Our article, "The Foundations of Fortress iTunes", covered what the entertainment industry sees as the challengers to Apple's dominance in the digital media download market: SpiralFrog, Zune, PSP and Connect, MP3 cell phones, MySpace and MTV Urge. We forgot to include one possible candidate: Sirius. As in the satellite radio. And just like the other upstars we covered in Part 1, a Wired.com reporter speculated that Sirius is looking like an assault on Fortress iTunes, too.

Remember Sirius' Stiletto 100 portable satellite radio and MP3 player that we featured last month? The company also announced an online subscription - "satellite-free" - service called Sirius Internet Radio (SIR). As mentioned in Part 1, iPod and iTunes were the perfect partners to capture an entire market for Apple. Yeah, well SIR isn't iTunes. The latter is an online media store. SIR's an internet radio service that streams CD-quality music and selected talk channels.

Enter Yahoo! Music, one of the partners of Stiletto's manufacturer, Zing. Stiletto 100 will reportedly work in conjunction with SIR and Yahoo! Music so that listeners can choose to purchase-download the song they're listening to. As announced by Bob Law, senior VP of Sirius, "The market for digital audio on-the-go is exploding. We are working with Zing to expand the availability of Sirius content on new platforms and bring the best in satellite radio programming to an increasingly mobile audience."

In other words, they're making Sirius and the Stiletto into an iTunes-iPod teamup of sorts.


And there's more after the jump: guess where the CEO of the Stiletto's manufacturer worked before.

Would it be an exaggeration to say that iTunes built the legal music download world? Maybe not - after all, it has 85% of the digital music download market (which is way too much for the entertainment industry's comfort). Apple is the undisputed king of this world. And there are upstarts who want to revolt - Microsoft, Sony, SpiralFrog and a few other brave souls. But a Financial Times analyst reckons they're going to have a heck of a hard time scaling Fortress iTunes' walls.

What is the secret to the success - nay, dominance - of iTunes? The analyst chalks it up to rivals botching up their plans to compete with Apple, but more to key advantages Apple holds in the market.

• First, they've got network effects and technological lock-in on their side. People can share their iTunes-downloaded music with each other's iPods - there's the net. And Apple's digital rights management software (so far) allows this to happen - there's the tech. These two turn the iPod and iTunes into natural partners, feeding off each other's market advantages and popularity. The word for this is "synergy."

• Not one to rest on their laurels, Apple has diversified and segmented their captive market to squeeze out more profits and an even bigger share. There's the video iPod and downloadable videos from iTunes. There's the basic iPod, the Mini, the Shuffle, and the Nano. And there's all the marketing support the company has poured into the iPod, turning it into a style icon and a hot-buy item.

• And finally, perhaps the greatest advantage of all: it pays to be first, it pays to be ahead. History demonstrates that, once established, technology leaders are seldom overthrown by direct competition. No, to seize the throne, you've got to go for the jugular: the business model, the technology paradigm. In the case of Apple, the iPod-iTunes synergy.

Read on for the whole analysis on Fortress iTunes.

Blogging is so popular today it seems everyone on the planet has one. No surprise there's at least one blog site to suit every possible taste. Even the weird ones.

For instance, there's the The Stinky Meat Project which chronicles what happened when the blogger took three kinds of meat, let it "ripen" for 19 days until 1,000,000 maggots moved in and stuck them in the yard of his unwitting neighbor. And you thought living next door to a strange lady with 1,000,000,000 kitties in her house was bad. Did you hear about blogger Stinky Feet? His impossibly gross mission is to infect himself with athlete's foot.

On the other end of the blog rainbow is this piece of gold called iFizzle. It's a blog site made to look like Mac OSx interface using macromedia flash. The owner of the blog said he came up with the idea for iFizzle because of the "immeasureable amount of hate" he feels for MySpace and all other "poorly designed automated blogs." This is his most complicated flash project to date.

We have to say, it's one of the best-looking blogsites we've seen. And we've seen a lot. Even Stinky Meat and Stinky Feet would look fresh and appealing if they had iFizzle's super eye-candy look!

View: [iFizzle]