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Technology Stocks : e.Digital Corporation(EDIG) - Embedded Digital Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JimC1997 who wrote (5932)	6/18/1999 11:35:00 AM
From: JimC1997	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18366

Here is Wendy's response: Subject: Re: Product development Date: Mon, 07 Jun 1999 10:31:31 -0700 From: Wendy Ravenel <wendy@edig.com> To: (JimC1997) CC: Robert@edig.com Thank you for writing. Your suggestion is very interesting. I am happy to pass it along to the engineering department. Here are some things I thought of while looking over your message: I agree that some customers for Internet music players will want to download and store many hours' worth of music, and while the price of flash memory continues to decrease, it could become cost-prohibitive to store a large collection on CompactFlash(TM). There is quite a bit of established competition to consider if e.Digital were to think about developing special memory options just for music as an accessory to the Internet music player. Given that other types of memory (hard drive space in particular) have notoriously tight profit margins, and given that there are so many manufacturers and options available to consumers, it seems like an uphill battle for anyone entering the memory market, even with such a niche product. True, the big Internet music afficionados will need huge amounts of memory for storaging large music collections, say, tens of gigabites, but they already have removable options such as data cassette cartridges, recordable CD's, or ZIP disks, and internal or external hard drives, optical drives, or even so-called jukebox towers. (I can't think of a more appropriate application for those than storing and retrieving music collections!) Having a special memory device that looks less like a PC peripheral and more like a stereo rack component would certainly support the current trend toward home computers acting as entertainment centers, but I wonder whether the investment in its development would really pay off. I thank you for your suggestion. Best regards, Wendy Ravenel

To: JimC1997 who wrote (5932)	6/18/1999 12:02:00 PM
From: mark cox	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18366

Jim, two thoughts about your idea of a music storage device being developed by e.Digital. First it would be diworsification for eDig. They are not in the storage business and like Wendy said there is too much competition in that arena. Second and most importantly, why would anyone want to purchase and download, say 100 albums, (for a round number), for let's say a total price of $900 over a couple of years time and to store their 'collection' on a device, (hard drive), that could crash and be totally worthless in a millisecond? Poof! you just lost your entire music collection and $900. Go back to square one and start over and shell out another $900. I have wondered about the same thing you have, where will I store all of this music that I am going to download? Certainly not in flash memory, too expensive, except for us eDig shareholders. <gg> I would only feel comfortable storing my collection on CDs or DVDs if you will. I read a long time ago that DVDs will be able to be written twice on each side of the disk for a total of 17 gigabytes of storage space. That would hold over 260 downloaded albums. Most importantly it is virtually indestructable compared with any hard drive. Even a regular writable CD can store 750mb which would hold about 11 albums for us. Mark