The exploding market for both hard disk drive and Flash-based portable audio players is expected to reach over 104 million units by 2009, up from 27.8 million units in 2004, reports In-Stat. Drivers for this booming market include falling prices, the availability of legitimate subscription and pay-per-download online music sites, smaller hard disk drives, and increasing Flash memory capacities. In-Stat also reports revenue for both HDD and Flash-based MP3 players reached approximately $4.5 billion, a remarkable increase of almost 200 percent over 2003. Apple is the leader in worldwide portable audio players with 30.2 percent of the combined HDD and Flash-based portable audio player market. Other leading vendors include Rio, iRiver and Creative. In-Stat expects that 1GB capacity or greater Flash MP3 players will represent just over 20 percent of all Flash-based MP3 player shipments worldwide by the end of this year. Consumer survey data shows that the percentage of US respondents owning a digital audio player has increased from 16 percent in 2001 to 25 percent in 2005.
Every executive who has approved a connected product roadmap has made a quiet assumption: the network underneath it will still be there. That assumption is about to be tested at a scale the automotive industry has never faced. The global connected vehicle installed base is heading toward a billion units, and the cellular technology most of those vehicles depend on is scheduled to begin its retirement before the end of the decade. For automakers, fleet operators, insurers, and the telecom carriers that serve them, the question is whether the recurring revenue those services promise can survive a connectivity layer with a shorter life than the vehicle carrying it. How Scale Meets an Expiry Date Omdia research forecasts that the global connected vehicle installed base will surpass 1.05 billion units by 2035, up from 473.7 million in 2025. Few installed bases of any kind more than double in a decade, and this one signals that connectivity is moving from premium differentiator to baseline e...