the Bump this time around. Of course, if your heart went aflutter at the very sight of this year's model, you're probably in line at the Apple Store already.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
"Toy" Portable Media Players Seen as Hot Holiday Item
Sat 17 July, 2004 12:26
By Angela Moore
NEW YORK (Reuters) - One of the hottest items on U.S. toy store shelves this holiday season might not be a toy at all, but a portable entertainment player, experts say.
The devices, which play popular TV programs, cartoons, music videos, or even movies, are a move by companies to nab "tweens," the fickle preteen demographic with waning interest in traditional toys.
Hasbro Inc., the No. 2 toy maker, is selling a color player called VideoNow, a handheld device that costs about $75 and plays video discs of selected television shows.
Rival toy maker Mattel Inc. is expected to roll out a competing product called Juice Box this fall in time for the holiday shopping season.
"It's definitely a trend we've been seeing, the marriage of adult consumer electronics with toylike products ... Seventy-five dollars is a lot of money, but it's a lot more expensive to get a car with a video system," said Chris Byrne, a toy analyst known as "the Toy Guy."
Hasbro, which posted lower-than-expected second-quarter earnings on Friday, said a black-and-white version of VideoNow was one of its most popular items last year, selling more than 1.2 million units.
At a color VideoNow launch event on Thursday at Toys R Us Inc.'s flagship toy store in New York's Times Square, hundreds of children and their parents lined up around the block waiting to meet with actress Hilary Duff and skateboarding icon Tony Hawk.
Ashley, from the city's borough of Brooklyn, was celebrating her eighth birthday at the event.
"I already have a black-and-white VideoNow, but I just got a color one for my birthday," she said.
The company gave away 600 tickets entitling holders to autographs as a way to create a buzz around the product.
Mattel's Juice Box, which will cost about $69.99, will appeal to a slightly older child and will play music videos, television shows, animation and full-length movies, a spokeswoman said.
Juice Box will also have a digital photo album capability and MP3 music player. The company would not comment on what particular licenses it will have on the cartridges.
Hasbro's system plays discs and the company has signed licenses for hot properties like Nickelodeon's SpongeBob Squarepants, Fairly Odd Parents and Jimmy Neutron; and episodes of ABC's America's Funniest Home Videos, NBC's Fear Factor and Fox's American Idol.
Others competitors will include LeapFrog Enterprises Inc.'s Leapster, which can be used to play educational games and videos. Kids who already own a Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s portable video game player Game Boy Advance can use cartridges by Majesco Holdings Inc. to watch cartoons and television shows.
"There's a huge opportunity out there for Game Boy Advance because there's millions out there and it has the virtue of being a game player," said Harris Nesbitt Gerard analyst Sean McGowan. "I wonder what the long-term market position for VideoNow will be when there are so many other alternatives out there."
And with the intense price cutting among consumer electronics retailers during the winter holidays, portable DVD players could go below $100, adding more competition to the mix.
McGowan expects the new portable entertainment players to be popular.
"It's cheap babysitting," he said. "Someone once said religion is the opiate of the masses. I say entertainment is the opiate of the mass consumer."
DivXNetworks Powers Secure Online Video-on-Demand Service For Wind; Leading Italian Web Portal Libero.it to Offer High-Quality Video Content Powered by DivX Open Video System
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 16, 2004--DivXNetworks, Inc., the company that created the revolutionary, patent-pending DivX video compression technology, and Wind, a leading Italian telecommunications company, have signed an agreement for the launch of a secure, DivX-powered video-on-demand service offered through Libero.it, Wind's popular Italian web portal.
The new video-on-demand service is powered by the DivX Open Video System, an end-to-end solution for the secure delivery of DVD-quality video over IP networks. Wind will offer a variety of full-length, premium DivX encoded video content to subscribers to the Libero web portal. Libero.it is among Italy's most visited web portals with over 8 million unique monthly visitors. The secure DivX files offered on Libero are downloaded and played on consumer PCs and will soon be playable on any of the millions of DivX Certified consumer electronics devices hitting the market in 2004.
The DivX-powered Wind Video-on-Demand service provides high-quality video at sizes 7 to 10 times smaller than DVD and utilizes full Digital Rights Management (DRM) for unparalleled security. The DivX Open Video System is a secure video-on-demand service that enables consumers with high-speed Internet connections to purchase or rent selected titles online and begin viewing DVD-quality content almost immediately. Thanks to "progressive download" technology, users can begin viewing the films in full-screen, high-quality format a few minutes after the download has begun.
"We are excited to launch the first major telecommunications deployment of a secure DivX video-on-demand system with Wind, an innovative company that is providing real value to their broadband customers with great entertainment services," said Kevin Hell, chief marketing officer and managing director at DivXNetworks, Inc. "Libero subscribers can now enjoy a wide-range of DVD-quality video content directly on their PCs and will soon be able to playback those same files on a variety of DivX Certified DVD players and portable video players."
The DivX Open Video System, one of the world's most successful secure, IP-based video-on-demand solutions, has been running successfully for over 2 years without a compromise in security and currently powers over 17,000 full-length titles from over 75 content providers. The DivX digital rights management system uses industry-standard encryption and security technology to enable millions of secure transactions provided through partner websites utilizing both rental and purchase models to create a seamless and secure user experience.
For more information on DivX video, visit www.divxnetworks.com. To learn more about the new VOD service from Wind Telecommunications, visit www.libero.it.
About DivXNetworks