"If you use a mobile phone with a camera, thank Tessera (NASDAQ: TSRA)," says Mike Cintolo in the Cabot Top Ten Report. "When it comes to miniaturization, Tessera is the go-to company."

"Tessera is one of the companies that drove the price of camera components down by miniaturizing them and combining them on a single chip.

"You'll find its technology in MP3 players, video games, wireless phones, computers and numerous other products where companies are forever working to design products smaller and manufacture them more cheaply.

Billboard reports that Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) and eMusic will soon offer new pricing schemes in an effort to boost digital music sales. While Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Store retains its popular $0.99 per track price scheme, Amazon.com will offer "Daily Deals" and a "Friday Five" promotion. At the same time, eMusic will be raising prices for new customers, increasing the entry-level plan from $10 to $12 a month, but offering existing customers 10 more downloads per month for the extra $2.

Amazon's "Daily Deals" plan "will feature a new album every day, sold at a discounted price that will vary by title." Billboard cites the current offer with Coldplay in which the band's first three albums offered for $2 in promotion of the band's newest release, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. The "Friday Five" plan "will feature five albums for $5 each" on Fridays.

Both plans come at a time when the music industry has been pushing digital stores to offer variable pricing models, but with Amazon.com the labels exercise the control they really want. Amazon.com's MP3 store operates as little more than an outlet for the labels to sell music and all sales go directly to the label with Amazon.com taking only a small handling fee. Assuming that Amazon.com's new pricing offers are directed from the labels, it's a sign that the music industry is taking another look at what consumers want and how much they are willing to pay.

So, according to this piece out on Reuters, Napster (NASDAQ: NAPS) is in a fighting mood. It recently created an MP3 download site that contains over six million tunes. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has been doing gangbuster business for years with its iTunes juggernaut, so it only stands to reason that from now until doomsday there will be initiatives aimed at stealing a little bit of the big guy's thunder. Whether it's Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) or Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), Apple will always have challengers.

Question is, does this matter? Should Steve Jobs and his Apple shareholders be shuddering in their collective boots? Probably not, although any competition should be taken seriously, I suppose. I grant you that Napster is a recognizable name when it comes to web-based music commerce (heck, Napster started all the peer-to-peer ruckus way back when), and that six million compositions represents an awesome depth of musical inventory, But come on, Apple has staked out one of the most vital components of a successful business: unmatched brand equity.

Simply put, Apple's brand in music downloads is as powerful and iconic as Coca-Cola's brand is in soft drinks. Yes, the Napster service, according to the article, will have an important competitive component, namely the ability to transfer songs to other devices, including the iPod. Napster, as many of you probably know, markets a subscription-based service, but you can bet that management will now concentrate on this download asset.

As a family, we try to sit down together every night for dinner. It's a small thing, but it's the only time all day that the seven of us can both talk and listen. I walk in from work listening to my iPod and the kids ask me, "Whattya listening to?". The answer, I explained, is Yael Naim, recent holder of a top single New Soul.

Turns out that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)'s Steve Jobs personally picked her tune to launch the new MacBook Air, which seemed to have launched her status. Almost overnight, New Soul became the top selling song on Apple's music download site/software, iTunes. It turns out that this stint at the top was short lived as Apple, it seems, enjoyed its own form of New Years present as users rushed to redeem iTunes gift certificates. Nevertheless, while Apple has contributed to Yael Naim's success, she has also contributed to Apple's as well.

And with this surge of continuing sales for Apple's music division, Apple has recently ousted big-boy Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) as the #1 music retailer in the U.S. Ars Technica breaks out the numbers: 30% of retail music is now purchased online, and Apple has the largest share of retail sales including Wal-Mart and walmart.com sales.

Pretty impressive, eh?

"I'm a new soul, I came to this strange world hoping I could learn a bit bout how to give and take..."

Zack Miller is the managing editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund.

British-based Play.com, a privately-based retailer, has launched a new download store in direct competition with Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Store in the United Kingdom. PlayDigitial will offer tracks without digital rights management (DRM) technology from privately-held EMI Group and independent labels, in a move that looks similar to iTunes current offering of DRM-free tracks at lower prices. The store will still offer DRM tracks at higher prices than the DRM-free tracks and is in talks with other labels to bring more DRM-free tracks into the store.

Play.com's new store comes in advance of Amazon.com Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AMZN) sister store in the UK, Amazon.co.uk, opening a similar store with DRM-free tracks. The U.S. store recently opened its own MP3 store in full with DRM-free tracks from all the major labels, not simply limited to one major and independents. According to Billboard, the UK version of iTunes controls 70% of the market there and the store is also being forced to bring prices down to common prices with other European nations. PlayDigital and the eventual Amazon download store in the UK will work against that control and price drops.

It seems odd that the "fight" against digital rights management continues, considering that it has essentially been over in the United States since last month when Amazon's MP3 store gained access to tracks from all the major labels without the technology. Obviously different laws exist for agreements with companies in different countries, but until DRM is dropped completely, moves like this are going to continue to occur. Unfortunately for Apple and the iTunes Store, the drive against DRM technology that was started about a year ago is no longer under the company's control, with stores like Play.com and Amazon.com taking the lead and gaining better deals with the music labels.

Napster (NASDAQ: NAPS) -- the mother of all file-sharing services that in 10 years' time has found itself one among many digital-music services struggling for its very survival -- is hoping its new move will attract more users. Today, Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company is shifting to MP3 downloads free of digital-rights-management software [subscription required], or DRM.

The move is expected to occur sometime in the second quarter, but Napster has yet to finalize the arrangements with some of the four major music companies - Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE), Warner Music Group, EMI Group and Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group. The final three on this list recently began selling MP3s on the download service available through Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). Sony has yet to report plans to sell its tracks as MP3s, but is reportedly expected to come forward soon.

Slacker is my favorite of the Internet-radio services I've tried. The ability to customize is vast, the programming is top-notch (I favor 90s Alternative and the oxymoronic Indies Hits), and the interruptions are few and far between, even for the free service. Slacker is the primary unit of the privately traded Slacker, Inc., which was officially launched earlier this year.

Throwing its hat into the ring of portable music players -- competing with the likes of Apple, Inc. (NASAQ: AAPL)'s iPod and the Sirius Satellite Radio Inc (NASDAQ: SIRI)'s Stiletto -- Slacker is introducing a portable device, perfect for listeners who aren't tied to their computers. Instead of broadcasting via a WiFi connection, the Slacker device is simply loaded with new tunes (from the user's favorite artists and channels) every time it is synched with the user's PC.

An article in USA Today this week notes that "You have little control over what Slacker selects, beyond identifying what artists you like... but [Slacker CEO Dennis] Mudd says consumers don't care."

Energizer (NYSE: ENR) is a defensive stock that may end up posting growth stock-quality results in the immediate years ahead.

Again, Energizer is not a defensive play, strictly speaking, as one could argue that batteries are a discretionary purchase -- an option consumers can cut back on during tougher economic times.

Still, powerful cultural and secular trends belie the above thesis. Think: MP3 players, iPods, iPhones, the text messaging generation, cameras, and remotes for almost everything. The net result: More portable energy use, globally, in the years ahead, which means more revenue for Energizer.

Energizer has revenue streams in the alkaline, carbon, zinc, miniature and specialty battery lines, with an impressive +35% U.S. market share. The company sells batteries in more than 150 countries, a more-than-decent defense against U.S. economic doldrums. ENR's shares fell $1.15 to $110.86 in Wednesday afternoon trading.

The qualifiers? Intensifying competition, and a high concentration of sales, 18%, to its largest customer, Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT). But so long as teenagers and downloads exist, and Apple (NYSE: AAPL)'s Steve Jobs is thinking of something new/portable/cool, these two negatives can be overlooked.

Technically, Energizer's chart is strong. With a P/E of 23 ENR is not cheap, but projected near-20% annual EPS gains account for that.

Stock Analysis: Energizer is a moderate-risk stock not suitable for low-risk investors. Investors with an investment horizon longer than one year should be rewarded from ENR's shares.

Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) has had an interesting seven years. The company was taken private by a group of investment firms led by Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group and then returned to the public markets a mere two years later for some odd reason. Wait: that reason was to give a payoff to the investors, as going off the market for 24 months gave the global company a chance to sneer at Wall Street's quarterly, paranoid expectations and focus on long-term strategy. The hard drive company you may have rarely heard of, though, is recording billions in revenue each quarter and is in fine shape financially. CEO Bill Watkins trumpets this fact all the time, but the Street rarely listens.

So, with Watkins alluding to $3 billion quarters in the near future and growing profits these days, is the market listening? Maybe not yet, but maybe your portfolio should. The never-slowing demand for storage is everywhere these days, hiding in plain site. Have a full-size iPod, Tivo box or other DVR, Xbox 360 or a computer in the home? Each one of those probably has some kind of hard drive in size, and according to Watkins, more consumers are buying all that storage than businesses these days. We have an insatiable need to store movies, music, files, taxes and everything else digitally, so this makes sense.

In the latest slap to Apple, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes and iPod platform, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) has released a "beta" (as in, being tested) version of its 'Amazon MP3' digital music store as of today, accessible through www.amazonmp3.com. While Apple continues to be the largest seller of digital music files on the planet, its recently launch of the 'iTunes Plus' selection was hailed as a larger experiment in the music industry's transition from the CD to the file download. The experiment? Apple removed digital rights management (DRM) copy protection from these iTunes Plus files, making them susceptible to file trading among friends and all over the Internet.

The music industry knows that DRM-free music file downloads are the future, and are relenting from paranoia about internet users everywhere stealing music slowly but surely. In Amazon's case, its new MP3 store features over two million songs from 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 music labels. And what do you know -- that entire music catalog is being offered in DRM-free MP3 format, making all two million songs virtually universal to every music player from the iPod to in-dash CD players in most new cars. And, without protection, buyers are free to copy and share the files -- without any protection -- to their heart's content. That's the potential mushroom cloud-size problem the music industry execs go to bed with each night.

Now that digital music leader Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is selling non-protected digital songs from its iTunes Plus music store, is the iPod maker extraordinaire setting itself up to have more competition in the digital audio player (DAP) marketplace?

After all, the whole customer-friendly integration between the company's iPod and its iTunes music store is what kept customers coming back for more (and more). The iPod was the coolest DAP on the market (and still is from market share figures alone), and songs downloaded from iTunes could only be played on the iPod, just as Apple designed and intended, tech hacks aside.

But now that non-protected digital music files (in AAC format) can be downloaded from the iTunes music store at a more hefty $1.29 each, is Apple going to see its iPod market share slip since customers can now use any AAC-compatible DAP to listen to music from the iTunes Plus selection?

Remember that the still-protected iTunes music selections far outweigh the iTunes Plus non-protected music selections. I'm quite sure Apple will reign in the iTunes Plus selection to gauge customer response for at least a little while.

Since everything else has an MP3 player built into it, why not put one in that Barbie doll. Mattel (NYSE:MAT) has decided to do just that. With its stock down almost 15% over the last three months, the company will do almost anything for positive PR.

The new doll gives its owners the chance to log onto BarbieGirls.com where she "unlocks pages and pages of games, virtual shops and online chatting functions," according to The New York Times.

The new Barbie is apparently part of an industry trend to sell toys which encourage children to go to the web. In many cases when they get there they will find things to buy along with free games. How clever.

Mattel wants little girls and their parents to think the cyber-Barbie is a better Barbie. As one Mattel executive put it: "For girls to understand the level of detail, the level of content, truly the experience of BarbieGirls, we wanted to allow them to play on the site."

Perhaps the age of the plain old doll that parents bought to allow their children to use their imaginations is gone. It is worth mourning. It is being replaced with toys that replace child-like creativity with websites where kids can buy more stuff. Maybe they can use the debit card for 7-year olds that marketing gurus are planning.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

According to Billboard, the Recording Industry Association of America is pushing the major labels to "discuss whether a new physical format is needed as an alternative to the CD." Although the RIAA is attempting to make sure that any new format is shared among the labels, I can't help but wonder what the point is.

I've repeatedly noted the demise of the CD and the growth of digital sales in the three months I have blogged here. Frankly, I don't think the RIAA has the labels' best interest in mind by pursuing a new format to replace the CD. That format clearly already exists in digital downloads. Why not seriously re-invest in the CD as a marketable format, rather than seeking yet another competing format?

Remember when the CD came out? People cried out about the death of vinyl. They've been crying about the death of the CD for a while now (I'm in that group), but let's face it: Digital formats are here to stay. The MP3 and other media files that can be played on pocket devices like Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPod and cell phones are easy to access, and though the transition from CD to digital file is slower than the switch from vinyl to CD was, it is still occurring (imagine what the iPhone may do to this situation). None of this counts to satellite radio subscribers who need neither a CD nor a portable player because their radio receiver is portable (this may be a generalization -- the few people I know that have XM or Sirius have stopped purchasing CDs and don't own MP3 players).

If the RIAA is worried about the compact disc, a new physical format is not the answer. Any new format will face the same competition with digital files that the CD is facing now. Either re-invest and change the CD or make the transition to digital files smoother.

Circuit City Store Inc. (NYSE: CC) and Napster Inc. (NASDAQ: NAPS) have teamed up to offer a new digital music service cleverly called "Circuit City + Napster." (I wonder how many marketing gurus it took to come up with that one.) The new service, which starts this coming Sunday, will give consumers unlimited downloads for $14.95 per month or 99 cents per download.

It's hard to imagine what exactly Circuit City + Napster's competitive advantage is here. With iTunes already deeply entrenched in the online downloading business, this looks like a pretty desperate attempt by Circuit City to become more relevant. I just don't understand why someone would choose to go with the new service over Napster. Perhaps the venture will be able to lure some new customers with price promotions such as the current free month for new subscribers, but it seems unlikely to generate long-term profits. Neither stock have moved much today in reaction to the news as the market seems unimpressed.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and SanDisk Corp. (NASDAQ:SNDK) are launching a new MP3 player with WiFi capacity, joining a host of rivals to Apple Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPod, including the Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Zune.

The iPod currently has 70% of the portable music player market, and, that number appears to be holding. If the iPhone sells well, Apple will have another horse in the music download space. Cellphones that can download music are offered by the large handset manufacturers including Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) and Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT), but there is little evidence that they have done any damage to the iPod's growth rate.

As much as it must pain Apple's competitors, no one has been able to throw anything in front of the company to slow the momentum of the iPod and its download service iTunes. The European Union recently announced that it would look into pricing issues involving iTunes and the record companies. That may eventually hurt Apple just as antitrust actions by the EU have slowed Microsoft's progress on the Continent.

Apple's only enemy appears to be its own success.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.