industry

San Francisco will host thousands of designers from around the world when CONNECTING'07, the Icsid/IDSA World Design Congress, comes to town October 17-20. As the largest and most influential gathering of industrial designers to date, CONNECTING'07 will fill three major Nob Hill sites with prominent speakers, exhibits, and events. Related activities will also spill into the surrounding city, with many of San Francisco's design studios, companies, museums, design schools and stores holding receptions, open houses and tours. Representatives from nearly 500 internationally renowned corporations, design firms, government entities, and higher education institutions, spanning more than 35 … Read more

A new report by Research and Markets says Russians are snapping up cars at a proportionately faster rate than much of the rest of the world.

The report predicts that sales of new passenger cars will increase more than 20 percent a year in the coming years. The sale of spare parts is expected to grow nearly 15 percent annually.

According to a separate 2006 report by political commentator Alexander Yurov, more than 1.5 million cars are sold in Russia every year. Yurov estimates the figure will be closer to 2 million cars by 2008.

The Research and Markets … Read more

Market research firm eMarketer recently published a study about U.S. consumer spending on music since 1980. Most commenters have seized on the fact that the study shows a higher percentage of people are buying music today than ever, but that those users are spending much less, probably due to the rise of single-song downloads. (eMarketer calls these "MP3 downloads"--in fact, the #1 source of legal downloads, iTunes, offers them in the AAC format, and many other sites offer downloads in the Windows Media Audio format.)

But I also noticed that music spending per capita rose dramatically … Read more

Microsoft made a splash earlier this year with a tabletop PC called Milan. Designers and developers there might have been spared building their 85 early prototypes, however, if they'd just gone shopping at defense contractor Northrop Grumman instead of Ikea.

As it turns out, Northrop Grumman--best known for missile systems and other military gear--for several years has been hawking the similar TouchTable as part of what it calls an "integrated collaboration environment." It'll be showing off the technologies next week at a defense conference in London, and last month delivered a TouchTable to the Federal Aviation … Read more

Welcome to Girl on Cars, a new destination for tech-savvy motoring enthusiasts. Here you'll find information (and lots of opinion) on a variety of automotive-related topics, including new car models, aftermarket accessories, design trends, fuel efficiency, and racing.

Beyond news and product reviews, this blog celebrates the lifestyle of cars and car culture. Sneak a peek into exclusive industry events, from new product launches to the making of Hollywood chase scenes.

Readers are encouraged to join in and leave feedback. Half the fun of cars is being able to talk about them!

The Recording Industry Association of America has already mounted a court challenge against XM Satellite Radio over gadgets like the Pioneer Inno that allow consumers to trap individual songs originally played on air in alleged violation of copyright.

Now the industry group is urging that issue to be one of the deciding factors for federal regulators weighing the proposed multibillion-dollar union of XM and its sole competitor, Sirius Satellite radio.

In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Monday, the RIAA urged the agency to "make clear that its approval of a merger is conditioned upon the continued … Read more

As I've mentioned previously, independent musicians can fall prey to a lot of questionable business deals that promise to make them rich.

But Pump Audio seems like good way for independent musicians to earn some money. (Full disclosure: Pump is based in Seattle, and I'm acquainted with one of their employees through mutual music connections.) If you own the rights to your compositions and recordings--as the vast majority of independent and unsigned musicians do--you can license them on a non-exclusive basis to Pump. Then, Pump retitles and sublicenses these pieces to other content creators who are looking for … Read more

Beginning musicians tend to be big dreamers. And there are an awful lot of us--Guitar Center's got nearly 200 stores now taking in more than $450 million per quarter, and you know that most of those buyers are thinking, at least in the back of their mind, that they'll be the next Jimmy Page. Or Joe Strummer. Or Kurt Cobain.

As you might expect, this combination tends to draw a lot of, shall we say, questionable businesspeople to the music industry, particularly the lower reaches. Over the years, I've heard it all: unscrupulous managers, publicists and promoters … Read more

Three aircraft in the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) pipeline promise to change some assumptions we have about air travel--the assumption that there's a pilot in the cockpit, for instance.

In the works is an unmanned cargo plane with a 30-ton payload capacity. IAI could have gone for an unmanned passenger jet--the technology does exists--but "the world is not yet ready to be flown without a pilot at the stick," Shlomo Tsach, IAI director of flight sciences, told the Jerusalem Post. "A psychological obstacle needs to be overcome before people are willing to fly in unmanned planes.&… Read more