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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gmoney who wrote (51062)	3/24/1998 6:38:00 PM
From: agiak	Respond to of 58324

NETM 30 times average volume, up 27% Check out this stock, look at the chart and do your DD cause this may take off and double very soon. Looks like institutions are in with volume of 6 million while the average is 200k. Watch or enjoy the ride cause as for now my IOM is a sitting duck!

To: Gmoney who wrote (51062)	3/24/1998 9:40:00 PM
From: Gmoney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

JAZ article in Sydney Morning Herald Clay Hagan on the MF board found this article on the Jaz in the Sydney Morning Herald....very positive smh.com.au excerpts: >>>>>Lots of drive and all that Jaz With its new 2Gb Jaz drive, Iomega looks set to dominate the removable-storage market. DAVID FLYNN reports. In the past few years, the once-dull world of removable storage has become a tense, edge-of-seat poker game. Iomega threw its 100Mb Zip disk into the pot. SyQuest matched its 100Mb and ponied up to 230Mb with the EZFlyer. Iomega retaliated with the 1Gb Jaz, since matched by the 1Gb Sparq. Now Iomega has upped the ante to 2Gb, with the Jaz2GB model due early next month. It's high stakes for the high-end removable storage market. "The success of Jaz has created a whole new market segment," says Greg Bartels, the former head of Iomega Australia, who was recently promoted to champion Jaz throughout the Pacific region. "It's made it possible for people to do things they couldn't do before. A lot of people have built Jaz into a solution. There are now places in the graphics industry where you will see nothing but Jaz." The Macintosh market has been a particularly strong one for Jaz. More than half of all drives sold end up sitting alongside a Mac, compared with a total desktop market share of about six per cent. This reflects the Mac's continued reign in high-end content-creation segments such as multimedia authoring, desktop publishing and audio-video production, including the booming area of non-linear video editing using systems such as Avid. In several ways, Jaz2GB is twice the Jaz. It has a twofold storage capacity owing to improved media surfaces and new head technology, although the backwards-compatible drive can read and write to the 1Gb Jaz disks. The burst-transfer rate is doubled to 20Mb/sec, with an average sustained transfer rate of 7.35Mb per second (peaking at 8.7Mb/sec), compared with Jaz's 5.4Mb per second when fed through an Ultra SCSI connection. Onboard cache is also lifted from 256Kb to 512Kb. The result of these rev-ups is a claimed 40 per cent improvement in throughput. When announced last September, the Jaz2GB was to be available worldwide in the fourth quarter of 1997, but the roll-out was delayed due to concerns about the quality of the drive and disks. But Bartels is not defensive about the setback, saying it affirms the company's high standards. "Yes, it's taken us longer to bring the Jaz2GB to market than we hoped, but at the end of the day the wait will be worthwhile because customers will have the best product they can get, and the best our professional products division has ever produced," he says. "We took the Jaz2GB through extensive testing measures and we've learned a lot from the process. A lot of the improvements we made in building the Jaz2GB we are now incorporating into the 1Gb Jaz drives, which was already a solid product from day one." One of the most interesting Jaz-based solutions is the StorPoint HD from Axis Communications. This puts a rack of Jaz drives onto a corporate network via an inbuilt Ethernet connection, acting as a stand-alone "Jaz server" without the need for a PC. "It's is an awesome way to gain additional network storage," says Bartels. "You can allocate some of this for backup or archive, some for common files, some for master files of the latest software. But it really comes into its own in very common ways. "Everyone who has server-side e-mail at work is told to clear out their e-mail box every few months because the network is running out of space. So you have to stop what you're doing - which is to ultimately generate revenue for the company - and spend hours going through your e-mail, choosing which messages to keep and which to delete. "Now surely that's a waste of your time and the company's resources. It would be better to be able to have all of that backed up onto a Jaz cartridge. The MIS managers can reclaim that space on the server and if you need access to an old message, it hasn't been deleted - it's still sitting there, archived on a Jaz disk." The Jaz2GB is likely to carry a price tag of about $1,099 for an external drive and $999 for the internal model, with 2Gb cartridges about $299 each. The original Jaz drive is being retained and repositioned as the affordable high-performance option, with a price cut of 25 per cent from $799 to $599. 1Gb cartridges have a street price of $180 to $200. "Corporate users and the more mainstream segments within desktop publishing, as well as software developers, will go for the 1Gb Jaz," says Bartels. "But there will still be power users inside those segments, as well as audio-video editing, who will lean towards the 2Gb version because it's the ultimate in premium high-performance storage." Perhaps the strongest growth area for the 1Gb Jaz will be mass-market segments such as home-video editing. Following the Jaz2GB's touchdown, Iomega will start shipping local versions of the Buz multimedia producer, a hardware video capture box with a sub-$400 price tag that includes an Ultra SCSI card. It's a clever move to make any Buz-equipped PC an easy candidate for the newly affordable Jaz drive, which Iomega can then push as the ideal way to store the huge video clips users will suddenly begin inputting, editing and storing. While an exciting product in its own right, Buz is likely to help catapult the Jaz format to the same heights of unit sales and penetration as achieved by the ground-breaking Zip drive. <<<< GARY