News for Friday, 3 October 2008

The Copyright Royalty Board defines among other things the royalties that online music store have to pay per sold track to the Majors or right owners. One of topic of the discussion was linked to the recent request made by the National Music Publishers' Association to increase royalties from 9 cents to 15 cents per track.
Last year, apple announced that with such increase, the Company will not make any money out of its online store and would then close it down as the unified price per track can not be discussed. Facing such reaction from the leading online store, the Copyright Royalty Board decided last year to maintain royalties to 9 cents per track, and renewed it too for the coming year. However, the relationships between Apple and music Majors remain difficult: the leader of online music stores (80% market share) is a new source of revenues for Majors, however it does not compensate the lost of income linked to the lower usage of physical media.

After having turned the web into its favorite domain, Google launched several WebApps dedicated to customers, and turning their computers into a terminal as software and required computing tasks are running on Google servers. Adobe decided to follow by offering light version of its key application as WebApps, as well as promoting its Flash format.
Microsoft could be strongly impacted if Google and Adobe WebApps become so popular that end users will not need to have MS Office installed locally on their computers. In a recent interview, Steve Ballmer indicates that a "cloud version" of Office/Windows should arrive soon. If this is the strategy followed by most of the key players, will Apple have to follow? Not necessarily. If one looks at MobileMe, one can already identify the first stones of a potential WebApps suite, and by simply adding some functions and defined applications over time, it could at the end offer an online iLife-light service to Mac users (most likely restricted to MobileMe account owners)

As we reported it already several times, future notebook will feature 16:9 display in order to adopt the proper format for HD video. According to recent information, 11% of notebooks to be manufactures in Q4 2008 will have such format, indicating its rather fast adoption by OEM and customers. For some manufacturers such as BenQ it represents one third of its production. So, one will have to choose between the current 16:10 format and the new video-oriented 16:9.

For RAM module manufacturers, this is a dark period as prices of their products keep going down. Their financial income dropped again by 10% in September, and with the current economic crisis, they expect to loose 20% more in a short term.
Some manufacturers have stopped production lines to reduce the volume of modules available on the market, but it seems that it remains ineffective.
So, customers should still have the opportunity to buy cheap RAM modules for the coming days and months, as resellers and distributors have large stocks to be emptied.

According to http://www.xbitlabs.com, ATI demoed its future Radeon HD 4000 Mobility during the Ceatec, an event taking place in Japan,
If we currently ignore the performance level of such GPUs and how they will be integrated in different cards, some of the unveiled details are interesting:
- Those new GPU Mobility will be also available as MXM format, so making possible to exchange the GPU without changing computer or motherboard. This connector is already used by Apple in the iMac 24". However, it is not really useful for end users as Apple does not offer GPU upgrade for those iMacs.
- As with desktop; one will be able to install two of those Mobility cards in the same computer in order to make them working simultaneously to boost 3D rendering, an interesting detail with the forthcoming Snow Leopard.

A rumor is currently indicating that Fujitsu might sell its Storage Division due to lack of financial profitability. If the company announces to be considering all options, Western Digital seems to hold the pole position.
It would not be so surprising since WD is expecting to come back as a strong leader in the storage business and the recent acquisition of Maxtor by Seagate is a new giant to compete with. By acquiring Fujitsu Storage Division, WD would then gain technology and market share in the 2.5" HD market massively used in notebooks by OEM.

Apple proposes via the update module for the Apple TV to download a new version 2.2 of its firmware.
It fixes a security breaches caused by reading a file specifically prepared with this in mind and it also adds the Genius function to the device, a thing that Apple finds important since this function will enable them to encourage you to buy more online music.

A small update is available since last night for iTunes taking us to version 8.0.1(58.5 MB via software update). For once (and we are not complaining) the description of the corrections are detaileded

iTunes 8 includes Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together. Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don't already have.
With iTunes 8, browse your artists and albums visually with the new Grid view; download your favorite TV shows in HD quality from the iTunes Store; sync your media with iPod nano (4th generation), iPod classic (120GB), and iPod touch (2nd generation); and enjoy a stunning new music visualizer.
iTunes 8 and iTunes U are now accessible with VoiceOver on your Mac.
iTunes 8.0.1 improves stability and performance and provides a number of important bug fixes, including:
• Seamlessly plays the current song when creating a new Genius playlist.
• Improves syncing spoken menus to iPod nano.
• Addresses an issue of deleting HD TV episodes when downloading.
• Improves checking for updates from the App Store
• Improves accessibility with VoiceOver.
• Addresses problems syncing Genius results to iPod.

In September, Real announced it's new software for PCs, RealDVD. It allows the contents of a commercial DVD video to be copied to a computer. According to Real, the fact that it uses DRM (similar to what is done with those from the iTunes store) makes it legal.
The major movie studios don't agree with Real, and six of them (in other words all of them) have decided to pursue Real Networks. They believe that ill-intentioned people will only rent the movies before copying them, rather then buying them. These arguments are valid, and may sway the results. However, everyone know how easy it is to get rid of CSS on DVDs today. At least Real's software has the merit of not allowing files to be shared on the internet.