Nike will do whatever is necessary to push their new music player, including showing Tiger Woods with the player. Of that I can be sure. The moment the general public begins to understand how rugged a walkman type player can be when it has no moving parts, and how much longer the batteries last because of the low current requirements of solid state devices, this market will really take off. As I have noted previously, I think the tiny multi-media cards are really the killer application, even more than compact flash.
And while we're all thinking about the MMC or SDMC applications in music players, cell phones, and hand held computers, we should not forget that little application first mentioned about a year ago -- the use of a rugged version to be worn by military personnel, containing their entire medical history. That's the joint program with Kaneb Services. It's apparently on the back burner for the moment, simply because of shortages of flash units. I look forward to applications such as this, where everyone carries a flash card with secure data. Not only is the market very large, but it is very steady and not subject to the ups and downs of consumer buying. It is also a method of storing information that protects individual privacy, very likely more than some centralized repository of info on a file server, a concept under development by Microsoft and others.
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