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

To: Tinroad who wrote (7999)	10/10/1999 10:30:00 PM
From: JimC1997	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18366

e.Digital/Texas Instruments/Lucent inter-relationship On September 27, 1999 I had a phone conversation with Joyce Eastman, Manager of the New Ventures Group at Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies), who is responsible for EPAC development and marketing. In our discussion she said that she believes that any portable player would require a programmable DSP to use EPAC. The DSP would probably need MicroOS (or an equivalent) to operate properly. There are some work-arounds (firmware or embedded control systems) but they are more complicated than simply using MicroOS. She added that e.Digital has been marketing its reference hardware design using the Texas Instruments C5410 DSP. Contacting the project manager for TI might give more light on the subject, but it appears that any player using EPAC is very likely to need MicroOS. She also said that TI was going to launch an advertising campaign soon featuring their (Texas Instruments) capabilities in the music player business. Consequently, I would presume that the current Texas Instruments commercials are featuring players which utilize EPAC and also strongly suspect that e.Digital is involved in their design and/or production. On an unrelated point, she gave me more background on the "beauty contest" that EPAC won in the Madison Project. Lucent's EPAC was pitted against five other codecs and judged on three criteria by the IBM and music label group. The criteria were 1. Quality of the music 2. Responsiveness of the team representing the codec 3. Licensing terms. The music labels were strongly supportive of EPAC based upon these criteria and it was decided to use only EPAC in the project. Many posters have made the point that content is key to the introduction of portable music players. If the music labels have selected EPAC on these core business criteria, which I would translate as 1. Consumer appeal 2. Operating flexibility 3. Competitive pricing then the likelihood of substantial EPAC content becoming available soon is very high. Remember, in order to participate in the Madison Project the music labels must encode their music libraries into EPAC. I have heard from a very reliable source in the industry that more tracks have now been encoded into EPAC format than into any other format. This speaks well of the behind-the-scenes progress that has been made in developing the infrastructure to support the release of portable EPAC music players. Jim