Episode 15 2005-09-13

Tim talked about the Reality Distortion Field surrounding Apple's latest announcement last week. The invitation to the announcement claimed, "1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything. Here we go again." The argument centered around whether the iPod Nano, as amazing as it is, constitutes an announcement as big as the original iPod. Bill talked about the Samsung NAND chip that is used in the new Apple iPod Nano and the announced new NAND chip that will be going into portable devices by late next year. 32GB capability in portable devices is the holy grail for next year. Scott's topic was the Ebay acquisition of Skype. According to the investor documents, there was a somewhat convincing argument to use Skype to enhance their existing product, although the price is still three times what seems to make sense. Talk of what other companies may do brought up the point that Vinton Cerf was hired by Google. From there the conversation moved to Teledesic, the McCaw/Gates satellite company, and whatever happened to it. Rick covered the Oracle and Siebel merger and what that will mean. Rick commented that banks prefer homegrown solutions rather than using commercial enterprise software. Bill mentioned what he likes about iTunes 5.0. Rick returned to talk about the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone being lame which turned into bashing the US cellphone companies.