NPD: Holidays belonged to the iPod

Apple's share of holiday sales has seen impressive growth compared to a year ago, according to one report. Analysis firm NPD notes that Apple's control of the market increased sharply from 42 to 57.3 percent within all non-Apple retail stores in the U.S., defying initial worries that the iPod maker's substantial lead would erode in light of waning novelty and the introduction of Microsoft's Zune player. NPD's findings also reveal that the increase has hurt rivals, according to Electronista. Storage firm SanDisk, which surprised industry watchers by usurping all of Apple's longtime challengers to reach second place, fell from 22.1 percent of the holiday 2005 sales to 19.2 this past year. Other competitors are struggling to even approach this smaller number, NPD suggests. Confirming earlier estimates, the Zune captured only 2.8 percent of sales at these same stores in spite of its developer's marketing efforts, and was in fact eclipsed by Creative's largely stagnant 3.4 percent share.

Samsung unveils 16-gigabit NAND flash chip...

Samsung today announced that it has sampled the world's first 16-gigabit (2GB) NAND flash memory chip, which may well end up in a future revision of Apple's flash-based iPod nano or iPod shuffle players. The new technology is one of the first chips to be manufactured using an ultra-dense 50-nanometer process, which is a new technology designed to boost devices that traditionally rely on sheer capacity, such as solid-state drives. Samsung claims that the new chips offer more capacity without sacrificing speed, but admits to a manufacturing process using multi-level cells (MLC) rather than the faster single-level designs. The new chip boasts double the page memory of older MLC devices, which effectively doubles read speed when compared to older chips while increasing the write speed by as much as 150 percent, according to Electronista.

Mogopop.com iPod community site launches

Mogopop today unveiled the beta launch of Mogopop.com, its website for creating as well as sharing and downloading rich media iPod content. The site offers iPod owners a hub for creating multimedia content -- such as miniature websites for iPods -- with audio, video, and images. Users can download functional iPod content created by other Mogopop users, , and the all site download content is available for free. "Until today, it's required a lot of technical savvy for a person to share media with other iPod owners - a video he's created, a song her band recorded, or a photo he took. Mogopop removes that barrier," said Jordan Allen-Dutton, Mogopop CEO and co-founder. Sample Mogopop.com content includes a multimedia guide to the Milford Sound Trek in Australia, comedy videos, music from indie artists, and sports TV shows with pop music trivia quizzes. Mogopop is a free Web-based service, requiring only a modern Web browser such as Apple's Safari.