Music Sales Weaken
Global music sales fell by 4% in the first half to $8.4bn in trade values, or $13.7bn at the retail level. In 2005, the industry declined by 3%. Revenues from physical formats, such as compact discs and music videos, were down 10% worldwide, compared with the 6.7% decline seen in the previous full year. CD sales and prices have been hard hit by the ready availability of pirated physical copies, illegal peer-to-peer services and the fact that the growing market for digital downloads has allowed many consumers to buy single tracks rather than entire albums. The legal digital music market continued to accelerate, rising 106% to $945m, or 11% of the total recorded music market - double the share it claimed at the end of 2005. In the US, where digital sales increased by 84%, online and mobile music now accounts for 18% of the total market.

Vista Coming in December
Microsoft has revealed a general release date for its upcoming operating system Vista — 5 December, 2006. The launch Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 on 5 December and Windows client sales professional at Microsoft. Microsoft had originally slated Vista for a 2006 fourth quarter release, then revised Vista's estimated time of arrival to January 2007. The business version of Vista — Vista Business — is still expected in November. Further versions of Vista expcted to hit the market in December are Ultimate, Home Basic and Home Premium. Microsoft also firmed up the release dates for its server product Exchange 2007 and for Office 2007, having previously said the products would be available "late 2006 or early 2007.

DOJ targets top chipmakers
US authorities have launched another investigation into the sales and marketing practices used by firms in the computer memory chip industry. Samsung and Cypress Seminconductor, makers of Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) chips, are helping with the Department of Justice (DOJ) enquiries. The two firms, among the biggest chipmakers in the world, have both confirmed that they are in contact with the DOJ about the latest investigation, into SRAM chips. The investigation will be undertaken by the Department's Antitrust Division, although it is not clear whether the enquiries are focussed on price-fixing, dumping or other practices. SRAM chips provide rapid access to data in computer and telephone networks. The much bigger DRAM market specialises in lower-performance chips that store data while a device is turned on.

Telefonica Going after Germany
Telefónica in Germany is gearing up for a full scale assault on the German IPTV market and said it will upgrade its core network using Siemens Communications to expand its inner-core backbone. Siemens will use routers from Juniper Networks and metro Ethernet switches from Extreme Networks and integrate them in the backbone network in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Düsseldorf. Telefónica plans to supply more than 1,500 cities and towns with the high-speed internet technology ADSL2+ by mid-2007, reaching 60% of German households. At present the network is mostly sold through ISPs that do not have a network of their own.

Hotel traditions fading quickly away

This Buslink Pro 2 flash drive from CDW is meant for the uber-rich. No, its not made of gold or platinum and is not encrusted with diamonds but, it features 64GB data storage all in the slim shape that looks more like a cigarette lighter. And, the 64GB flash drice costs a jaw-dropping $5,740. So, for that kind of price for a flash drive, you need to be superrichright folks! But, if you cant afford to buy it in lump-sum then Ubergizmo reports, you can even get a loan on it $180 monthly which will continue to 32 months of repayments that too exclusive of interests.

Cool Gadget - RAmos' RM400 portable media player
Chinese manufacturer RAmos has a new portable media player for those who prefer their gadgets with a little of the Midas touch, recently announcing its RM400 player. This one boasts a 2.2-inch QVGA display, MPEG-4 and AVI video support, plain-old MP3s on the audio front, 512MB of built-in flash memory and an SD slot to add up to 2GB more.


Today's Site To Peek At:
RealTravel has very deep travel content - mostly written by users, and some from a recent partnership with Frommer’s. The site has an active community of tens of thousands of frequent travelers who talk about theirexperiences and freely give their recommendations via blogs, forums, photos, etc. RealTravel new My Trip Plan tool, which can be found in the main navigation area. Travel content on the site includes an “add to My Trip Plan” button. Clicking this basically cuts and pastes the information into the My Trip Plan area along with a link to the original content, and this information can then be shared with others for discussion. TripHub and Yahoo, among others, also offer good trip planning tools. RealTravel’s new My Trip Planner actually falls short of those existing tools in terms of pure organizational features. However, the depth of content available from other travelers gives RealTravel a different kind of advantage. And while RealTravel can create better planning tools over time, it will be hard for competitors to compete with RealTravel’s active traveling and content-creating community.All the content on RealTravel (except the Frommer’s Guide content) is drawn directly from user posts and photos that are categorised by location and type. Editors, with the help of some automated classification, and choose the cream of the crop to be featured on the site. Readers can also affect the ranking of posts by voting on them or implicity when they add the content to their trip plan. All this content populates the site’s info on trip ideas, photos, blogs, dining reviews, sight reviews, useful links, and hotel reviews. The blogging platform performs like any other blog (RSS included) except you catagorise by location and type (if it’s a review or not) before you write up the entry. You can’t drop drop images directly in a post, but instead associate some photos with it via an image gallery. You can print these photos out later using Qoop. Readers can comment on posts or leave questions in RealTravel’s location specific forums.

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