Creative Technology Wins Ipod Lawsuit
Marketing News August 24th, 2006
Creative Technology Ltd. is finally getting their just rewards. Under an agreement annoucned Wednesday, Apple Computer Inc. will pay $100 million to its’ rival. In June, the U.S. International Trade Commission agreed to investigate whether the Apple iPod infringed on Creative’s patent for a navigation system used to organize and access music on its Zen Player. Thankfully, the federal agency did not side with Creative and over 8.1 million iPods were sold in the three months following the investigation. Apple has admitted no wrongdoing and has filed two countersuits against Creative. (Yahoo News)

No doubt social networks are generating major revenues this year. After Google struck a deal with MySpace to be the sole search engine advertising provider for the site Microsoft has now aligned with Facebook to be the sole provider of banner advertising and sponsored links. “We chose Microsoft because it, like Facebook, is a technology company at its core and is committed to taking a fresh approach to targeting advertising to social media,” Owen Van Natta, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said in a prepared statement.
Martijin Engelbregt, who apparently has not registered with the
Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it is finally taking cyber squatters to court. These cyber squatters have been buying up the domain names containing trademarked Microsoft product names, services, and common misspellings. Doing so has helped these cyber squatters profit illegally from pay per click advertisements. “This land rush on the Internet was to collect as many domain names as possible and monetize them using pay-per-click ads,” said Aaron Kornblum, a Microsoft lawyer in charge of its Internet safety enforcement. Microsoft filed the suit against three persons who have registered “324 domain names targeting the software maker” according to Yahoo! News.
It’s the Worlds First Interactive Talking Men’s Bathroom Urinal Cakes! But don’t get too excited just yet. I remember when I was in Middle School (and in High School) when students would run for school office. There would be hundreds of posters, flyers, and tidbits around the school. As the mallicious trouble maker I sought myself out to be in a private school, I would unsuspectingly rip down the flyers with the candidates face on it and put it in a urinal. The rest explains itself.
Paris Hilton may not yet own the world but she’s headed in the right direction. Many thought and were proven right that Kevin Federline’s album would be a flop and it was. But no one could’ve suspected that Paris Hilton’s new album that just hit stores today would be a Top 20 Hit on The Billboard charts. What marketing tactics did she employ that would make people pay a “premium” for what many would believe to be a piece of garbage coming from a dimwitted celebrity? Clever Marketing is the only answer I can think of along with a legion of high priced producers and writers. Not too long ago Ms. Hilton “lost” a sex tape which helped drive her video across the world online. Then there was her hit TV Series “The Simple Life” which capitalized on Jessica Simpson’s “idiot” type personality on her show “Nick and Jessica” on the MTV Network. Don’t forget all of her public appearences and being world renowned as a paid party starter.
The estimated $74 billion dollar a year ad market is a piece of the pie that Google wants to devour. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, the company wants to creat target ads to TV watchers so they won’t be wasting their time watching ads for products they’ll never be interested in (think of the college students who have to endure all the Depends ads on The Price Is Right). I have no idea how Google plans on narrowing a target market such as this. It remains unclear. Online, monitoring demographics is obviously much easier and part to Google’s success with AdWords. They could target ads based on the time and channel your watching in conjunction with your web browsing. It might be some other way. We’ll have to play the waiting game and keep everyone up to date on the matter.
When I first ran across these new
If you’re me and without an iPod or MP3 digital player alternative then this is for you. Monday, SanDisk introduced a new digital music player that stores 2 TIMES as many songs as the iPod Nano for the same price. A perfect buy this holiday season. The SanDisk player has an amazing 8 gigabytes of storage capacity or 2,000 songs worth of music. The cost? Only $249.00! “The most costly ingredient in a flash-based (music) player is the flash memory,” said Eric Bone, director of audio/video product marketing at SanDisk. “Since we make the flash memory, we essentially remove the middleman and pass that savings directly to the consumer.”

