now possibly the 'just missed it' timing of the pearl

Hardly.. the hard disk market is still tiny in comparison with the almost-main-stream Flash market, and Flash is tiny compared with the currently-mainstream CD market.

You seem to be thinking of Pearl as the Rio answer to iPod. It isn't - Riot came out in the iPod timeframe and clearly the ball was dropped (mainly due to form factor - it has some nice software features). Pearl is the next step. This time I'm confident we have the right featureset AND form factor for a next generation product.

It was mentioned in this thread that empeg was ahead of the curve - that's true and we're proud of it, but it sure didn't help with the cashflow! My prediction is that the empeg (in a slightly different form factor) could make money around two years from now - four years ago the market was miniscule.

Rob