Contents

Sale to SONICblue completed
Free carry case with every car player sold during December
Empeg (Rio) at CES 2001
Geek site updated
Welcome Aboard
Holiday period - customer support
Happy holidays!
Useful Resources


Sale to SONICblue completed

On November 1st 2000 empeg Ltd was acquired by SONICblue, formerly known as S3. Official press releases concerning this can be found at empeg.com and sonicblue.com.

The car player will be integrated into the Rio brand, manufactured in higher volume, and sold more widely. Press and marketing activities will be substantially increased and the future of the product looks very bright indeed.

The design of the player will not change significantly for the foreseeable future as Rio are keen to embrace a high end automotive product into their range. In time we hope to expand the range of automotive products and reach new markets that have been closed to us with the current product.

We will continue to develop the car player, with software release 1.1 scheduled
for alpha testing over the next few weeks. The tuner module is still undergoing development and manufacture, and is likely to become available more quickly now due to SONICblue's greater ability to source components that are in short supply.

Sales and marketing activities will transfer to SONICblue in the near future, however we plan to retain technical support responsibility for the car player for the foreseeable future.

Apart from support we will dedicate our staff and facilities to software development, as the SONICblue Linux specialist team. A number of exciting developments are already planned well into 2001, including new products and further development of the car player.


Free carry case with every car player sold during December

Order a car player (any capacity) during December and you will also receive a carry case free of charge.

If you have a preference of colour please specify Blue or Black in the "shipping notes" field when placing your order.

Note that carry cases ordered from the store will be considered to be in addition to your free case - there is no need to add the free case to your shopping basket.

This offer is in effect from 1-Dec-2000 until 31-Dec-2000 inclusive subject to availability.


Empeg (Rio) at CES 2001

The car player will be on show at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 6th to 9th. Last year we previewed our prototype home network player which has now evolved into the Rio Receiver. We'll have some great new technology on show this year too.

See you at booth 23260 in the Gold Pavilion.


Geek site updated

The empeg Geek Site (geek.empeg.com) has recently had an update. The company gallery now has photos from the Amersfoort meet and the IASCA world finals, while the developer section has been expanded with lots of new projects.

The Geek Site complements our main site with features and resources for the more technically orientated.


Welcome Aboard

Andrew joined our software development team in November, from an automotive data logging background. He is a Unix and Windows programmer and is working mainly upon Emplode and the car player.

Richard is about to join our software team, and will apply his expertise to Unix development for a variety of projects.


Holiday period - customer support

There will be limited customer support over the holiday period.

25-Dec to 27-Dec : Closed
28-Dec to 30-Dec : Email support only.
31-Dec to 02-Jan : Closed

If you have a support issue over the holiday period, please email [email protected] and we will endeavour to respond to your enquiry as soon as possible.


Happy holidays!

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the new year from Hugo, Steve, Mike, John, Roger, Toby, Peter, Andrew E, Patrick, Daniel, Abhi, Alex, Andrew F, David and Rob.


Useful Resources

Web Sites

The empeg web site at http://www.empeg.com/
The empeg Geek Site at http://geek.empeg.com/
The unofficial empeg BBS at http://empeg.comms.net/
The empeg developer's site at http://www.empeg.mars.org/

Email Addresses

General information [email protected]
Sales enquiries [email protected]
Press enquiries [email protected]
Mailing list [email protected]
Tech Support [email protected]
Recruitment [email protected]

end

David Moss
[email protected]

Any chance of a preview of what we might see at CES?

_~= Dearing =~_
"WAY too happy about having #99."

We won't have new products on our booth (SONICblue have a hospitality suite elsewhere for that sort of thing) but we'll be showing wireless synchronisation, software version 1.1, and streaming to a Rio Receiver from a car player.

Rob

You guys rule. Hands down.

/me checks airfare...

(O|||||O)

hmm, i just can't help but feel that the product is going to
a) get cheaper to make
b) get cheaper to buy
c) shift development agendas

i really wonder if the profit margin is great enough for sonicblue to keep things as tehy are,.. and you said you want to market to a wider range.. well that is going to have to encompass a pricing change, whetehr you make an "empeg lite" or just drop prices on the current... because most people have not got th emoney to spend for it.

just outta curiosity, how many Empegs have been sold, mk1 & mk 2?

thanks.. good luck with everything new :)

There were between 350 and 400 Mk1's. I think empeg has said they've sold over 1000 Mk2's.

As for your concern about the decline in hardware of the empeg, we have speculated that sonicblue might decide to produce a lower-end machine that doesn't do as much but retains alot of the same software features, because that would be cheaper to produce. This would be in addition to the current model. But who knows? What do we care? We already have our players!

DiGNAN

As we've said many times, the car player is never likely to change in price significantly (although the dollar per megabye ratio gets steadily better). Production is increasing, but this will remain a high end niche product.

In time we hope to expand the range to accommodate the higher volume segment of the market, however I would anticipate that any such product(s) will complement the existing car player, not replace it. There will always be demand for no-expense-spared quality products in the car audio market.

As for development focus, over the past year we have developed several products apart from the car player (some of which have become public knowledge, such as the Receiver). I suspect your concern is that the car player will not receive development attention, whereas in reality the reverse is true - we will be spending more time on the car player than we have been able to recently.

In short - nothing much is going to change with the car player - it will cost about the same, we'll take advantage of new drives as and when appropriate, and software development will continue. Even support is going to remain much the same, with the same team answering your enquiries and helping with your problems.

We're going to be working on lots of other cool stuff as well, and we're growing the development team to accommodate that.

Rob