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Happy New Years!

According to Business Week Sony may be announcing an E-Book reader here in the U.S. in the $300 to $500 range. Now as a big reader of e-Books on my Palm I can hardly wait to see what this device is. If it is anything like the Libre they released in Japan and without the [...]

BBC News
Albums sales in the US dipped by 7% in 2005 but the music download market doubled over the past year, according to early figures.
Sales stood at 602.2 million during the year, down from 650.8 million in 2004, report analysts Nielsen Soundscan.
Downloaded music reached 332.7 million for 2005, an increase of 148% on the previous [...]

Merry Christmas!

It seems that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer wants to know if the major music labels have been breaking anti-trust law in the pricing of songs in the digital music download market. Who knows if there is any merit to this, but given their track record it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Tags: Apple, [...]

MacNN Apple’s iPod is an overwhelming success in Japan. The company has a roughly 60 percent marketshare–as of the middle of November–in the country, or about six times that of its archrival Sony.
Sony has really screwed things up. How does a great company be so behind in so many areas that they used to dominate. [...]

BBC Microsoft has advised Mac users of Internet Explorer to switch to rival browsers such as Apple’s Safari.
That baby has been dead for years, now it’s official.

Tags: Apple, IE, Microsoft

WSJ.com …. though, there’s little Christmas cheer to go around. During the crucial Thanksgiving week, for instance, the top 10 albums sold 40% fewer copies than the top 10 albums the same week in 2004. Album sales so far this year are down 7.8%, according to Nielsen SoundScan, compared with the same point a [...]

WP
Online search engine leader Google Inc. will begin giving some musical artists the star treatment by spotlighting links to their songs, lyrics and other related material at the top of the results page.
The music section, scheduled to debut Thursday, is designed to provide a more direct route to the content that most music fans want [...]

MacMinute Online auctioneer eBay today announced that Apple’s iPod mini, which was discontinued in stores September 7th, is “is holding its own against Apple’s sleek new iPod nano.” eBay Marketplace Research, a new service that offers sellers and buyers visibility into listing, bidding and pricing trends on eBay, was used to determine these sales data [...]

CNET News.com is reporting that though they are late to the party MTV and Microsoft are teaming up and launching a new music service called Urge in 2006 and it will be integrated into a new version of Windows Media Player. I’m sure it will be the market leader in the also-ran(not iTunes) segment of [...]

Over at TUAW
Dave Winer, known in some circles as the first blogger, the creator of RSS, and the man who invented Podcasting (or was that Adam Curry?) has gotten a press pass to cover Macworld. Hurrah for bloggers, right? Well, not so fast spanky. I’m a blogger, a blogger who covers Apple news obsessively [...]

AppleInsider
Sources familiar with the company’s plans describe the new products as “iPod companions” rather than “accessories,” and say Apple appears ripe to announce the first of the gadgets as early as the second week of January at the annual Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Calif. ……
Details of the device are few and far between, but [...]

Over at Business Week they have an article which states that iTunes may be losing it’s luster as legal digital music downloads have slowed. Also, covered is that the iPod shuts out other music services out, the subscripition model and variable pricing on songs. Here some relevant quotes.
Which brings us to a grand irony: Apple, [...]

Yahoo! News
Google Inc. had its price target lifted by Credit Suisse First Boston to $475 from $400, with CSFB saying it believes the momentum behind the online advertising market is accelerating. The broker told clients that its proprietary survey of chief marketing officers showed that 45 percent of them intend to increase their Internet ad [...]

Think Secret is reporting that Apple is on track to release a Intel-based 13.3 inch widescreen iBook replacing the current 14.1 inch model. The new iBook will sport a resolution of 1280 by 720.

Tags: Apple, iBook

baltimoresun.com
Businesses are finding their way to the latest domain of the high-tech counterculture, and this time it didn’t take them long. In what amounts to a nationwide social experiment, corporate America is testing whether this cheap and quirky medium proves useful in the battle to reach the public, communicate meaningfully with employees and keep costs [...]

New York Times has a nice piece on Vlogs or some call it Video Podcasts.

Tags: Podcast, Video, Vlogs

Chicago Tribune
Now that some podcasters are pulling in hundreds of thousands of listeners a month, advertisers are setting their sights on the downloadable audio programs as a viable marketing channel.
That’s spawning an ecosystem of companies hoping to capitalize on the emerging medium. And it’s letting some podcasters begin to seriously think about quitting their day [...]

del.icio.us blog
We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their [...]