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.
