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Samsung Steals the Brain Behind the iPod
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times reports that Samsung has hired the same programming genius who helped make the iPod so great to design its own music player. They imply that the new Samsung device is just as innovative." From the article: "Samsung's choice of Mr. Mercer also shows how much consumer electronics now rely on the powerful computing capabilities that defined personal computers two decades ago. Samsung is betting that it can win a share of the music market dominated by Apple by using new software that mimics what is found in powerful PC's. The Z5, shaped like a stick of gum, has a 1.8-inch color screen and a 35-hour battery life, and is priced at $199 to $249 to compete with the iPod Nano, which costs $149 to $249. Early reviews have been positive, and Samsung is hoping that the Z5 will work smoothly with the range of subscription music services that support the Microsoft PlaysForSure digital music standard."
While Wall Street was giving a non-stop parade of new "buy" recommendations for Google on CNBC over the last 30 days, it might be interesting to know what they were actually doing with their own clients' money:
Of the top 11 institutions that own Google shares, as reported by the SEC, 9 have been selling Google shares like there's no tomorrow.
Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Jennison Associates have each dumped roughly 35 percent of their entire holdings of Google stock. Alliance Capital Management has sold 13 percent of their stake, and Wellington Management has unloaded 18 percent of their shares.
No major shareholder of Google has reported a net addition in shares to their holdings in the last 30 days.
Let me spell it out for you- the smart money is dumping Google as fast as they can into the hands of the "dumb" retail investors.
Were you people even alive during 1999? Do you not remember that every single Wall Street firm paid billions in fines to the SEC for pumping and dumping worthless dot.com shares to the public? What exactly, will it take to wake you guys up?
BTW- Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, sold over 100 million dollars of stock on February 22 this year. IN ONE DAY.
The total amount of shares sold by Enron executives is less than 2% of the amount of stock sold by Google insiders in the last 12 months alone. Don't say I didn't warn you.
I'd been avoiding the whole mini-mp3/video ipod thing, but recently caved into my young daughter's pleas for a PSP. It plays games, it plays mp4 movies, it plays mp3's, has a *usable* screen size, has easily removable memory sticks, and has reasonable battery life (I was able to use it to watch two feature-length movies on a single charge on a recent flight to Tokyo and still had enough juice to play games for an hour or two afterwards). I can't imagine wanting anything much smaller as the screen just becomes too unusable.
Cheers,