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Saturday, 1 April 2006
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Quite an interesting article on the iPod/iTunes Music Store dominance in which the author concludes that Steve Jobs's control is the key to its current success, and also to its decline as predicted by the author. The argument is essentially that the big guns of Google and Microsoft, or someone like them only have to enter the market at full bore with more open systems to relegate iPod/iTunes to a niche market in the way that Windows did to the MacOS.
We'll see.
My favourite sentence is the last one.
We will witness the creation and destruction of a market
dominance in the time it used to take to work up a business
plan.
[The Age Technology Headlines]
11:53:19 PM 
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David Pescovitz:
Scientists at the University of Bristol are studying the "ears" of locusts, membranes that oscillate on the scale of nanometers. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.) They're also measuring the movements of mosquito antennae (seen here) in response to sound. According to the researchers, insights into insect hearing could someday lead to novel microphone technology inspired by nature.
From a press release (photo by D. Robert):
Professor Daniel Robert is the research leader at Bristol: "We have found that different sound frequencies elicit very different mechanical responses in the locust hearing system. By studying these tiny nanoscale movements and understanding how sound waves are turned into mechanical responses we may be able to develop microphones based on the functions of natural hearing. These could detect very faint sounds and analyse their frequency, something that current microphones cannot pick up."
Sounds excellently cool.
Link
[Boing Boing]
5:09:58 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 4/5/06; 7:27:15 AM.
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