Metue.com

Apple appears to have bought up large amounts of flash memory fueling a new round of iPhone 3.0 rumors.  The company was also hit with a new patent infringement lawsuit. In detail…

THE FLASH
Memory orders are often monitored as potential indicators of consumer electronics production changes.  It’s not an exact science as companies routinely adjust inventory on parts to hedge against price fluctuations, or to satisfy demand,  still spikes in volume can be significant.

Apple has a contract to buy its flash memory chips from Samsung, Toshiba, Hynix, and Micron through 2010.

Think Equity Partners reported in February that Apple had bought up much of Samsung’s supply of flash memory. Digitimes reported today that Apple’s recently snagged another 100m 8Gb NAND Flash memory, mostly from Samsung as well.

Click to Read More

Legend has it, the great blues musician Robert Johnson went down to a crossroads and made a deal with the devil.  In exchange for unfounded musical talent, the story says, he traded his soul.   It was a yes or no choice; be a guitar hero, or not.   He chose the immortality of his music.

The music industry is hardly so fantastic but like the legend, the thin line between the industry’s successes and failures, or evolution and regression, seems to hinge on the big decisions made when the road of progress forks.

Looking at the music business over the last decade, as its struggled to evolve to the changing digital landscape, two pivotal moments jump out.  The first was the evolution of file sharing networks and how the music industry chose to handle them.   The second was the advent of Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption and how the music industry steered its early use.

Now, it’s starting to look like the industry is reaching a third crossroads: license fee rates for streaming services .

Click to Read More

Disney’s castle has been locked down tightly when it comes to distributing its video programming online but that now appears to be changing. Last week, word leaked that the company was discussing a possible content partnership and equity stake in News Corp’s and NBC / Universal’s joint venture, Hulu. This week, today, the Disney Media Group announced a content deal with YouTube.

The new arrangement will lead to the launch of several ad-supported YouTube channels featuring short-form programming from Disney’s ESPN, ABC, and SOAPnet brands. 

Click to Read More

Advertising is sometimes seen as the great subsidizer, the mighty and powerful Oz that can pay for all kinds of Internet media.  But Oz couldn’t give the Scarecrow a brain and advertising can’t give all Internet content businesses a good looking income statement.  Free (ad-supported) online radio stations are a case in point.  As the sites grow in audience scale, the license fees behind the music they stream grows too.  Pennies (or even fractions thereof) per song play adds up fast when millions of users are lounging in the soundscape.  Paying that expense with ad income can be a difficult calculus when ad markets are trim.

Click to Read More

The battle for e-book reader dominance isn’t the kind of consumer product war that’s likely to raise a big audience.  Despite Amazon’s high profile Kindle, the market for e-book devices is, for now, relatively small.  Still, that’s not stopping companies from asserting claims or taking shots.  Earlier this week Discovery Communications reached for its piece with a patent infringement suit levied at Amazon.  Today, Sony and Google took a subtle jab of their own at Kindle.

In a press release this morning, the companies announced they were partnering to make more than five hundred thousand public domain titles Google has digitally archived available to Sony reader owners at no charge.

These books, which include works ranging from Mark Twain to Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen, are all clear of copyright restrictions.   Google’s digitized them as part of its book search program.

Making them available for Sony’s reader will expand Sony’s library catalog of available content to near 600k titles.  That will put the company well ahead of Amazon’s approximately 250k titles.

Indirectly emphasizing what’s been positioned as a major difference between Sony’s product and Amazon’s, Click to Read More

The teeth associated with Discovery Communications (“Discovery”) are usually those flashed on Animal Planet, during the company’s “Shark Week” TV programming on the Discovery Channel, or when host Bear Grylls eats something disgusting, but it turns out the company’s legal department has plenty of bite of its own.

Today, Discovery filed a suit against Amazon in Delaware US District Court claiming Amazon’s popular Kindle e-book platform willfully infringes on a patent granted Discovery on Nov. 20th, 2007.

Discovery is seeking damages, repayment of legal fees, and in lieu of an injunction blocking Kindle sales, an ongoing royalty.  Discovery has also requested “treble damages,” the legal term for punitive damages up to triple the compensatory finding if Amazon is found in the wrong.

Click to Read More

The occasional journalist Mark Twain famously told a newspaper reporter that the report of his death was an exaggeration.  For the staff at Seattle’s daily Post-Intelligencer, reports of the paper’s death were anything but.  After weeks of rumor, failed efforts to sell the paper, and a last tortuous week of expectation, Hearst finally pulled the band aid off the wound and confirmed today that it’s stopping the presses at its Seattle property.

In place of the P-I, Hearst is set to launch a reworked, digital-only news service.  Hearst representatives explicitly avoided calling the new incarnation a newspaper, however.  The goal, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack, Jr., said in a statement, is to turn Seattlepi.com into “the leading news and information portal in the region.”

“Seattlepi.com isn’t a newspaper online – it’s an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information website at its core,” explained Hearst president Steven Swartz.

Click to Read More