The RIAA is going after one of its largest paying customers, XM Radio. The RIAA claims that XM’s new product under the Inno name is too much like an MP3 player or an MP3 recorder and therefore is not covered under XM’s current arrangement whereby XM pays to broadcast music. The music industry wanted XM to pay a similar rate such as is imposed on Apple and Sirius (XM’s largest competitor) for the download of music in addition to the broadcast. XM feels that the recording industry is trying to double charge its customers, who pay $12.95 per month and under XM’s vision would not have to pay for a download.

“The lawsuit seeks $150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM Satellite customers using the devices, which went on sale weeks ago. The company said it played 160,000 different songs every month.” This quote out of the New York Times is slightly out of context as XM does state that it broadcasts 160,000 songs each month, but does not say how many songs are being recorded onto these devices.

XM has apparently ruffled some feathers with one of its most important partners, the RIAA. XM had attempted to play nice with the RIAA, this lawsuit seems to indicate a severe breakdown between the partners. Maven Mapper’s next line of inquiry will be to review XM’s financials and compare them to Sirius who by recent accounts has agreed to pay the RIAA the fees they seek.

Its curious that Sirius has accepted this and XM has fought it now all the way to court.

Recording Industry Sues XM Satellite Radio - New York Times

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Microsoft is working hard to catch up with Google. We have to wonder if they will be able to succeed. After all, Microsoft has a terrible track record of throwing money at a problem in an attempt to grab the number 1 or number 2 position. Everyone has witnessed how poorly Microsoft’s efforts paid off when they attempted to bump IBM’s OS2 and Apple’s OS out of the market, not to mention poor showings in forays with Netscape navigator, and Real Player. Microsoft obviously tanked in all those matchups. . . .Well actually they didn’t, they took market leads in all areas. They have been much less successful with web design tools as Frontpage has faired miserably against Dreamweaver, but MS has a solution to that as well with Microsoft Expression, which is even offered Free through the end of the year!

Currently Microsoft is number 3 for ad revenues behind Google and Yahoo!. They would like to catch up in advertising and in search. They are hoping to leverage their presence in mobile phones, gaming systems, and Digital television to help take share by creating a bigger market. Google may hold a lead in web browsing alone, but expand that out to advertising in gaming consoles and Microsoft has an obvious advantage with Xbox 360 (Oh and they are trying to beat Sony and Nintendo in that market too.)

Microsoft is often lauded as being slow to develop and poor at creating great new applications, however they are great at playing catch up! They are also very good at waging a multi-front assault on many different competitors at one time.

Microsoft is rapidly turning itself into the General Electric of Software and Internet technology, building out many very broad and increasingly very deep markets.

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Palm has brought the Treo 700p to market and will be offering the phone through Sprint and Verizon Wireless. Each carrier has yet to announce their respective pricing points or plans for this phone.

The phone functions on networks using EVDO (Evolution Data Optimized), which allows it to operate with on the cellular networks at broadband like speeds.

This is Palm’s first Treo with the Palm OS to become available on a smartphone for EVDO networks. The Treo 700W came out last fall featuring a Microsoft OS.

The PDA market has slipped in recent years overtaken by Smartphones and wireless laptops. This device capitalizes on Palm’s dedicated Palm OS user base. Not so long ago, Palm PDA’s held a 70-80% market share in PDA’s due to the flexibility of the OS and the plethora of cheap software titles that functioned on this OS. This new phone will be targeted towards the users still on this OS using these tools.

Among other things this new phone will be able to receive emails much faster and support the download of large attachments via email. The network allows for streaming of multimedia and the Treo 700p will ship with a streaming media application allowing users to watch live TV(see picture left screen shot of video), movie clips and audio from radio stations. For the corporate buyers it could even be used to run training videos and corporate communications.

One of the exceptional capabilities of the 700p verses the 700w is its built in ability to allow Dial-up Networking via the phone. [Of course someone has spelled out a useless acronym for Dial-up networking, which is DUN, but we can all rapidly forget that one!)

Basically DU . . . - Dial-up Networking will allow users to connect their laptops or other devices to the internet via there Treo 700p. Both Sprint, which purchased Nextel, and Verizon Wireless cater to users that need to be able to access the high speed internet from anywhere, whether the user is a Wall Street Broker, a DC lobbyist or a truck driver checking a load board for freight. (BJ and the Bear just got Broadband!)

Other great new features include:

• 1.3 megapixel camera and camcorder -[4 x resolution of a VGA camera]
• Photo & video album Organization software
• Slideshow tool that allows music and audio captions and transitions to be added to pictures and video
• NormSoft’s Pocket Tunes for MP3 files (plays anything from Microsoft’s PlaysForSure - Janus DRM technology - Screen shot right)
• Out of box support for Yahoo!, AOL & Gmail
• PDF Support w/ DataViz Documents to Go V8.0
• Palm OS 5.4.9

• Memory - 128mb total built in (68 supporting product as is, 60mb available for user)
• SD memory Cards will support up to 2GB of storage

For Treo enthusiasts on the Verizon or Sprint networks this is going to be a must have upgrade. For users on other networks, it may be one to wait for or it may be worth considering a move over to Verizon. While Sprint may be tempting, this reviewer is still receiving too many negative reports from current Sprint customers (former Nextel customers and regular Sprint customers.) Sprint may have an EVDO capable network, but they still seem to be struggling to overcome many fundamental issues.

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