Update Stories since 980126:

Brave Oddysseus sat and moped
his crew so needed teaching.
Tomes on sailing, tied in rope
lay 'neath decks 'til beaching.

Yet no man hath yet read and rowed,
So men upon this flat glass sea,
must row and reach, their backs full bowed
to cleave the seas for Penelope.

"Oh Gods!" now wailed Oddysseus,
"Send me tools to train these boors
and cleanse their minds of sissiness
while they bend their backs at oars!"

The plea had barely passed his lips
when a seaman headed aft, in hand
a page from Grecian Sails and Ships
("That Rag That Beats the Band")

"Eureka!" Oddysseus snatched the page
all tattered from the seawind cruel
and read thereon the tale some sage
had sung of Audible's RealNet tool.

Audible
Player
$199

Wired 2/98 (p.104):
"Internet Walkman?"

RealNetworks and Audible Inc.
Deliver Mobile Audio Solution
for Corporate Intranets.

"Workers can now get corporate updates or training content as they drive to work or from client to client. The mobile audio solution allows Audible mobile players and RealNetworks desktop client, the RealPlayer(TM), to play the same RealAudio(R) content. This enables corporate Intranet users to access RealAudio files and play them back through the Audible player, a handheld PC peripheral that holds up to 2 hours of spoken audio content and works with headphones or any car stereo system."

"The Intranet mobile audio solution will make it possible to efficiently distribute corporate communications, training material, executive management communiques, product updates, and other business content for listening in cars and other mobile environments away from the work place. It is estimated that there are more than 40 million ``mobile workers'' in the U.S. who spend an average of 20 percent of their time on the road."

Consulting the Oracle of IE4.0, Oddysseus learned that Audible was founded in 1995 with smart money (e.g., Kleiner Perkins, AT&T, Intel, Thompson) with the mission of delivering over the Net a growing collection of spoken audio programming from more than 70 leading audiobook publishers, business conference providers, and educational and cultural institutions. The Audible.com store claimed "the best selection of spoken audio on the Internet" and offered visitors a sampling of business content.

"Audible and RealNetworks™ have formed an unprecedented partnership so that sites that create streaming RealAudio® files can now allow those same files to be played back in the Audible player."

"In other words, you'll be able to take many of your favorite free RealAudio® files from anywhere on the World Wide Web or your corporate intranet, download them into your Audible player, and play them back away from your PC."

The "corporate intranet" link took him to this message:

The Audible system and your company

The Audible system presents a powerful way for companies to communicate with employees who are on the road. Audible integrates seamlessly with corporate Intranets to:

• Turn employee downtime into productive time.
• Enable near real-time communications with mobile employees.
• Allow instant authoring and transmission of up-to-the-minute, need-to-know information and training materials.
• Enable easy access to archival audio information.
• Free up time at work and other times when reading is impossible.
• Provide and disseminate audio materials at a fraction of the cost of cassette tape creation and distribution.
• Create a cost-effective, bandwidth-friendly, and information-rich alternative to cellular telephone updates.

"Next stop: RealNetworks!" cried Odysseus, clutching his newly acquired Audible player.

Update Stories since 980126:

Wired: 980130 "RealNetworks and Microsoft Hold Hands, Butt Heads"
by Joe Nickell

PR News: 980211:
RealNetworks announces the Mobile Daily Briefing, the Internet's first portable personalized audio newscast.

Shifting to the Yahoo! Finance News for RealNetworks, Odysseus found a news report of an alliance between RealNetworks and Sun Microsystems to deliver streaming media solutions for the Internet and corporate intranets using RealSystem 5.0 on the scalable Sun Solaris platform

Shipped in November, RealSystem 5.0 is a client/server streaming media system that includes RealPlayers, RealServers and publishing tools. RealSystem 5.0 provides a suite of high-quality products for viewing and delivering real-time multimedia (video, audio and animation) over the Internet and corporate intranets. Improvements in version 5.0 include superior audio quality (near-CD quality over 28.8 modems), full-screen video at 100 - 300 kbps, animation synchronized with RealAudio and new commerce features such as advertising insertion, pay-per-view and secure user authentication.

In the last three months since RealSystem 5.0 shipped, the total number of Internet Web pages with streaming media has increased by more than 70%, and more than 85% of these pages use RealAudio, RealVideo or RealFlash, co-developed by RealNetworks and Macromedia. Consumers have been downloading RealPlayer 5.0 at an average rate of more than 600,000 units per week, bringing the total number of RealPlayers downloaded to more than 35 million.

Now wiser, Odysseus departed the Isle of RealNetworks, listening to a Navigation lesson on his Audible player, keeping in mind the more than 1,000 current and prospective RealNetworks developer program members, customers, partners and press expected to attend the second annual RealNetworks Conference in April 1998.

How long before these features are built into the Palm Pilot?

When will Sony license the Audible player and crank it out cheaply?

When will these devices pick data from wireless bandwidth?

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  Doug Simpson 98.01.26