The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Main arguments in his article are : Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.The main problem, if that’s the word, is that we live in the physical world and, until recently, most of our entertainment media did, too.

As of October 2004, iPod has dominated digital music player sales in the United States, with over 92% of the market for hard-drive players and over 65% of the market for all types of players. iPod has sold at a tremendous rate, moving over ten million units in a total of three years. The device has had a significant cultural impact in terms of its takeup. The history of iPod clearly illustrated that slick design , better technology and cost effective price for a product will always triump in the end.

MorganStanley created a NNZ index to track the nanotech sector on the NASDAQ. Here’s a look at the performance: R&D magazine attributes the heating up of index in 2004 to : Continuing reduction in the cost to produce, measure, and control these thin layers of materials. Working at the nanoscale level is now pretty much pervasive in most semiconductor processes and the instrumentation to observe and analyze these processes and materials, while still expensive, has become within the reach of more researchers and manufacturers.

I think the efforts to combine Net and TV will go on irrespective of failures that took place in the past. However Tivo does look like a success , though its sustenance is a question mark .Tivo helps one view the content in the TV shows offline, thus obviating the need for the user to be present when the show is aired. The new trend in this space is that there have been a set of services where the TV shows have been offered to the users through web.

Evolution Auto-ID center pioneered a system called EPC Global Network comprising RFID technology, Electronic Product Code, Software based on EPC Global Standards Support. To commercialize the system, EAN International and Uniform Code Council were chosen to form not-for-profit org called EPCglobal Network. EPCglobal Network Components ELECTRONIC PRODUCT CODE (EPC) : Unique number that identifies a specific object in motion in the supply chain. ID SYSTEM : The ID System consists of EPC tags and EPC readers.