Archive for November, 2006

Thanks to Robin from ‘Army for providing the new Zuneinsider background image! You rock!  (Bonus points if you can guess what the building is)

I just noticed that the image was too small when I upped my screen resolution. So for a while I’m going with another image sent – thanks again Damien!  we’re back to the image provided by ‘Army.

If you have a cool picture and would like to be included in the background, email me at askzune(then type the “at” symbol)microsoft.com. For me to pick it; it has to be PG, and big enough to fill the entire background on a 1280X1024 resolution monitor.

“Music, Culture, and  . . . ?”

I know, I know, I gotta step up the “Music, Culture” part of this site. So here goes: my buddy Anna (hi-five!) over at DecentXposure clued me into a cool band out of Copenhagen – Mew. I like ‘em a lot. And they’ve toured with Kasabian and Bloc Party, both perennial favorites.

Check the the video “Special,” which actually won a CADS06 award for Best Cinematography:

Mew has also been blogging since 2002. Cool. And if anyone is still wondering, I still rock my 360. Gamertag: Cesarisok.

Vaja is the recent addition to elite list of zune accessory makers who are officially listing products for launch. Vaja is an Argentina based company and has been known for making exquisite high quality leather cases.
The current models available are Balance, Classic, Classic Top and Classic Top Retro. Prices start at $50 and are available [...]

According to market researcher NPD group in their weekly survey of music player sales, the Zune player grabbed 9 percent of the US digital music player market in its first week of sales. The Zune took the second position from…

As Sportsunit noted, Zune has debuted in the number two spot, according to early NPD data. We’re happy to see this but we know this is going to be multi-year investment. Quoting thestreet.com:

For the week ended Nov. 18, Microsoft had a 9% unit share and 13%
dollar share of the U.S. portable player market, while Apple had 63%
unit share and 72.5% dollar share. 

Also, retailers are telling us that they’ve seen Zune delivering
incremental sales, and that’s resulting in growth of the category. So
Zune sales are not simply nibbling on the competition’s market share,
but rather our approach seems to be driving addtional interest in the
space.

One final note about this: Lots of folks have been quoting the rankings
on Amazon.com to gauge how well Zune is selling. I would say that
Amazon is a great way to tell how Zune is selling. . . but only on
Amazon. Zune is sold at over 30,000 retail outlets across the country -
so for the overall market, we’re sticking with NPD.


More as I have more.