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creative posts

Apple after the bell 6/14/06: down a bit as Creative challenges Apple's patents

Posted Jun 14th 2006 9:43PM by Tobias Buckell (RSS feed)
Filed under: After the Bell, Press Releases, Products and Services, Law, Apple Inc (AAPL)

Apple finished today at $57.61, down 72 cents. The negative news for Apple today was that the other MP3 device company Creative has gotten the International Trade Commission to launch an investigation into whether the iPod infringes on Creative's patents for the Zen player. Creative's stock rose some 5% today as news came out.

Creative is trying to overthrow Apple, but Apple is pretty firmly cemented in the #1 position for digital music players. As a result Creative and Apple have been circling each other like a pair of territorial yard dogs, with both companies filing patent complaints against each other over the last year.

[Disclosure: I own Apple stock at the date of this post]

Google's 20% rule: why not make it 50%?

Posted Apr 14th 2006 3:18AM by Sarah Gilbert (RSS feed)
Filed under: Products and Services, Launches, Television, Google (GOOG)

I'm up late watching Charlie Rose's taped interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In raving about Google's 20% rule -- that engineers can spend 20% of their time on projects of their own choosing -- Schmidt says that all of their new products come from that 20% "free time." Charlie asks an obvious question, one that's been bugging me for months: "why not make it 50%?"

Schmidt doesn't answer the question, really (he is a CEO after all), basically saying that, although it's a great idea, and they should do it, anarchy would prevail.

Why would anarchy prevail if 50% of a creative worker's time was spent doing creative, independently-chosen work? I think it's a fantastic idea and one that many companies should employ. If workers are selected for their extreme intelligence and ability to innovate, why not have them create the products they wish existed? We'd all be better for it.

iPod joining Kleenex, Xerox as 'generic' names to describe category?

Posted Mar 31st 2006 3:22PM by Sarah Gilbert (RSS feed)
Filed under: Products and Services, Law, Consumer Experience, Apple Inc (AAPL)

is this creative zen mp3 player synonymous
with apple's ipod?

Xerox ® and Kleenex ® have been fighting for decades to protect their intellectual property. Their assertion, that their trademarked names are not nouns (it's a Xerox ® copy, and a Kleenex ® tissue), has been maintained despite every common usage evidence to the contrary, whereas words like Band-Aid and Aspirin have faded into 'generic' status, losing their trademarks.

iPod, surely, is headed that direction. When my sister asked for an iPod for Christmas, I immediately thought, but does she want an iPod ® player? Or an iPod? Apple may have some serious work to do to protect its IP, what with the ubiquity of white-colored iFakes from makers like Creative and SanDisk. This article from TechNewsWorld wonders if "MP3 player and iPod may become synonymous." I'd argue that it's already happened. Even iPod's silhouette ad style is being ripped off from here to my friend's Christmas cards.

What do you think? Are iPod and MP3 player synonymous? And should Apple spend big to protect their trademark from generocide?