The Omnipresent iPod Nano and "Too Many Damn Vampires"

"The iPod Nano? - there's nothing "Nano" about it, it's just a marketing ploy and Jobs' usual great promotion by using what's becoming the hottest prefix, er, suffix on the planet, " I said.

My associates in Seattle weren't buying it. You better talk about this, Darrell, or - or what? I wasn't sure, but I sure didn't want to find out.

Well, that's what you get when the most read article on Yahoo is all about Samsung ALSO "stealing" the Nano with their NAND flash memory chip. OR WERE THEY? . . . . .hmmmmm

"Samsung said the new memory chip can store data equivalent to 200 years of a 40-page broadsheet daily newspaper, 8,000 digital music files or 32 hours of DVD-quality movie files on a single memory card.

The 16Gb NAND density was achieved with the use of 50-nanometer (nm) technology directly applicable to mass production processes and by using Samsung’s 3D-transistor architecture."

That's a heck of a lot of storage! And while the 50nm features alone don't make it "nanotech", they are nothing to sneeze at, ESPECIALLY FOR CONSUMER ELECTRONICS, and certainly fall gracefully into the small technology space. How cool is that?

Jobs, you old son of gun, you.

Now, on another related (yeah, sure) subject: Grandpa's last word's in the 1987 cinematic classic "The Lost Boys" - To wit: "One thing that always bothered me about Santa Carla . . . all the damn vampires." Some of the best minds in nano are saying the same about the plethora of nanotech conferences from mid-October through early November this year. It's a sickness.

Someone at Foresight said it best to me today, "The big losers are the attendees, who could have benefitted from attending several over a longer period of time, but have to pick one, now, because they are so bunched up."

These are all first-class folks, and I personally would encourage you to support all these - Foresight's, Lux's, SEMI/NanoBusAlliance/SmallTimes, NSTI and the rest, (yeah, unbelievably there are even others) but I guess people looked at the profits flowing in 2003 to a few key NanoConference promoters (because it takes an endless amount of time to plan and pull off these things) and said "we gotta do one" - I just wish there had been some coordination or mutual planning, and they weren't all squished together in a few weeks this Autumn.

If the situation happens again we might hear people saying, "One thing that always bothered me about nanotechnology, all the damn conferences."