Hitachi was first to hit the terabyte mark when it announced the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive in January 2007. Fast forward a year and a half, and the company is back with not a larger version of the drive but a more efficient model in the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Like its predecessor, the 7K1000.B is a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm hard drive that serves up 1TB of storage space and a 32MB buffer. It hits that magic terabyte mark, however, by using only three disks–down from the five-disk design of the older 1TB drive. It also borrows from Hitachi’s 2.5-inch mobile drives and includes Bulk Data Encryption.
Hitachi says the new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent compared with last year’s model. Fewer platters should also mean improved reliability, acoustics, and seek times. The Deskstar 7K1000.B also matches Samsung’s Spinpoint F1, which was the first three-disk drive to offer 1TB of capacity.
While desktops go missing at a much slower rate than laptops, that didn’t deter Hitachi from offering Bulk Data Encryption on the Deskstar 7K1000.B. This feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and decrypts when it’s retrieved. This hard drive-level security is superior to software or system-level security measures, and it has no impact on system performance.
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B will sell for $239 when it starts shipping later this month. Hitachi will also ship the Deskstar E7K1000 this month for $279, an enterprise version of the drive designed for low-duty-cycle, 24×7 applications.
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As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.
This announcement has been a long time coming, as Flash developers have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Adobe acknowledges this in its announcement, saying that although search engines are able to index static text and links within Flash SWF files, “[Rich Internet Applications] and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states—a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.”
This announcement may also result in some major usability changes (for the better) for Flash on the web. In a post to its Webmaster Central Blog, Google wrote that it can now index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, like that included in Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, entirely self-contained Flash web sites, “and everything in between.” Google can now also follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not, however, include FLV files (video files that are found on sites like YouTube) because those are generated as videos and don’t contain any text elements like an SWF file does.
Google says it’s able to do this by developing an algorithm that “explores Flash files in the same way that a person would,” by clicking buttons and manually going through Flash content. “Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed,” wrote the company. “We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.”
Of course, Google (and eventually Yahoo) won’t be able to index everything embedded within a Flash file—at least not yet. Anything that is image-related, including text that is embedded into images, will be invisible to the search engines for the time being. Google also noted that it can’t execute certain JavaScripts that may be embedded into a Flash file, and that while it indexes content that is contained in a separate HTML or XML file, it won’t be counted as part of the content in the Flash file. These are all issues that are being worked on, however, and are likely to change in the future.
Yahoo is also working with Adobe to index SWF files, but doesn’t appear to be as far along as Google just yet. One player that is noticeably missing is Microsoft, though. From Adobe’s announcement and the language used by Google, it appears as if each search engine has to work with Adobe to make this possible—meaning that Microsoft has either been excluded by Adobe for this round or has decided to voluntarily sit this one out. Either way, with searchable SWF files down, usability experts can now focus all of their attention on other Flash-related concerns, like blatant design perversion and excessive animation abuse.
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Nokia wants some of Apple’s rhythm. On July 1 the Finnish mobile-phone maker said that Warner Music Group has agreed to participate in Nokia’s fledgling music service, making Warner the third of the major record labels to join in the effort. The move is one more step in Nokia’s effort to compete against Apple for the people who want to carry around music libraries in their pockets.
Nokia’s service, which will officially launch in the second half of this year, is called Comes With Music. It will be built into certain Nokia handsets and will allow customers to download unlimited amounts of music from participating labels. The downloaded music can be kept on a PC or mobile-phone forever. In theory, a consumer could download every single song from the labels’ catalogs; they’d simply need a very big hard drive on which to store the files. Nokia and its partners have not disclosed pricing for the service, but they believe it has plenty of potential. “We believe this will be a significant contributor of revenue over a long-term basis for Nokia,” says Liz Schimel, global head of music for Nokia.
(Almost) All Aboard
The record labels seem to be buying that argument. Universal Music Group in December signed up with Nokia, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment partnered with the service in April. A spokesperson for EMI Group, the sole major label yet to join, says the company is talking with Nokia, although no deal has been reached. Nokia says it is in talks with independent labels as well.
For the music industry, the Nokia venture represents a departure from the old ways of doing business. Susan Kevorkian, program director of consumer markets at research firm IDC, says there is “broader experimentation” as CD sales decline and music revenues slide overall. For record companies, it may make sense to look for new ways to sell the work of their artists. Ringtones, for example, have become a multibillion-dollar business in only a few years. “We have a long-term sustainable business for Nokia, the music industry, and the artists,” says Schimel.
It’s hard to evaluate the service before pricing and other specifics are known. Nokia remained tight-lipped about the details of Comes With Music as it unveiled the Warner Music partnership. But Apple has said that it makes little money on music sales through its iTunes store, instead generating profits from sales of iPods and other hardware. Will the music business for Nokia and its partners also be of marginal financial benefit? Schimel says such comparisons are off-base. “We feel it is apples and oranges,” she says. “We are offering a structure that will attract new customers and new revenues.”
Will It Pay?
Some analysts are skeptical that Comes With Music will help Nokia attract new customers for its mobile phones. James McQuivey, a principle analyst at Forrester Research says, “There won’t be the same rush to buy Nokia phones” as there is for iPhones. Apple is expected to sell 10 million iPhones by yearend. McQuivey guesses that at most Nokia could sell between 2 million and 4 million handsets in the year following Comes With Music’s launch. The amount of revenue the company earns from downloads will depend on how much Nokia intends to charge consumers. But it is sure to be insignificant at a company that made $10.6 billion last year on sales of $75 billion.
IDC’s Kevorkian sees this as part of a bigger move by Nokia and the music industry. “It is a slim revenue margin, but it makes sense as part of a volume play for Nokia, who is in the midst of transition,” she says. Kevorkian sees Comes With Music as fitting into Nokia’s Ovi service, a broad effort to sell services to mobile-phone users.
Still, McQuivey thinks Nokia and its partners may find few takers for the new music service. He argues that music enthusiasts won’t be satisfied with a phone that’s merely adequate for listening to tunes, while other people won’t be willing to pay money for such music services. He says it’s a lot like digital cameras. Some people use their phone as a digital camera, but people taking lots of photos will generally purchase a separate, higher-quality digital camera. “It’s a mismatch in market opportunity,” says McQuivey.
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