China and Japan signed an agreement on August 26th to jointly develop research for a new worldwide standard to cover 4G. A spokesperson for Samsung, one of the key members of the 4G Forum, said that the technical specifics need to be “firmed up”, but significant research has already been performed in the area.

NTT and others have been researching 4G for some time, well before WiMax development began, but standards have not been formed as there is still debate on the uses of 4G. The original plans for 4G were to offer 100 Mbps wireless transmission. NTT has successfully blown through this barrier with a successful test of 1Gbps using their 4G technology, a Variable Spreading Factor-Spread Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (VSF-Spread OFDM) and a 4-by-4 Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna.

D&M, who also owns the Denon, Marantz and McIntosh brands, announced that it will no longer make Rio products after September 30th, 2005. The company cited increased competition in the mass-market portable digital audio player market.

The closing of the Rio lines, purchased from SonicBlue in early 2003, will allow D&M to focus on the more profitable premium consumer electronics brands.

Analysts are viewing this decision as a blow to companies like Microsoft, RealNetworks, Napster and other Apple rivals that operate online music services based on Microsoft and/or open standards. The exit of Rio leaves Creative Technology (maker of the Nomad and Zen music players), Samsung and a handful of other music players that operate on these other standards.

It is Monday morning and the markets are live with rumors from the weekend. The one that has jumped out first is a rumor that Palm may be buying back PalmSource.

Palm spun off PalmSource in 2003 to allow the companies to separate sales requirements, product marketing and strategy for the Palm OS and device hardware. Since then, Microsoft and Symbian have largely taken over the mobile device market. The Palm Trio has been Palm’s saving grace, but even recent comments by Palm’s CEO about being open to a non-Palm OS on a new version of the Trio raised more than a few eyes.

One could make a case either for or against a recombination of the two Palm companies, but this will be an interesting story to follow.

A new study from Parks Associates suggests that online music subscriptions will need to drop below $10 per month in order to attract a significant number of consumers worldwide. Although, the results for the study are questionable when looked at from a more complete business perspective

The study finds that 41% of people with digital music players in the U.S. are not willing to pay more than $10 per month for listening to their favorite music. For comparable prices, 62% of people in the U.K. with digital music players, 49% in France, 52 % in Germany and 56% in China are also unwilling to pay more than the $10 level.