Sony is licensing its stick--
eetimes.com
Sony licenses Memory Stick to six manufacturers
By Yoshiko Hara
EE Times
(10/13/99, 5:41 p.m. EDT)
TOKYO ? Sony Corp. has licensed its Memory Stick, a flash memory card, to six
companies. To support Sony, Fujitsu Ltd. will license the media specifications needed to
produce Memory Stick products.
Five other companies ? Aiwa Co. Ltd., Kenwood Corp., Pioneer Corp., Sanyo Electric Co.
Ltd. and Sharp Corp. ? will license hardware specifications to develop products based on
Memory Stick technology, including audio players.
The six companies will license Memory Stick with MagicGate, Sony's proprietary copy
protection scheme. MagicGate ensures secure audio data on the Memory Stick Walkman,
which will hit the Japanese market in December. A license is needed to produce Memory
Stick Walkman-compliant products.
Sony reported that cumulative shipments of the Memory Stick reached 1 million units in
August. The company expects that number to swell to 3 million units by March 2000.
This means that Memory Stick will account for 30 percent of the small flash-card market,
which Sony estimated at 10 million units for the current fiscal year, which ends next March.
Memory Stick shipments will grow more than three times to 10 million units in the next fiscal
year, according to Sony.
Sony is promoting its gum-stick-sized Memory Stick for other applications, and has created
mockups for a Walkman/cell phone combo, a headphone audio player in which the Memory
Stick is inserted directly into the headset, along with a GPS cell phone. Since the first
introduction of Memory Stick in September 1998, Sony has unveiled camcorders, digital still
cameras, notebook and desktop computers, video printers and several Walkman products
that use Memory Stick technology for data storage. An IC recorder using Memory Stick was
added to the product family last month. That recorder will be introduced in December. |
